eli5 Why is there no giant solar farm in Australia?

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My cursory Google says that it’s not impossible. So why?

EDIT: Answer seems to be that (politics aside) practically it’s cost prohibitive and the tech can’t transfer the energy over the distance required.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

1. Many medium is better than singular large due to localised weather, power distribution concentration vs distributed consumption etc
2. The cost to hook into the grid is material. You want to locate your farm close to or on the grid. Fun fact: USA companies buy decommissioned coal power stations to run wind and solar to save on the electric infrastructure costs. In Australia our population is concentrated around our grid and farmland, making land purchase expensive. Thus, cheap land in our arid centre is no where near high capacity grid.
3. What is big? I know of several farms of over 1/2 a million panels. Non-trivial cost to set up.
4. Already in Oz we may be approaching peak solar for current storage tech. Power price going negative at lunch, but four figures when sun sets. Getting harder to fund big farms.

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