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Power

In World First, 100% of South Australia's Power Supplied By Solar Panels (abc.net.au) 281

1.76 million people live in the 983,482 square kilometer (379,725 square mile) state of South Australia. This weekend Australia's national broadcaster made a big announcement: South Australia's renewable energy boom has achieved a global milestone. The state once known for not having enough power has become the first major jurisdiction in the world to be powered entirely by solar energy.

For just over an hour on Sunday, October 11, 100 percent of energy demand was met by solar panels alone.

"This is truly a phenomenon in the global energy landscape," Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) chief executive Audrey Zibelman said. "Never before has a jurisdiction the size of South Australia been completely run by solar power, with consumers' rooftop solar systems contributing 77 per cent." Large-scale solar farms, like the ones operating at Tailem Bend and Port Augusta, provided the other 23 per cent.

Any excess power generated by gas and wind farms on that day was stored in batteries or exported to Victoria via the interconnector.

South Australia is where Elon Musk installed Tesla's giant Powerpack battery as part of a massive solar and wind farm.
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In World First, 100% of South Australia's Power Supplied By Solar Panels

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  • "For just over an hour on Sunday, October 11, 100 per cent"
    True! but before I'll plug my servers in we have a ways to go ;)

    How many 9's work for you
    • Huh? You never heard of batteries? This can be solved with adding more panels, batteries, expanding the number of panel locations, and increasing the grid size.

      • Huh? You never heard of batteries?

        If batteries fall in price by a factor of 5, they will be a viable grid-scale solution. But they aren't there yet.

        The Tesla battery installation in South Australia is used primarily as a peaker reserve for wind farms, with multiple intraday charge/discharge cycles, not to store solar power for nighttime use.

        • With 77% of the solar being supplied by homeowners rooftop systems and if they then all get home batteries connected in a virtual grid, the reliance on a grid-scale size battery becomes less of an issue especially when more EVs come online in the future and V2G/V2H systems come online.

          from the Hornsdale website:-
          "A portion of the battery is dedicated to trading on the electricity market. This capacity is being used to store power from the grid when demand is low and dispatch it when demand is high, redu
          • if they then all get home batteries connected in a virtual grid

            This won't work unless Australians are really bad at math.

            If they can do arithmetic, it will be obvious that a battery system doesn't even come close to paying for itself.

            • it doesnt need to run all night, it only needs to cover the peak couple of hours when people are up at night before they go to bed. wind and hydro and whatever else can keep the fridges and heating/cooling going. all the recent studies show it is possible and its already happening. i actually moved all my superanuation from 'high returns' which included oil to 'sustainable' which is all the green tech recently. the sector has been on par for years and is now having far greater returns. you'd be nuts to inve
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

          Battery+solar is already cheaper than nuclear. Nuclear involves more CO2 production over its lifetime than wind or solar.

          Of the generation technologies in common use today which are not solar or nuclear, only wind and hydro are also zero carbon to operate.

          If we actually want to solve the carbon problem, our only real choices are wind and solar.

          The options get fairly simple fairly quickly if you look at the problem from a problem-solving perspective.

      • by TuballoyThunder ( 534063 ) on Monday October 26, 2020 @08:42AM (#60649798)
        I'm a fan of solar (I even have panels on my house) and it has its place in the energy grid. However, blanketing the earth with solar panels to make it a majority power source is not the answer. A friend of mine is a desert biologist and took me out on a tour of desert and pointed out the diversity of life. So, we need to look at KWh/m^2 as a metric when deciding on energy production.
  • Sunday (Score:2, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 )

    Businesses are largely closed. It's a nice sunny, warm spring day and everyone is outside firing up the barbecue. The charcoal briquettes consumed more than made up for the avoided power plant carbon emissions.

    • business is not mostly closed, there is no covid because of a clear government communication and handling of it and we have sunday shopping.
  • by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @06:54PM (#60648046) Homepage

    This is great and solar power just keeps getting better. Solar panels have become steadily cheaper and more efficient over the last forty years, and the trends are continuing https://sites.lafayette.edu/egrs352-sp14-pv/technology/history-of-pv-technology/ [lafayette.edu]. We're also getting better in terms of wind power. Wind and solar have the same problem of intermittency but in most locations, one often has at least one of them producing.

    And storage and transmission is getting better. Large scale HVDC lines are now becoming common to connect grid sections. And we even have sections which now superconducting lines. The first superconducting line in the US was the Holbrook line in Long Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Project [wikipedia.org], but other places have built them also. The US has a current plan to build a large-scale superstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation [wikipedia.org] using them to connect the three big US grids (East, West and Texas), which will allow excess solar to move easily to Texas when Texas has little wind, and allowing excess wind to move to California when the reverse is helpful. When the system is fully operational, it will also work well with high wind areas in the Mid-West like Iowa.

    In the short term one can help increase the amount of solar around the world in two easy ways. The Solar Electric Light Fund https://www.self.org/ [self.org] helps get solar panels for parts of the developing world which have little to no electricity. This both helps them and helps the environment in the long term, since climate change issues will be potentially much worse if they go through a Western-style fossil fuel burn period before switching over to low carbon or carbon neutral power sources. Another good one is Everybody Solar https://www.everybodysolar.org/ [everybodysolar.org] which helps get solar panels for non-profits in the US like science museums and homeless shelters.

    • by zmooc ( 33175 )

      It keeps getting better for countries like Australia. For countries even further from the equator, the situation is vastly different. I live in the Netherlands and we have a lot of gas available to us, but in order to curb our CO2 exhaust and to stop gas well induced earthquakes, we aim to stop using gas during the next few decades.

      Now, if we'd exploit all our geothermal and hydro energy, we'd still need so incredibly much additional energy on a record-cold day that over half our country would need to be fi

  • There seems to be a major omission in the title and post that the EDITOR of a News for NERDS site would fix as part of their EDITTING job.

    If they gave a shit about that job, that is.

    • EDITTING?

  • When did solar panels get cheap enough to make this viable, and where did they get them from?

    • When did solar panels get cheap enough to make this viable, and where did they get them from?

      They paid a shitload for them, and they were made in China. Obviously.

    • by ThromaLek ( 6373936 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @07:42PM (#60648146)
      Insolation in Australia is very high, so the yield from installing PV is pretty good. In 2013 it was estimated that the cost of electricity provided by PV installations was about half the cost of the same power supplied by the grid. With efficiency increases in solar cells and the continual decrease in price of solar electricity components, coupled with the high price of grid-sourced electricity in Australia, uptake of solar is probably the highest per capita of any country in the world.

      Australia has some domestic solar panel and electronic manufacturers, but the panels installed over the last decade and a bit would be from a mix of manufacturers including from China and Europe.

      During the early push to get domestic solar electricity happening in Australia there were a number of rebate and feed-in tarrif schemes to make the initial cost more affordable until economy of scale benefits led to initial costs being more affordable.

      Rebate and tarrif schemes have been wound back considerably in recent years and typically you'll be paid the wholesale price for any power you supply to the grid, but charged at the retail price for any electricity you source from the grid, however with the cost of grid electricity in Australia it's possible to have a PV system pay for itself in as little as 2.5 years.
    • by thogard ( 43403 )

      Panels are about AU$0.44 per Watt now for European or North American made panels from Australia distributors and before any subsidies.

      A roof frame for 10 panels costs about as much as two panels. The inverters can be had for AU$400. The rest of the wiring is about the same as the roof frame. The expensive part for a grid connection system is the labor.

  • The real solutions is to cut out the waste. People and business everywhere waste energy and they dont understand the consequences.
  • by OpinOnion ( 4473025 ) on Sunday October 25, 2020 @09:17PM (#60648380)
    It's a BIG area and 1,736,422 people is no minor feat, but it's not representative of some huge amount of people using solar... yet.
  • "with consumers' rooftop solar systems contributing 77 per cent."...

    The people in S.A got sick of losing power so often, and been charged though the nose for it - that a quite a number of them got roof top solar. 77% of the 100% renewable for that hour was provided by the people themselves not the government or private power providers.

    This really is a result of how badly the state have managed their power grid over the last few decades. While it's going in the right direction - clean energy wasn't the goal

    • Common sense from the S.A. consumers, they just need all to add a battery (or EV with V2G/V2H capability) and the utilities won't have to work so hard.
    • 77% of the 100% renewable for that hour was provided by the people themselves not the government or private power providers.

      Who paid MOST of that? Oh yeah, the government, or tax payers.

      However, I totally agree about the grid/infrastructure issue. That is a problem all around. Look at how fucked up California is.

  • ... and batteries.
    Let's try that in Toronto or New York shall we?
    And in ~25 years all those panels go to the landfill.
    So let's review the life cycle:
    a) environmental impact to produce the panels,
    b) large surface area required since it's an inefficient energy producer
    c) requires a resource not available everywhere (dependable sunshine)
    d) _requires_ an environmentally impactful other technology (or did you think making batteries is 'green')
    e) major environmental impact on disposal of both batteries and panels

    • And in ~25 years all those panels go to the landfill.

      Panels are often recycled today. In 25 years, it's reasonable to assume that almost all panels will be recycled.

      So let's review the life cycle:

      It's been done, and solar panels are already far lower-impact than anything else except for wind.

      major environmental impact on disposal of both batteries and panels

      Batteries are already recycled.

      Your post contains nothing but FUD, and as such, is a prime candidate for recycling... into compost.

    • Give it a rest. Environmental impact by panels is minor. And yes, batteries are overall so-so on impact. They are NO WHERE NEAR as bad as you make them out to be.

      There are good reasons to NOT have 100% solar/wind, but arguing on environmental impact is one of the silliest lies that the far right continues to claim. Kind of like claiming that Volcanoes produce more CO2 than mankind.
  • Simply add a forest fire, or volcanos, and see how well these do.

    As it is, we lost 10% of our 10KW solar generation this summer when southern colorado fires were raging. 10% is not much, BUT, considering that the fire was over 100 miles to the west, means that as it gets closer, we would lose solar (AND WIND) just when we need it for EVs and even the house.

And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.

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