Item — HN Reader

Australia is lucky, we get hot summers and mild winters, which means our electricity demand is highest precisely when we get the most solar.

That's why something like 30% of Australian houses have solar.

That said, grid prices spiked recently. Both a combination of subsidies expiring, and fewer people buying grid power (because of solar) causing fixed costs to be shouldered by fewer people.

It should be pointed out that while electricity prices went up on paper, a lot of people aren't paying those higher prices because they are on solar!

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Temperature has nothing to do with the performance of solar. Solar panels perform better when they are cooled.

Also worth pointing out that much of the US is below 49 degrees latitude. Which is south of most of Europe. Washington DC and San Francisco are at a similar latitude (38) as Melbourne (-37). Most of the US is perfectly situated for getting pretty decent solar power around the year. Yes it gets cloudy sometimes. It's usually not continent wide. You can compensate with cables and batteries. The US is far behind because of policy and their local energy monopolists blocking progress. Not because of anything to do with the weather or geography.

Prices have a lot to do with scarcity. Which with monopolists has more to do with the lack of a free market than with a scarcity of resources. Installing solar is about 3-5x more as expensive in the US as in Australia. The permitting process in the US is more expensive than the total cost of buying and installing in Australia. That's a policy problem in the US. All the hand wringing around that topic isn't helping a lot. A bit of pragmatism could improve things a lot and probably very quickly. Australia is showing how to do that. And yes, they have rain there too and you can go skiing pretty close to Melbourne. That isn't stopping them.

I wasn't talking about the performance of solar, only the demand for electricity.

Someone pointed out that the big problem with solar isn't how do we store daytime solar for nighttime use - this is easily solved with batteries. The real unsolved problem is how do we store summer solar for winter use.

Australia doesn't have this problem, not to the extent of other colder places, because we don't need a lot of heating in the winter.

Seems like there are lots of approaches that are technically viable for seasonal storage, hard to work out which one is better cost wise.