20 August

This is a very standard story most days now. The wholesale price of electricty is negative across the country. In other words, generators will pay retailers to use it - they’re not just giving it away, they’re paying retailers to take it. This is due to the massive surge in solar and wind power during the day. This costs coal-fired generators money, but it’s impossible to shut them down and start them up again quickly. So they wear the loss. Also why nobody is building new coal plants. You can see in the vertical column graph that Australia already gets about twice as much of its electricity during the day from renewables than from coal and gas. By far the largest (and still growing) source of electricity is rooftop solar (Distributed PV). For ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’ people, the country uses about half as much energy at night. Storage will fill that gap. Imagine your electricty price when the lot is renewables.