‘What’s really interesting about this warm stretch of weather, is it is going to last for a long time,’ BoM says
Archived version: https://archive.ph/RF9dH
‘What’s really interesting about this warm stretch of weather, is it is going to last for a long time,’ BoM says
Archived version: https://archive.ph/RF9dH
Australia is just know for being hot af all year round, isn’t it? Also, they are huge polluters and don’t care. They keep electing governments that don’t care, and have massive amounts of land they refuse to use for solar and wind. They could plaster relatively minuscule areas outside of their cities with solar panels, build wind turbines among parts of their coast and yet, their love for oil is immense.
They could be supplying their neighbors with hydrogen and electricity, or be the leaders in grid-scale batteries with molten salt or something else, but they simply choose not to.
Australian here:
not hot all year round. Australia is fucking enormous, it spans the tropics to (just) below the 40th parallel. Some areas are costal and mild, although single digit temps are common in the most populus regions in winter. Inland temps vary wildly.
Yeah huge polluters, political class gives no shits. Proles are more mixed as usual. We have massive uptake of rooftop solar driven by cost/environmental concern. Pretty solid adoption of EVs and ubiquitous adoption of heat pump based climate control. Very neoliberal culture of buy your way to a solution, no real discussion outside city centres of necessary radical transformations. Energy use is impacted heavily by how fucking awful building codes are and how corrupt the construction regulators are. For example, my house in a temperate rainforest is commonly about 8 C inside during winter, and 38 C during summer. I wear snow gear inside during winter, most people have the choice of dangerous temps or blasting ac, guess what they choose.
Re solar, we actually have massive uptake of rooftop. However outside of south Australia there has been no real investment in energy storage. Very neolib ''let the market solve it". Wind is getting pushback from farmers and nuclear lobby :(. Location is actually a bit complex, our population is heavily urbanised (>90% in cities. Mostly in 2) but our cities are sprawling nightmares so not a lot of ‘free’ easy to build on space. Severely need densification but the freestanding home is highly valued because our cities suck and property prices are absolutely broken.
It’s crap. The national research institute used to lead the world on renewables but we have had reactionary, neoliberal govs for ~50 years. The way our cities are designed to prevent uprising (prison colony heritage) and systemic racist othering has severely hampered the ability for people to organise and struggle against neoliberalism imho.
Yeah i wanna agree with a lot of their points as fair but their 'plaster solar everywhere" Is just. Yeah ok lets plaster solar outside fucking hobart and see how that goes. And export to neighbouring countries? Which ones? PNG would be the only potentially viable one. 4000km to nz may be fuck all flight time but it’s a dealbreaker for a power transmission line
Part of the frustration is that because our cities are arse land is too expensive for government projects that would improve them (according to neolib, country-as-household financial theories). Building out the infrastructure for like large battery farms in Syd for example is a nightmare problem for a government afraid to government.
NSW is doing a very neolib plan of subsiding household batteries if you agree to turn your house into a powerplant (details uncertain but presumably incentives to feed the grid and charge during peak times). could help solve the coal dependency as much as it’s not my fav idea.
Vic is running neighbourhood battery banks - i’m begging for one on the empty lot next door.