Rooftop solar effectively eliminated grid demand in South Australia on Saturday as it accounted for all but a few megawatts of demand in the world’s most renewable grid.
i mean management of the grid to a centralised location IMO is always going to be a bigger cost, which would likely mitigate some efficiency gains from installing solar en masse by a utility
It’s actually not as high of a cost as you might imagine. The signals to control the smart inverters actually work through the same system that communicates with smart meters. Which as you know, are already universal here. Whether it’s smart or not, an inverter is an essential part of a solar installation. Part of its job is automatically sensing if there’s a power outage and disconnecting from the grid. This is vital for the safety of repair crews and linesmen.
In talking about utility-level solar though, did you see this article about a prototype project in Western Vic? It’s a combination of solar and storing energy as heated water underground. It can then be turned back into electricity using the process geothermal uses. If I recall correctly, extra electricity from the grid can be fed into the system to be stored as well.
The genius part of that IMO is storing energy as cold, not just as heat.
You need a heat difference to run a heat engine, and the energy lost refrigerating the cold block is more than made up for by making the “waste heat” into usable energy.
Dandrews gov has some great strides to that front, the neighborhood battery initiative is one I’m particularly fond of. Not only islands areas in event of grid failure, but solves the issue of ‘overfeed’ with shitty street inverters
oh yeah totally! i’m in vic too :)
i mean management of the grid to a centralised location IMO is always going to be a bigger cost, which would likely mitigate some efficiency gains from installing solar en masse by a utility
Oh hell yeah :)
It’s actually not as high of a cost as you might imagine. The signals to control the smart inverters actually work through the same system that communicates with smart meters. Which as you know, are already universal here. Whether it’s smart or not, an inverter is an essential part of a solar installation. Part of its job is automatically sensing if there’s a power outage and disconnecting from the grid. This is vital for the safety of repair crews and linesmen.
In talking about utility-level solar though, did you see this article about a prototype project in Western Vic? It’s a combination of solar and storing energy as heated water underground. It can then be turned back into electricity using the process geothermal uses. If I recall correctly, extra electricity from the grid can be fed into the system to be stored as well.
The genius part of that IMO is storing energy as cold, not just as heat.
You need a heat difference to run a heat engine, and the energy lost refrigerating the cold block is more than made up for by making the “waste heat” into usable energy.
Dandrews gov has some great strides to that front, the neighborhood battery initiative is one I’m particularly fond of. Not only islands areas in event of grid failure, but solves the issue of ‘overfeed’ with shitty street inverters