Ignoring the politics, we have to say that China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service in strategically developing and mass producing super cheap solar panels.
Don't forget Germany. If you look at the amount of PV built in Germany early this century and make some admittedly strong assumptions about learning curve, one could argue the Energiewende, then usually called failure, singlehandedly accelerated PV development by decades. I don't recall Germany ever credited on that.
I remember some old tidbit about the American westward expansion, most railroad projects failed and went bankrupt and were sold for pennies on the dollar to the ultimate owners.
But since then there was an endless stream of negative press especially in English speaking countries against German energy policies, so not much of this positive comments are still remembered.
It really is a huge service not just to the developed world that needs to decarbonize but also a huge service to the developing world. Solar can be put up quickly and cheaply and is good for about 2 decades and can be paired with cheap LiFo batteries to give round the clock electricity. Both of these are relatively portable. It can really bootstrap the economies of local communities where infrastructure hasn't been built out. Then combined that with portable Internet connection via something like Starlink or one of the competitor networks, we can really enable the available human capital in developing nations to realize their potential.
The biggest bottle neck to really solving the energy problem is now the price and fragility of high voltage DC long haul connections. Between those and solar you can have energy anywhere any time.
Let's hope someone can do the same for grid-scale seasonal storage. "Excess" solar electricity won't be free in (noon, summer) if you can easily bank it for (night, winter).
Never going to happen but there should be some sort of global emission accounting standard to factor in exporting goods that reduce emissions (over lifetimes), vs not, i.e. a barrel of oil burned should count at producer side the consumer side.
They are not cheap. They are extremely efficient at manufacturing. The 201st panel look exactly the same as 1st one. Definitely no human labor involved. Huge well readable serial numbers placed on multiple places of the panel for camera based identification. Usually no single failing panel in shipping container. The bad ones were clearly damaged during transportation. This efficiency looks scary when I see output of my workplace in Germany.
For years I've been hearing one excuse for the US not doing more about climate change is that China is polluting more and if they aren't doing something about it then why should we?
The argument always seemed disingenuous. For sure, China produces a lot of pollution as they are modernizing, but they are also investing a lot in the direction of sustainability. If we take the balance of (pollution produced - pollution prevented) for the two countries, the day will come, if it isn't now, that the US is on the losing side of that comparison, and I wonder what the new argument will be for the US not doing more.
If you ignore the pollution and environmental aspects, the main geopolitical reason is because the Straits of Malacca are very vulnerable in the event of a hot war and the overland pipelines from Russia and the middle east are insufficient to supply China. Getting rid of the oil dependency is the quickest way to autarchy. There are few other resources they can't produce themselves.
It's easier to understand that excuse when people realize that Americans tend to start with a conclusion then work their way backwards to support it. As in, 'we aren't doing much about climate change so here's why that's okay'.
I am not familiar with Chinese politics or motivation, but I wonder if it's for the same arguments we have in the US, "save the world" vs. "the strong can do whatever they want". I am not sure China does for the sake of sustainability and environment. Yes I know the end result might be the same but are the reasons the same?
And??? The parent commenter wrote about the manufacturer of said solar panels, going outside the frame of that article to something related but still relevant, given that that article surely is meant to stimulate a more general discussion.
For all the people hyping LLM AI in order to raise lots of cash, solar and battery is the real transformational technology of our time. But it gets less press, as it just doesn't benefit a few, who need the press hype.
I agree their treatment of the Uyghurs is deplorable but the way you had to chop that quote like a creationist undermines your point. It’s possible to say China has done both good and bad things, and recognizing the cost rather than denying something factual is probably a more effective.
Most of them would. These are labour-rural-transfer programs thats been going on in PRC for poverty alleviation for 20+ years that retards in west twisted into slave labour.
The entire coerced labour propaganda are bunch of country bumpkin Uyghurs getting enrolled in poverty alleviation programs where they're paid close to median wage, i.e. 2x+ typical subsistent agri income. This is equivalent to US starting a jobs program to give bottom quantile earners (15k) a median income (40k).
The reality is these are well paying jobs, relative to bottom quantile recruits these programs are designed to uplift usually go towards more ethnically "Chinese" applicants, because factory bosses don't want to deal with Uyghurs who don't Mandarin Good until central pushed Uyghurs (and Tibetans) to front of queue, when frankly much more qualified "Chinese" applicants exist.
Are individuals sometimes fucked in the process, of course, statistic inevitability, but poverty alleivation is net good for Uyghurs, XJ solar is net good for the world.
On the flip side here in Australia the government for years encouraged us to get panels put on our house by selling it as, "You can export power and create a small income exporting the surplus you create".
So many people did so that at one point last year the government said, "So many people are exporting it now, and the surplus is so great on the network we may have to charge you for exporting it". Wholesale power prices become negative during peak solar times - but retail companies will still charge you for using it!.
Obviously, that didn't go down too well and this is the response - free electricity during peak solar hours.
That said, my understanding is that free electricity is only for people who are on the "default offer" from the electricity companies - that is effectively the highest tier of pricing. Most people are not on the default offer.
There's currently a significant rebate on batteries in Australia. (Or maybe just Victoria?) So that's definitely one attempted solution. People are getting it for costs paying off in under 5 years.
> I haven't look into the details, but It sure feels like a slap in the face to those of us who invested in panels.
Sure. But if you live in Australia, you knew that slap was coming. You could almost have said to have signed up for it.
Very early in the piece, the government offered to pay people who installed solar about $0.50 for every kWh you fed into the grid. To be clear, that was far more than the retail price of electricity at the time. It was sunsetted, in 2028 from memory (so if you signed up back then, that sweet subsidy money still flowing strong.) I know a few people who installed 50kW of panels on their houses and sheds purely because of that incentive.
The idea behind the subsidy was to kickstart the solar industry, and it worked. It was always obvious what was going to happen to feed in prices if it did work. Given the price of power is now very close to $0 for 8 hours a day, it's working very, very well. That's how this "free electricity" offer came about.
The same incentives are now happening for batteries. The Australia electricity regulator created a special kind of retailer called a "Virtual Power Plant". It's effectively a collective of battery owning consumers, and the VPP allows them to sell their excess storage into the wholesale market. The government is now subsidising batteries, in the same way they subsidised solar panels. And now, they are looking at offering free power to charge the batteries(!) The result you should be able to get will over a 10% return by installing a battery and joining a VPP. Consequently, there is currently a shortage of battery installers.
That 10% won't last forever of course. It will last for a while, especially in Queensland (where I live) as the conservatives are installing more gas turbines rather than building more renewables. The high price of gas generated power guarantees a good return on my battery investment. I will take great pleasure in sending the gas and coal generators broke by selling when the price is highest (which is a night) and taking their profit.
And fortunately night lasts a long time, and years and years of battery installs to take a real bite out of it. Nevertheless the fun and profit will wind down eventually. When it does I won't be whinging about a receiving slap in the face. I will shrug, be thankful I could have my fun while it lasted, and move on.
Governments do this all the time. And wonder why there is resistance and have to roll out the "why do you want your grandchildren to die" propaganda for the next eco green net zero thing du jour.
This is a bizarrely negative take. No residential is being charged negative prices without very, very explicitly joining a plan that exposes them to the direct minute-by-minute wholesale price. Most 'EV' plans include free hours during the day (and much cheaper power in the early hours as well), it's likely it'll be standard within months thanks to this.
They are now also subsidising batteries while should help meet the wave of solar with a wave of distributed storage capacity to smooth out grid demand as well as successful rollout of grid-scale batteries.
This is a generational success story big enough to have geo-strategic implications.
So long as you ignore the working-poor. Those who live pay check to pay check, can’t afford solar / battery - or are renting so none of that applies to them.
This seems like a great way to encourage the behavior you want, which is conserving when energy is emitting more carbon by shifting consumption. Do your laundry, charge a car, charge a whole house batter, run laundry, crank the AC, run your own aluminum smelter, whatever.
In the UK, you can go on an agile tariff that does exactly this. I'm on one.
It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.
Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff, and it's nice to be doing something good for the environment too. It's particularly satisfying to charge up the car when tariffs go negative.
In Australia, residential premises are prohibited from running aluminium smelters.
Dunno about where you live.
If you’re going to throw capital at large metal refinery infrastructure, you want it running 24/7, or have guaranteed subsidies from local, state, and federal governments.
And remember that subsidies are paid from the public purse.
still sounds like an incredible way to incentivize consumers to buy small-scale storage. if i knew i could get free electricity for an hour or two each day (or even each week) it'd be a very easy choice to drop ~$1000 on a home battery.
The real price of solar electricity is never negative. Unlike something like oil wells (which really have driven the price of oil negative) you can just turn solar off.
Prices have gone negative because of things like subsidies - which in the short term is a good thing IMHO - it subsidizes industries developing systems to make use of that free (but not negative cost) energy...
Somebody has to go and turn it off, and having this person available overwhelms all of your operational costs.
Or alternatively, you need the infrastructure to do it automatically, what is currently expensive. (But there aren't intrinsic reasons for that being expensive, it's probably due to lack of scale.)
If it's just slightly negative, or just rarely so, it's not worth it.
This is the “smart grid” idea, right? We just haven’t fully explored it yet.
Something I firmly believe is that there’s a ton of low hanging fruit for timing our energy use better. It is just hidden by the desire to present a uniform energy price.
Like why not run our water heaters when power is cheap? Then if that became a thing, we might even be interested in larger water heater tanks. Batteries cost per volume, you only pay for the surface are of a metal tank!
They could also run their AC to below where their normal set point would be to “bank” some of the free electricity. I wonder if we’ll start seeing other more passive energy sinks… if you lived in a hot area and could rely on several hours of free electricity each day, it enables all sorts of interesting options like turning on a secondary cooling system to “charge” a large boulder or hunk of metal that you could then pass air over to cool your house when energy is expensive again.
Australia will give you a 30% discount on that purchase, they have a fund of 2.3 Billion Australian dollars available for this purpose called the Cheaper Home Batteries program.
My subsidised 48kWh battery is getting installed in two weeks - and I can't wait.
I have also upgraded to a 20kW inverter (I have ~10kW of panels on the roof) so I can import or export twice as fast and I will be switching to a provider that offers wholesale pricing. Getting a guaranteed 3 hours of free power a day for charging (even in winter) is just going to be the icing on the cake.
Based on back of the envelope calculations, the battery should be paid off in about 5-6 years during which time I will have paid zero for electricity (outside of a $25/month access charge).
"The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson
For some reason when I read that I thought it was offering anyone in the world free electricity, and I started imagining the USA setting up a giant undersea cable... then I realized the voltage drop would be too high, then finally realized they meant it for Australians only!
There is one project for an undersea cable to Singapore.
As solar efficiency goes up, and prices of solar and batteries come down and make local installation easier, an already audacious project seems less and less likely to complete.
I think they're pivoting the giant solar farms they were building for this to AI or green hydrogen now.
It's almost like that idea where the first people to leave in generational star ships will arrive at their new home to find the people who left in the third or forth generation ships already there for some time, technology having advanced so much in that time.
By the time they get the cable to Singapore, it will just be cheaper to generate it in Singapore.
In short: yes. It can be done. Clean, almost limitless energy, funded in a way to provide effectively free electricity for ordinary people. Restrictions would have to be in place to prevent true excess, but regulations already handle such matters in other areas.
The ambient vibe of our time, and here on HN, is often really pessimistic. I don't believe such pessimism is realistic. Commercial grade fusion power will come, and we should push very hard to make it happen. It will change the equations at the core of the economy and open up whole new paths for technology -- far beyond the pure digital.
By the time we get fusion (say 5 years) the solar+battery solution will be so cheap that it will be preferable to grid electricity (free to produce, expensive to transmit).
There is always some capital and operational costs. Plus transfer. Limit is cost of infra and operations. And the financing costs. So you can get to very cheap, but not free.
I still wonder who came up with the charge your car during the day / use it as a batterie. I don’t have the luxury’s of owning two EVs that I can charge and use at the same time.
If my car stand unused at home so I can charge it would mean I use it during the night?
I understand that there could be useage pattern where someone works from home once or twice a week and waits with the charge during these peek hours. But the generalization of just charge your car during the day is weird.
Unless that also counts when the car could charge for free at the workplace of course.
Obviously it still works great on the weekend, or whatever days you’re not working to charge the EV at home for free.
Given all power is free, why wouldn’t you charge the EV at work in the middle of the day? Even if you pay to have the charger installed it will pay back quickly.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but with literally free electricity things will change quickly, and even huge parking structures or lots will have a stack of chargers that are free or very close to it.
Is it falling apart right now? It seems the poster has forgotten that EVs can be charged at home but also away from home. They mention that in the last paragraph, but it kind of seems to undermine the whole premise that this is a problem.
> The Australian government is floating a scheme that would share the benefits of solar power with everyone on the grid, offering totally free electricity to ratepayers in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining the strongest.
> Australia proposes letting everyone benefit from negative wholesale rates
I know more countries have this now, so that's a good initiative that hopefully will spread to other countries (with negative rates).
It might not be as reliable in other places to do it every day, even just in summer. Still, there's clearly a trend globally towards more dynamic prices.
Readit News
Something sad about that, really.
But since then there was an endless stream of negative press especially in English speaking countries against German energy policies, so not much of this positive comments are still remembered.
It's all very exciting I think.
The solar+battery revolution is doing for power what cell phones did for communications in the third world in the 90's and 2000's.
> On farmland and on rooftops, Iraqis turn to solar as power grid falters
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/farmland-rooftops-ir...
[0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red... [1]: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/rene...
Deleted Comment
A third solution is to pipe it across timezones using HVDC and accept some level of efficiency loss and some geopolitical risks.
A fourth solution is to mix lots of wind, which performs better in winter and cancels out the lower insolation.
Realistically it's going to be all of the above, with the balance determined by local factors.
The argument always seemed disingenuous. For sure, China produces a lot of pollution as they are modernizing, but they are also investing a lot in the direction of sustainability. If we take the balance of (pollution produced - pollution prevented) for the two countries, the day will come, if it isn't now, that the US is on the losing side of that comparison, and I wonder what the new argument will be for the US not doing more.
China's numbers did rise quickly on that measure and is above the EU now I think but still way below the US.
And if you don't like per capita, then China with 4x as many people is still behind the US when you compare cumulative CO2.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ending...
And??? The parent commenter wrote about the manufacturer of said solar panels, going outside the frame of that article to something related but still relevant, given that that article surely is meant to stimulate a more general discussion.
Dead Comment
I doubt the Uyghurs would agree:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/in-broad...
https://sustainabilitymag.com/articles/gb-energy-blocks-use-...
https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/solar-companies-linked-to-...
The entire coerced labour propaganda are bunch of country bumpkin Uyghurs getting enrolled in poverty alleviation programs where they're paid close to median wage, i.e. 2x+ typical subsistent agri income. This is equivalent to US starting a jobs program to give bottom quantile earners (15k) a median income (40k).
The reality is these are well paying jobs, relative to bottom quantile recruits these programs are designed to uplift usually go towards more ethnically "Chinese" applicants, because factory bosses don't want to deal with Uyghurs who don't Mandarin Good until central pushed Uyghurs (and Tibetans) to front of queue, when frankly much more qualified "Chinese" applicants exist.
Are individuals sometimes fucked in the process, of course, statistic inevitability, but poverty alleivation is net good for Uyghurs, XJ solar is net good for the world.
So many people did so that at one point last year the government said, "So many people are exporting it now, and the surplus is so great on the network we may have to charge you for exporting it". Wholesale power prices become negative during peak solar times - but retail companies will still charge you for using it!.
Obviously, that didn't go down too well and this is the response - free electricity during peak solar hours.
That said, my understanding is that free electricity is only for people who are on the "default offer" from the electricity companies - that is effectively the highest tier of pricing. Most people are not on the default offer.
I'm pretty sure he hasn't actually paid for electricity or gas (same provider) since.
I think this is about battery sales for those that can afford it. Fill a battery up for free and use the power during peak hours.
Sure. But if you live in Australia, you knew that slap was coming. You could almost have said to have signed up for it.
Very early in the piece, the government offered to pay people who installed solar about $0.50 for every kWh you fed into the grid. To be clear, that was far more than the retail price of electricity at the time. It was sunsetted, in 2028 from memory (so if you signed up back then, that sweet subsidy money still flowing strong.) I know a few people who installed 50kW of panels on their houses and sheds purely because of that incentive.
The idea behind the subsidy was to kickstart the solar industry, and it worked. It was always obvious what was going to happen to feed in prices if it did work. Given the price of power is now very close to $0 for 8 hours a day, it's working very, very well. That's how this "free electricity" offer came about.
The same incentives are now happening for batteries. The Australia electricity regulator created a special kind of retailer called a "Virtual Power Plant". It's effectively a collective of battery owning consumers, and the VPP allows them to sell their excess storage into the wholesale market. The government is now subsidising batteries, in the same way they subsidised solar panels. And now, they are looking at offering free power to charge the batteries(!) The result you should be able to get will over a 10% return by installing a battery and joining a VPP. Consequently, there is currently a shortage of battery installers.
That 10% won't last forever of course. It will last for a while, especially in Queensland (where I live) as the conservatives are installing more gas turbines rather than building more renewables. The high price of gas generated power guarantees a good return on my battery investment. I will take great pleasure in sending the gas and coal generators broke by selling when the price is highest (which is a night) and taking their profit.
And fortunately night lasts a long time, and years and years of battery installs to take a real bite out of it. Nevertheless the fun and profit will wind down eventually. When it does I won't be whinging about a receiving slap in the face. I will shrug, be thankful I could have my fun while it lasted, and move on.
They are now also subsidising batteries while should help meet the wave of solar with a wave of distributed storage capacity to smooth out grid demand as well as successful rollout of grid-scale batteries.
This is a generational success story big enough to have geo-strategic implications.
So long as you ignore the working-poor. Those who live pay check to pay check, can’t afford solar / battery - or are renting so none of that applies to them.
Yeah, they can just get fucked.
What a success!
It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.
Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff, and it's nice to be doing something good for the environment too. It's particularly satisfying to charge up the car when tariffs go negative.
Here's today's rates (actuals): https://agilebuddy.uk/latest/agile
Here's a forecast: https://prices.fly.dev/A/
Dunno about where you live.
If you’re going to throw capital at large metal refinery infrastructure, you want it running 24/7, or have guaranteed subsidies from local, state, and federal governments.
And remember that subsidies are paid from the public purse.
Prices have gone negative because of things like subsidies - which in the short term is a good thing IMHO - it subsidizes industries developing systems to make use of that free (but not negative cost) energy...
Deleted Comment
Somebody has to go and turn it off, and having this person available overwhelms all of your operational costs.
Or alternatively, you need the infrastructure to do it automatically, what is currently expensive. (But there aren't intrinsic reasons for that being expensive, it's probably due to lack of scale.)
If it's just slightly negative, or just rarely so, it's not worth it.
Something I firmly believe is that there’s a ton of low hanging fruit for timing our energy use better. It is just hidden by the desire to present a uniform energy price.
Like why not run our water heaters when power is cheap? Then if that became a thing, we might even be interested in larger water heater tanks. Batteries cost per volume, you only pay for the surface are of a metal tank!
My home state of WA is not a part of the same power netwrok.
Charge the batteries in the free time and then use the stored power the rest of the day.
I have also upgraded to a 20kW inverter (I have ~10kW of panels on the roof) so I can import or export twice as fast and I will be switching to a provider that offers wholesale pricing. Getting a guaranteed 3 hours of free power a day for charging (even in winter) is just going to be the icing on the cake.
Based on back of the envelope calculations, the battery should be paid off in about 5-6 years during which time I will have paid zero for electricity (outside of a $25/month access charge).
"The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed." - William Gibson
As solar efficiency goes up, and prices of solar and batteries come down and make local installation easier, an already audacious project seems less and less likely to complete.
I think they're pivoting the giant solar farms they were building for this to AI or green hydrogen now.
By the time they get the cable to Singapore, it will just be cheaper to generate it in Singapore.
Suppose fusion power becomes a thing, and after handwaiving some issues let's assume it can power everything indefinitely.
Does that make things like heating, cooling, travel, ocean desalination, bandwidth, AI, Bitcoin mining, permanently free?
Shouldn't all of humanity be homing in on that holy grail?
I read here and there that geothermal could be the next best thing. Maybe HN can say more on that.
(P.S. terrestrial fusion may also explain why nobody bothers to build Dyson spheres out there)
The ambient vibe of our time, and here on HN, is often really pessimistic. I don't believe such pessimism is realistic. Commercial grade fusion power will come, and we should push very hard to make it happen. It will change the equations at the core of the economy and open up whole new paths for technology -- far beyond the pure digital.
There is always some capital and operational costs. Plus transfer. Limit is cost of infra and operations. And the financing costs. So you can get to very cheap, but not free.
What's cooler than being a billionaire? A SPACE BILLIONAIRE.
Unless that also counts when the car could charge for free at the workplace of course.
Obviously it still works great on the weekend, or whatever days you’re not working to charge the EV at home for free.
Given all power is free, why wouldn’t you charge the EV at work in the middle of the day? Even if you pay to have the charger installed it will pay back quickly.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but with literally free electricity things will change quickly, and even huge parking structures or lots will have a stack of chargers that are free or very close to it.
Is that anything like the "_ agenda being pushed" I keep hearing about, but can't seem to see anywhere?
> Australia proposes letting everyone benefit from negative wholesale rates
I know more countries have this now, so that's a good initiative that hopefully will spread to other countries (with negative rates).