Australia to give away free electricity – and it sounds legit. How much would 273,000 GwH cost?

@meJess what happens when consumer take "the excess kilowatts"? does that electricity actually keep the lights burning, or the AC on, if there's already too much electricity?

@SusanInFlorida if they take the excess then there is no excess, I think some firms and maybe homes charge vehicles etc when they see a negative wholesale rate. If I understand correctly, some of the smart systems give you cost on a hour by hour basis. Not claiming expertise but have read of it happening in European wind farms.

@ArishMell I worked at one of those once! Really interesting facility.

@NeoNeo I see. Thankyou for explaining it.

The system introduced in the UK and I think some other countries encouraged home owners to have solar panels on their own rooves. The electronics within the house measured the relative amounts of public- and private- supply, and could feed "surplus" electricity back into the mains, for which a so-called "Feed-in tariff" was available.

The "surplus" is typically that generated in daylight when the householders are all out and the only draw is by low-power appliances like the 'fridge and freezer.

Solar power is not suitable for all homes, particularly if the roof faces East and West rather than N-S, and of course not everyone can afford it. For those it would work, the system would eventually repay the installation and even make a profit, depending obviously on the way the household uses electricity.

I don't know if this still applies. The Feed-In Tariff has now been stopped, but the solar panels still help keep electricity costs down for those using them over a sufficiently long time.


The electricity and gas bills here (UK) are high, partly because they include a tax used by the Government to subsidise solar and wind power stations feeding the National Grid. Also of course because these utilities were privatised, they have a large profit element of which much is lost to the nation by foreign owners! Natural-gas is also subject to the highly irregular pricing of international hydrocarbons trading.


So we do not try to differentiate between what is supplied by the generators to the National Grid, and what is supplied to individual customers. We customers pay what we draw from the mains, irrespective of the mix of generating systems, but the price is set by the retailer and in turn the wholesale price.

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All solar-power installations here use large storage batteries. The British Isles go Pole-wards from about 50ºN - higher latitude than Tasmania - so Winter brings low-angled sunshine and longer dark than daylight hours, as well as chilly weather. Even in daylight, in cloudy conditions the efficiency of photovoltaic arrays drops considerably.


My brother lives at nearly 56ºN, in Southern Scotland, and has built his own PV set!

The array itself is only about a metre square but set at the appropriate latitude angle for greatest efficiency (rather than dictated by a roof slope) and on a turntable tracked to follow the Sun, driven by a low-power motor and gearbox so its loss to the system is very low. The whole apparatus is on the flat roof of an outbuilding, which I think also contains the large float batteries.

Not content with that, he and his wife built a home extension whose flat roof holds a solar water-heating system he also built himself, using ordinary domestic central-heating radiators inside special enclosures. This cannot face the mid-day sun but is still effective, as it heats the mains water in a large, insulated storage tank.

Scotland is not known for a sub-tropical climate, but I gather his installations all work very well. His village has mains electricity but not gas so the residents have to rely on tank-stored gas; and this water system reduces the gas needed for the domestic hot-water.

Scotland is known for wind though, and everywhere you look in my brother's area, the hill-tops sprout wind-turbines, mainly feeding the National grid.

@NeoNeo I think there should be some sort of long term contract between electric companies and rate payers who install rooftop panels. so those bidirection payments don't get suspended or radically changed on a whim.

many people installing rooftop solar have 10 financing on those panels, and need to cover the monthly payments.

@GerOttman upvoted. my dad said this

@NeoNeo Well, yes, that is the basic system... when the sun shines on it. The storage is to cover the times when it is not and everyone needs their lights on.

So without the batteries the national grid still needs some alternative power source.

What do you mean by a "bidirectional meter", though? A meter simple measures something.

@SusanInFlorida I’m aware it’s non-Chinese, but the article quoted Chinese reports.

Also, in that case, as I asked, please provide me with photos.

And by the way, what are you trying to prove?

@wildland thanks for confirming my views. China is not releasing info to the western world. local observers are leaking it to western websites.

case closed?

@SusanInFlorida No. Show me these photos.

Also, I'm afraid none of this is going to slow the death of fossil fuels, and the emergence of a world powered by wind and solar.

Sorry.