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Australia Struggling with Oversupply of Solar Power
- srameshc 2y agoCan they next build the infrastructure to export to other countries since they have huge potential to produce more solar power ?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bennysaurus 2y agoA high voltage DC line is being built to Singapore now from a solar generator in Northern Australia, so it's definitely doable to send over that distance (around 3,000mi). I would like to see more storage though in its various forms; the oversupply is during peak daytime hours, however there's still large draw at night that could be offset.
- blitzar 2y agoSome other suggestions I can offer would be to un-decomission desalination plants that are too expensive to power, pump water back up hills or run the wind turbines in reverse to blow the wind back out.
- shirro 2y agoSun Cable was proposing a High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) undersea cable to Indonesia and Singapore. They went into administration last year but I think came out of it with new ownership. The cable has to pass through one of the worlds busiest shipping channel (Singapore strait) and areas of high seismic activity and the distances aren't trivial. Australia is very remote and there aren't many large power consumers in our vicinity and a lot of capital needs to be raised. The Darwin to Singapore route is about 9 times longer than the current longest undersea power cable.
- justinclift 2y agoLooks like the cable to Singapore is going ahead? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41912103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41912103
- toomuchtodo 2y agoPrevious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42305762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42305762 - Dec 2024 (1 comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42215403 - Nov 2024 (5 comments)
- _t6sv 2y ago[dead]
- rstuart4133 2y agoMaybe some kind EE can explain here why they want this. As I understand it, their is a limit to how much solar they want on the grid because they want to keep it stable. The solar follows the voltage (ie, syncs with the phase) or an inertial generator, which is a coal fired power plant or synchronous condenser. I'm guessing if there spinning iron there is nothing to follow, and the grid becomes unstable [0]. So they don't want solar forcing all inertial generation off the grid. But, don't home solar inverters shut down once the grid voltage exceeds some threshold? In which case, they will remove themselves automatically if there is too much generation. So why do they want to add a manual override as well? [0] That's a wild guess. The counter argument to that is these inertial governors are "just" analogue computers communicating through the grid to agree on what the phase / frequency should be. Solar inverters are also controlled by computers. Yes, they are digital computers not analogue, but today's digital computer any emulate any analogue system - including spinning armatures weighing many tons. The answer is probably "we don't trust the programmers to get the simulation right". I'm a programmer, and neither would I. But it's not hard to test and certify.
- archi42 2y agoInertia is stored energy. To emulate an energy storage, you need to be able to get energy from "somewhere". That's just physics. Plus, it works both ways: If there is excess power, you also need to dissipate power from the grid. But an individual solar inverter fluctuates wildly, and has no significant amount of energy stored (e.g. in capacitors). It also has no place to put power (okay, you can put it in the PV panels to produce heat, but they won't like that during a hot summer day). That's why they are using batteries to emulate inertia: They are energy storage, and thus can act like inertia. Both putting energy into the system and "removing" it. The power industry is slow moving, so we're only seeing it now. (Not an EE, but I think the reasoning is sound. Proper EEs feel free to teach me)
- rstuart4133 2y ago> It also has no place to put power (okay, you can put it in the PV panels to produce heat, but they won't like that during a hot summer day). Actually solar can vary it's output fairly easily. The inverters are constantly monitoring the voltage from the panels, and rasing or lowering their impedance to extract the maximum energy from them. It is trivial for them to deliberately extract less power by varying that impedance, and that's exactly what happens with solar battery chargers. They have to match what the battery can accept. But from the grid's viewpoint though it would be a pointless additional complexity. The contribution from each household is so small they can achieve the same effect by shutting on and off an entire household, or more likely a suburb. To put it another way they are saying they want to power off solar to ensure grid stability. But at the times you might want to power off solar there is excess capacity. Yes it's not stored, but it's just there, waiting to be turned on or not. Keeping the grid locked to phase is much harder. The inertia of spinning iron does it automagically for a short while, without any complex control systems or fancy programming. They each pull the others into sync. But if the grid falls apart the magic is gone, and it the grid has to be brought up one generator at a time somehow manually syncing each one. That's hard enough when there are 100's of coal fired plants around the country, but can you imagine what it would be like if there are a millions of solar powered homes all trying to have their say in what the phase should be. Maybe this has something to do with that, or maybe not. I'm not a power EE. Interest factoid: most solar + battery setups will not power the house from the battery if they lose grid supply. The reason is the inverter refuses to switch while it doesn't have a grid to sync phase with. If was switched on and then the grid came up at a different phase a lot of smoke would result. You can get setups that will work while there is no grid, it's just that unless you specifically ask for it you may not get it.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoThe URL slug debunks the misleading headline: solar-flooded-australia-told-its-okay-to-waste-some
- blitzar 2y agoURL slugs can be deeply inconvenient
- defrost 2y agoThe Australian ABC news site, like many others, uses "dynamic headlining" .. the same end URL and content can have multiple headlines over the course of time and even in the moment can vary between the "current news" web and RSS feeds. It's a PiTA for HN submissions as I've been bitten in the past by submitting a story plus headline and getting later complaints that the submitted headline doesn't match the story headline .. (well, it did once).
- more_corn 2y agoJust build batteries.
- euroderf 2y agoConsidering the Australian real estate situation (90%+ empty), shouldn't they be researching how to install even more, and convert all that surplus into storable, portable, sellable fuels ?
- lazylizard 2y agowhy not shutdown the GPU clusters training large models at night or when its cloudly, and powering them back on when its shiny and windy?