25 July

A solar panel is installed in Australia every 44 seconds. We easily lead the world in household solar, more than 20% greater than other heavyweights like Japan and Germany. Just look at the graph, the growth (yellow is energy made by rooftop solar) is phenomenal, and speeding up. The bizarre problem Australia will have is so much generation delegated to homes that the mainstream power generation industry could collapse. All due to a decade of inaction on storage and transmission by the previous federal government. Why the current rush is to build new lines and new storage now, to be able to share all this energy around. Expect to see a lot of 'virtual power plants', fancy term for linking all of these households together to create virtual power stations, to replace the old coal and gas plants. You can already join one of those now. As for those who spent the past 10 years talking about 'baseload' (which they don't understand), power stations will struggle to survive even to 2030. Not because we stop building them, but because we don't need them.