Solar to the fore as grid sails through heatwave and record demand

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-09/solar-powers-australia-through-heatwave-conditions/106211394

10 Comments

  1. AnAttemptReason on

    You mean… solar panels provide peak power at the same time as demand peaks?

    How could we have ever have guessed this!

  2. I’m sure this information will be major headlines in all the Newscorp papers, along with congratulatory pieces on how the government is steering us in the right direction.

  3. But but I was told renewables are a waste of time and nuclear is the solution to our problems /s

  4. PatternPrecognition on

    > Both Eldridge and Mountain said **batteries** would — and already were to an extent — help bridge the daily gap between abundance and scarcity.

    > On Wednesday, for example, they helped meet about **10 per cent of demand during the evening peak**

    In my head I thought we were only very much at the beginning of the battery rollout. That they were able to contribute 10% already on peak demand day is impressive.
    It will be interesting to see this shift in the next 5-10 years as the number of households with dedicated batteries or EVs as well as community based batteries and grid scale batteries increase significantly.

  5. AC on 24 all day running off solar and battery at night and still fed in enough power to the grid to cover my daily supply charge. Hard to argue with that.

  6. Its incredible how much of a no brainer seems to be in Aus yet its so unnecessarily contentious.

  7. For the last couple of years I’ve listened to the parliamentary speeches of Coalition MPs and senators. Every spring they’ve had dire warnings about “the summer ahead”, and how we would be seeing the electricity grid crashing due to an over-reliance of renewables.

    Those claims have not been matched by real world experience, and this ABC News article makes it sounds like renewables and batteries are actually a huge boon to our summertime energy mix.

  8. Icy_Celery6886 on

    LNP governments are the worst. If it was up to them they’d be no NBN, Solar, Wind. They gave away our LNG resources for almost nothing. Incompetent, ideological, religious, racist, sexist, regressive.