The world is on the cusp of an energy transformation that could make the Industrial Revolution look minor. Mike Cannon-Brookes is banking on the Land Down Under to be a major driver of that change.

The billionaire co-founder of software giant Atlassian plans for Australia, where he grew up, to become the hub for the two biggest renewable-energy projects ever. According to Bloomberg, the SunCable project will build a 20-gigawatt solar farm and a 4,300-kilometer undersea transmission cable, called the Australia-Asia PowerLink.

But even he acknowledges this $21 billion undertaking by SunCable is a "completely bats*** insane project." Still, it's the first step in a 10-step outline to move clean energy to Asia from one of the sunniest places on Earth. This cable would run along the bed of the Indian Ocean and feed Singapore's great demand for electricity.

Australia could produce 10,000 times more solar power than it consumes, as reported by Bloomberg, though it is a coal behemoth and exports more than any country besides Indonesia.

It will take governments, companies, the wealthy and powerful, and individuals to fully divest from such dirty energy sources, which are rapidly heating the planet and leading to more severe and frequent storms, wildfires, and other weather events.

Cannon-Brookes compared the energy transition to technology disruption, saying: "Everyone changed to a smartphone over a five-year period."

"Averting catastrophic climate change will require a similar rapid societal shift, including changing how energy is generated and delivered," Brian Kahn wrote. "In BloombergNEF's net-zero scenario, solar will be the world's largest source of clean energy by 2030. To get there will require building the equivalent of the world's largest solar farm every few days by the end of the decade."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15724955

World’s largest compressed air energy storage project comes online in China

Renewable energy accounted for more than 30% of the world’s electricity for the first time last year following a rapid rise in wind and solar power, according to new figures.

A report on the global power system has found that the world may be on the brink of driving down fossil fuel generation, even as overall demand for electricity continues to rise.

"...across all the state’s utilities by 2035."

Is this a good balance between ambitious and realistic timeline? 2035 is just over a decade away.

https://archive.is/ygEMK

Just 10 years ago, landlords could ban you from putting solar cells on your balcony because it makes their building look "messy". Now Germany is really pushing forward to let everybody put solar modules on their balcony with these new laws. How is legalization of balcony solar cells in your country? Is setting up solar modules on your balcony easy or difficult law-wise?

Although Germany has massively invested into green energy, the issue is that the electric network has not been sufficiently expanded. This means that solar and wind energy has to be turned off to not overload the network. However, the owners of solar/wind energy still get paid. This means that in Germany, the price of energy will only make up ~50% of the bill. The other 50% are payments for unused energy (to not overload the network) and costs for expanding the electric network (because some regions such as Bavaria refuse to have wind turbines or solar panels "because they look ugly", but still need electric). Lesson: When implementing renewable energy in the rest of the world, we have to keep in mind that we have to massively invest into the electric network as well or it won't work.

Executives at the companies say they reopened the factory in part because of incentives for domestic manufacturing in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature climate law. They expressed hope that their decision would also encourage other companies to revive production of a technology that was created in the United States about 70 years ago.

I'll note that right now, this is a seasonal issue, associated with moderate springtime temperatures when there is a lot of sunshine available.

Main page: https://fbrc.dev/

See also: https://codeberg.org/FBRC/RFB-dev-kit

And: https://dualpower.supply/posts/rfb-kit-workshop/