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
It’s to be hoped that the Australian Governments get on board to power Australia into this decade and re-establish a manufacturing industry in this country with more moderately prices power.
Not gonna pretend to know about anything. I do wonder if we want to cover up a bunch of land with solar panels.
Electrifying everything in sight has got to be making things worse.
three main reasons
1. Rooftop solar has cut the costs of electricity when the sun is shining in Australian cities
2. Transmission costs to get it from where its generated (Woop Woop) to where its needed (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane)
3. Storage costs – this is coming down and large batteries are currently being planned and installed in the location of existing infrastructure, I.e. old coal fired power stations that are being closed
Should also mention that there is a large solar farm in planning for the Northern Territory, Sun Cable, which will feed electricity to Singapore and beyond
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.
Lots of good answers here. I’ll add another: setting up truly giant solar farms does not present much benefit over many smaller ones, and has significant downsides.
One of the beautiful things about solar is that you don’t need giant scale projects to break even. Solar is very modular, and after a certain size the costs scale fairly linearly. It is easier to finance/plan/approve smaller projects, and the costs are similar per megawatt as absolutely massive projects.
Victoria is planning a transmission line to bring electricity from the northwest part of the state to Melbourne. The very expensive line will disrupt farming on some of the best soil in the state (like most of Australia, most of the soil is crap). There will be significant line loss. Personally, I think distributed solar, like lots of rooftop solar is a much better solution.
Another solution I think is better is to put solar panels over irrigation channels. This doesn’t take land out of production and the shade from the panels will reduce evaporation, preserving the water resource.
Want to cry?
I can’t find it but, about a decade ago around earth day a college out out a global map that they a lot land to the best match of green energy.
And they only use non-farmable land.
And land not deadly populated or desirable at this time to people but, within range to make it work.
If they filled it in, at current population growth it gave us totally green energy the whole world…until about 2153 (I think, give or take a few years decade since I read it after all)
residential solar is popular here to the point where the priority is needing power at night
Check out the NSW government’s Renewable Energy Zones (REZ) proposals. Some interesting stuff may be happening with renewables isn the nearish future.
https://www.energyco.nsw.gov.au/renewable-energy-zones
There is the largest one in the world being built. It’s going to power another country via power cable 4000kms long
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