Solar power in Australia outstrips coal-fired electricity for first time

Pretty remarkable considering the governments pro-coal and anti-renewables tone and policy. Australia still generates more than half of its electricity using coal and even brown coal. Inevitably the same dynamics that are killing the coal power generation elsewhere will play out in Australia as well.<p>Basically, periodic over supply of electricity because of solar leads to temporary shut downs of plants. That is expensive and makes these plants less profitable. That over supply comes both from renewable energy generated on the grid and home owners putting solar on their roofs. Each year there&#x27;s more of it. And Australia gets a lot of sunny days. So, the pressure to shut down more coal plants just keeps on growing.

One of the reasons this is happening in Australia is because the price of electricity has been rising quite sharply for over a decade now and that makes solar more attractive.<p>It turns out one of the main reasons for these price rises has price gouging by the newly privatized energy companies.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com.au&#x2F;accc-overspending-on-poles-and-wires-is-the-key-reason-why-electricity-prices-have-soared-in-australia-2017-10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com.au&#x2F;accc-overspending-on-pole...</a><p>Basically these energy companies have been screwing their customers for decades and successive governments have been letting them get away with it.

If there&#x27;s anywhere in the world that solar makes sense, it&#x27;s Australia. Vast stretches of land, more sunshine than you can throw a stick at. Good to see it&#x27;s starting to happen.

In addition to being tone-deaf and&#x2F;or incompetent on basically every big-ticket issue facing us, our (AU) power grid (mis)management is almost on a par with the US&#x27;s E[R]COT debacle ... just stretched out over a few more decades, so it&#x27;s harder to notice.<p>This story from 2014 [0] describes a sequence of events that <i>could</i>, if you were feeling sanguine, be attributed to generic incompetence, even if they smell more like congenital corruption.<p>In any case, AU citizens pay a bucketload for power, way more than it costs to generate (domestically).<p>Combine that with active disincentives at the large-scale (to develop sensible power generation &#x2F; storage systems) and small-scale (witness the recent regularly change [1] to allow primarily fossil-fuel based power companies to charge residential solar subscribers a fee to feed-in power).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themonthly.com.au&#x2F;issue&#x2F;2014&#x2F;july&#x2F;1404136800&#x2F;jess-hill&#x2F;power-corrupts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themonthly.com.au&#x2F;issue&#x2F;2014&#x2F;july&#x2F;1404136800&#x2F;jes...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021-08-12&#x2F;power-companies-to-charge-solar-owners-for-exporting-to-grid&#x2F;100368588" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.abc.net.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;2021-08-12&#x2F;power-companies-to-ch...</a>

For a slightly more wonky take on this with more speeds &amp; feeds: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reneweconomy.com.au&#x2F;solar-exceeds-coal-for-first-time-as-renewables-set-new-records-on-australias-main-grid&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reneweconomy.com.au&#x2F;solar-exceeds-coal-for-first-tim...</a>

Reminder: this sort of metric is sensational but hardly relevant. The relevant metric is how much fossil production is left, not how much low-carbon production we add. All the more so because production peaks of renewables tend to be outliers.

Not for assuring baseline supply it doesn&#x27;t...

Could that also be a side effect of the reduced economic activity due to covid measures ?

Or Australia could just build a few smaller nuclear plants away from urban centers and be much more effective and environment friendly.

Solar power has all sorts of downsides when you start looking at who makes it, the complexity of the process, it&#x27;s reliance on fossil fuel, its intermittence which brings up a whole new problem of mass scale storage, etc<p>Headlines like this make it seem like &quot;some countries are making progress, why is anyone not following faster?&quot;.<p>Solar strikes me as a bad direction to go in. There is no magic want for energy that doesn&#x27;t impact our environment. The most impactful, and actually sustainable approach is to reduce our usage of energy.<p>Ban crypto mining waste for instance. That&#x27;s 10% of global electricity these days. That&#x27;s a whole lot of power plants you suddenly don&#x27;t have to build using &quot;green&quot; energy that&#x27;s nothing but green.