More heat than light

Does the sun shine all night in Australia?  Are the new batteries a breakthrough? Over to you.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/11945075/Half-of-Australian-homes-to-adopt-solar-power-and-move-off-grid-from-2018.html

Comments

[wert]

'UP TO half of Australian hones COULD START to move off the grid in A FEW years

IF

battery technology improved 50x.'

Read: The battery technology is still magnitudes more expensive in terms of both money and externalities than using existing wires. When solar power cells or batteries becomes feasible, the power companies producing eletricity to the grid will be the first to use them. There is no way end user could have both grid access and cheaper night-usable solar without taxpayer paying it dearly for you.

What crrap.

[Martin A]

I'll say! For a start, if I invested the 5k at 4% compound interest, 10 years would give me about 7.5 k. Can the battery manage that?
Oct 24, 2015 at 11:37 AM | Unregistered Commenter Dodgy Geezer

Er, no. Apart from anything else, in less than ten years, the battery will be knackered and you'll be stung for another 5k.

[Gamecock]

Solar generation is good for 8 hours in a day. If you plan to get all your electricity from solar, you need three times the system for storing the 2X needed off hours. Just for a day's cycle. If you want capacity to carry you through one rainy day, you need 6X the system.

[Punksta]

each battery’s capacity will grow 50-fold within a decade.

Well, that explains it then.

[Geoff Sherrington]

You would know that Australia had so many natural advantages that any person could find a personal Utopia. We approached this happy nirvana state for a few years after WWII, but then the rot set in and all sorts of odd and dangerous people popped out of the woodwork. We had talkedour Russian spies (Petrov) so we needed to boost our public service intelligence numbers . It became a deadly game, to increase branches of the public service, to have idealistic High Court judges strain the limits of interpretation of the Constitution to give the Feds more scope to bully and pilfer from the private purse. We had some disasters like minister Gareth Evans getting foreign affairs dept to agree to 2 new treaties a week. Some international treaties like the UN World Heritage were gross infringements of property rights. I spent several million $$ of corporate profits trying to stop this green madness before most of the populace was aware of what was happening. We lost. One of the judges, one who wrote a majority opinion for the Full Bench, was a former President of the Australian Conservation Society, but was apparently deaf to arguments about conflict of interest.
The point I am trying to illustrate is that here, average Joe runs a couple of years in arrears of these Machaevellian developments that are so tragically fait accompli before the consequences are realised. This is part of the reason I partake of blogs that can close the knowledge time gap a little.
Finally, to come more on thread, these organisations that are so dear to Flannery and his merry cohorts would not stand a chance in the Australia I loved 3 or 4 decades ago. These days there is so much juggling of huge amounts behind the scene that is unreported by the press and so cannot be easily combatted by the normally acute typical Aussie who is quick to find words of derision to cut tall poppies to size, like a Victor mower turning grass into lawn.
We had a secretary named Lorna who talked a lot so they called her lorna mower.
We used ridicule basedon acute observations to some good effect in the old days. There days so much public policy is slithy toves that gimble and gyre in the wabe of Parliament House.
If only the bureaucracy would self-decimate. We could try deporting them back to Britain for minor crimes of which there are plenty, except that the immigrant pathways are crowded with black brown and brindled.
Stop me if I sound like a rant ...

[michael hart]

Geoff, years ago I read a science fiction story where there was an official bureau tasked with sabotaging the workings of government (by legal means). The problem was that the government in the story was efficiently making several new laws per hour which meant the general populace was never able to keep up and was constantly disadvantaged by the new laws (which were of course primarily designed to help the governing class and its friends). The main character was also able to make, and then lose, a large fortune on the stock exchange.

Some might say that mechanics for the latter part of that fiction has already occurred.

Perhaps the former part hasn't, but the total number of laws still seems to rising inexorably. I guess part of the problem is that so many people are often keen on new laws, though usually to control other people. I have never yet heard a living person say that they wish there were more laws for them to obey themselves.

[Rico L]

I hate the way solar panels are referred to as renewable... How do you make a solar panel???? How long do they work for???? These are not renewable, the sunshine might be, but the panel is definitely not.

Coal is cheap, you just need a shovel and a match to get energy, everything else requires complex processing (usually powered by coal in the initial stages)

[Messenger]

Maybe they call them renewable because you have to keep renewing them? :)

[Truthseeker]

Of course a domestic Australian user can store enough power in the soon available Tesla powerwall to power the house through the night...

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/06/05/why-new-australian-housing-estates-may-be-off-grid/