eli5 Why is there no giant solar farm in Australia?

Question

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.

In: 609

Answer 1

Lots of guesses here and very few answers. The answer is complicated, but you can simplify it by noting that Australia implemented a type of residential solar net-metering where homeowners got paid for excess power they generated. What homeowners got paid was fairly attractive, and so a lot of rooftop solar got built which both covered the homeowners own needs and sold excess power to the grid. The upshot is that Australia built a lot of rooftop solar upfront and this giant solar farms weren’t needed.

There are a bunch of other factors, but this was the big one initially.