Sun shines on Australia as over the last two months records are broken as demand from Grid FF electricity falls due to Aussie battlers rooftop solar installations (3 m households)
Australia grid and distribution networks are to be smartened to sustain frequency control,transfer to storage and education on usage such as control for houshold charging of ev.
So why are Australians so advanced with their uptake of solar power when new subdivisions in the sunniest province in NZ are conspicuous for the absence of solar roof panels on any houses while their fashionable black roofs require more assistance from heats pumps to cool them in summer?
Do the Aussies have incentives? Are they regulated in some way? Has the public awareness of the benefits of solar panels reached a general consensus of agreement? What caused that?
Mac1 incentives subsidies and the lack of them is a hangover from the Neo-lib experiment of the late 80s and 1990s. At that time there was fierce condemnation of the idea of subsidies from govt because
1 the market will look after everything
2 if the market didn't (look after everything) it was not worth pursuing anyway.
The impact of this has been hard to get over.
Also In NZ our introduction to energy saving or better devices etc has been faddish rather than researched. For instance now we have heat pumps, before that it was converting open fires to gas heaters etc etc.
In new builds we are still installing heat pumps, and these are great for retro use, but if you were planning a new build wouldn't it be more efficient for have whole house heating in the form of radiators etc. I sometimes look at show homes and only one recently had a whole house system using an Italian gas fired model. Yet a new build is an ideal time to install these.
In Wellington there are many villas built with lots of life left. In some the crawl space to install under floor insulation is limited. Two friends devised different low cost models of accessing through the floor. If we were really serious about energy research and accepting that subsidies have a place then we would have looked at these ideas, put some $$$ into research and possibly if the results came out OK then introduced via subsidies or low cost loans. But no.
In NZ we have accepted the mantra that subsidies = bad, bad, bad unquestioningly.
Energy efficient thermal mass, insulation and ventilation design for NZ would negate the need for household energy consumption in regards to temperature in many regions.
" Two friends devised different low cost models of accessing through the floor."
There were large outages in SA and other areas due to under investment in both grid and generation.Firstly SA offered first discounts then offsets against the GST component.
As uptake rose,economies of scale arose as both prices of solar fell,and installation costs decreased.Also local industry technology came with switching technology for using generation first for HW ,then to other uses in the home.Prices are around half the cost of NZ.
There has also been the uptake of both community and centralised battery storage,which allows for less transmission loss and distributed resilience from outages in emergency situations.
The incentives that Pat sourced include this- "Solar for low-income households help pensioners get affordable clean energy by providing 3kw solar systems, including installation, at no cost. After installation, you can save electricity bills of up to $600 annually."
In NZ we supply a $700 winter energy payment to keep people warm in winter, money which goes to energy providers for electricity, gas, wood or whatever. That $700 went in part for compensating me for the cost of my solar roof generation.
What Australia funds seems a better idea in providing free 3kw/h solar generation than the still well-intentioned and welcome winter warmth payment to us superannuitants.
With more distributed solar the transmission costs are better sustained (around 30% of your unit cost) during daytime usage it helps to conserve fast start hydro.
NZ uptake is low 38000 household connections,around 200mw by year end and 300mw by 2025 so still growing.
For your information Mac,Octopus energy has set up in NZ,and it targets the purchase of residential solar,with a buyback rate of 17c for exports to the grid.
That’s the problem in NZ, according to my son whose expertise is in this area, electric power production cost is only about 7c in NZ, the real cost is moving it over long distances and to relatively small settlements. The major problem here with a large uptake of solar is the need to maintain connection to the main grid so that privately produced power can be traded, if too many people go off-grid the transmission costs will rise because there will be fewer users to spread the costs over.
This is not an easy country to provide services economicaly for, the same goes for roading and rail.
The headline says it all. Union doesn't see the govts interim health plan making much difference to the staff shortage. Our health system is in real trouble. Expect it to get worse. Little needs to down tools and put all his energy into the workforce shortage, which is at crisis point.
Little puts the blame at the feet of National. FFS they have been in power for five years. Ian Powell former head of salaried medical specialists told David Clark, the then Minister of Health that there were three issues facing the Health system when Labour first came in……workforce shortage, workforce shortage and workforce shortage. We had two or so years covid free. That would have been very enticing for staff overseas dealing with covid to work in a covid free environment. But no, Labour and Little to busy spending money and wasting time on health reforms
Of course there is no quick fix, even more money won’t do it. Every country in the world is recruiting and there is a world wide shortage of nurses. The base pay is high by any measure and add-ons lift that by another 20%. $ 100k take home for an experienced nurse ( 5 plus years ) is not unusual ).
The two major problems are the growing complexity of treatment requiring a larger workforce because the hospital system can cure or fix far more conditions than even 20 years ago, and the on-going stupidity of the nursing spokespeople who constantly describe the job as onerous, over worked and underpaid making it seem like the last place on earth that a school leaver could possibly want to go to. Just STFU and it may become more attractive.
The job does require a quite high level of intelligence both mental and emotional, and that narrows the available cohort considerably. Want to solve the nursing crisis? Stop getting sick, stop doing stupid shit and stop everything that we enjoy that’s not good for us! Yeah, right. Fat chance.
Retaining medical staff after they finish training, could in part be addressed by reducing the financial pull of overseas, as they graduate with sizable student loans and debt.
Scholarships that require the student to remain for a period of time after study, not only retains those graduates in the country, but also retains them while they seek a better work/life balance, and most likely form relationships. If they do this overseas, their links to NZ have more chance of becoming tenuous, if they do this here, their connections grow and strengthen.
Address the issue of natural wanderlust, by creating robust programmes with other countries that create opportunities for medical staff – particularly in areas where NZ has little skill or experience. This will also allow medical staff to travel overseas on secondment, and increase the chances of them returning with needed skills rather than losing them completely.
The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts & talking about the week’s news with regular and special guests, including:, Helen Clark and on the week in geopolitics, including Donald Trump’s wrecking of the post-WW II politicial landscape; and, ...
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On Tuesday, the "Independent" Police Conduct Authority issued an extraordinary report, proposing a complete rewrite of protest law to enable the police to restrict public protests and ban them at a whim. While packaged with several complaints in an appendix, the focus of the "thematic review" was clearly the provision ...
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It is almost never an (unconditionally) good thing if an official policy interest rate (in our case the OCR) is being adjusted in large bites, whether that is (for example) 175 basis points of cuts in the last six months or 375 basis points of increases in just twelve months ...
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The Prime Minister says he's really comfortable with us not knowing the reoffending rate for his boot camp programme.They asked him for it at yesterday’s press conference, and he said, nah, not telling, have to respect people's privacy.Okay I'll bite. Let's say they release this information to us:The rate of ...
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This may be rhetorical but here goes: did any of you invest in the $Libra memecoin endorsed and backed by Argentine president and darling of the global Right Javier Milei (who admitted to being paid a fee for his promotion of the token)? You know, the one that soared above ...
Last week various of the great and good of New Zealand economics and public policy trooped off to Hamilton (of all places) for the annual Waikato Economics Forum, one of the successful marketing drives of university’s Vice-Chancellor. My interest was in the speeches delivered by the Minister of Finance and ...
The Prime Minister says the Government would be open to sending peacekeepers to Ukraine if a ceasefire was reached. The government has announced a $30 million spend on tourism infrastructure and biodiversity projects, including $11m spent to improve popular visitor sites and further $19m towards biodiversity efforts. A New Zealand-born ...
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In 2005, Labour repealed the long-standing principle of birthright citizenship in Aotearoa. Why? As with everything else Labour does, it all came down to austerity: "foreign mothers" were supposedly "coming to this country to give birth", and this was "put[ting] pressure on hospitals". Then-Immigration Minister George Hawkins explicitly gave this ...
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A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, February 9, 2025 thru Sat, February 15, 2025. This week's roundup is again published soleley by category. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if ...
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Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Is sea level rise exaggerated? Sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate, not stagnating or decreasing. Warming global temperatures cause land ice ...
Here is a scenario, but first a historical parallel. Hitler and the Nazis could well have accomplished everything that they wanted to do within German borders, including exterminating Jews, so long as they confined their ambitious to Germany itself. After all, the world pretty much sat and watched as the ...
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Simeon Brown’s Ideology BentSimeon Brown once told Kiwis he tries to represent his deep sense of faith by interacting “with integrity”.“It’s important that there’s Christians in Parliament…and from my perspective, it’s great to be a Christian in Parliament and to bring that perspective to [laws, conversations and policies].”And with ...
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Hi,When I started writing Webworm in 2020, I wrote a lot about the conspiracy theories that were suddenly invading our Twitter timelines and Facebook feeds. Four years ago a reader, John, left this feedback under one of my essays:It’s a never ending labyrinth of lunacy which, as you have pointed ...
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The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts & talking about the week’s news with regular and special guests, including: and on the week in geopolitics, including the latest from Donald Trump’s administration over Gaza and Ukraine; on the ...
Up until now, the prevailing coalition view of public servants was that there were simply too many of them. But yesterday the new Public Service Commissioner, handpicked by the Luxon Government, said it was not so much numbers but what they did and the value they produced that mattered. Sir ...
Photo by Mauricio Fanfa on UnsplashKia oraCome and join us for our weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar with paying subscribers to The Kākā for an hour at 5 pm today.Jump on this link on YouTube Livestream for our chat about the week’s news with myself , plus regular guests and ...
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For obvious reasons, people feel uneasy when the right to be a citizen is sold off to wealthy foreigners. Even selling the right to residency seems a bit dubious, when so many migrants who are not millionaires get turned away or are made to jump through innumerable hoops – simply ...
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Bills by Labour MPs to remove rules around sale of alcohol on public holidays, and for Crown entities to adopt Māori names have been drawn from the Members’ Bill Ballot. ...
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The Green Party says the Government is giving up on growing the country’s public housing stock, despite overwhelming evidence that we need more affordable houses to solve the housing crisis. ...
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Russia does a deal on grain and prices stabilise. Insiders go large on grain futures, Russia sinks the deal and futures spike.
That's how you do it.
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https://twitter.com/FortuneMagazine/status/1587194247584907265
Sun shines on Australia as over the last two months records are broken as demand from Grid FF electricity falls due to Aussie battlers rooftop solar installations (3 m households)
https://twitter.com/AEMO_Energy/status/1581866199914192896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1581866199914192896%7Ctwgr%5Effaabf38d84cafa883722a4a7d5d6aa11fac4b56%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.abc.net.au%2Fnews%2F2022-11-02%2Faustralian-solar-records-tumble-as-coal-eclipsed%2F101606490
Australia grid and distribution networks are to be smartened to sustain frequency control,transfer to storage and education on usage such as control for houshold charging of ev.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-02/australian-solar-records-tumble-as-coal-eclipsed/101606490
So why are Australians so advanced with their uptake of solar power when new subdivisions in the sunniest province in NZ are conspicuous for the absence of solar roof panels on any houses while their fashionable black roofs require more assistance from heats pumps to cool them in summer?
Do the Aussies have incentives? Are they regulated in some way? Has the public awareness of the benefits of solar panels reached a general consensus of agreement? What caused that?
subsidies and incentives
https://instylesolar.com/solar-guides/full-list-australian-solar-rebates-incentives/#:~:text=The%20current%20incentive%20is%20%24825,you%20can%20receive%20around%20%244000.
Wow! Do we offer any similar incentives and subsidies, Pat? If not, do you know what's the sticking point?
We have none…I know not why…the Aussies have had various subsidies and incentives for years, the ones linked are only the current ones.
What proportion of renewables does their energy system have, and how much did they need to improve on that to meet climate targets?
Mac1 incentives subsidies and the lack of them is a hangover from the Neo-lib experiment of the late 80s and 1990s. At that time there was fierce condemnation of the idea of subsidies from govt because
1 the market will look after everything
2 if the market didn't (look after everything) it was not worth pursuing anyway.
The impact of this has been hard to get over.
Also In NZ our introduction to energy saving or better devices etc has been faddish rather than researched. For instance now we have heat pumps, before that it was converting open fires to gas heaters etc etc.
In new builds we are still installing heat pumps, and these are great for retro use, but if you were planning a new build wouldn't it be more efficient for have whole house heating in the form of radiators etc. I sometimes look at show homes and only one recently had a whole house system using an Italian gas fired model. Yet a new build is an ideal time to install these.
In Wellington there are many villas built with lots of life left. In some the crawl space to install under floor insulation is limited. Two friends devised different low cost models of accessing through the floor. If we were really serious about energy research and accepting that subsidies have a place then we would have looked at these ideas, put some $$$ into research and possibly if the results came out OK then introduced via subsidies or low cost loans. But no.
In NZ we have accepted the mantra that subsidies = bad, bad, bad unquestioningly.
Energy efficient thermal mass, insulation and ventilation design for NZ would negate the need for household energy consumption in regards to temperature in many regions.
" Two friends devised different low cost models of accessing through the floor."
That sounds promising. What were they?
There were large outages in SA and other areas due to under investment in both grid and generation.Firstly SA offered first discounts then offsets against the GST component.
As uptake rose,economies of scale arose as both prices of solar fell,and installation costs decreased.Also local industry technology came with switching technology for using generation first for HW ,then to other uses in the home.Prices are around half the cost of NZ.
There has also been the uptake of both community and centralised battery storage,which allows for less transmission loss and distributed resilience from outages in emergency situations.
The incentives that Pat sourced include this- "Solar for low-income households help pensioners get affordable clean energy by providing 3kw solar systems, including installation, at no cost. After installation, you can save electricity bills of up to $600 annually."
In NZ we supply a $700 winter energy payment to keep people warm in winter, money which goes to energy providers for electricity, gas, wood or whatever. That $700 went in part for compensating me for the cost of my solar roof generation.
What Australia funds seems a better idea in providing free 3kw/h solar generation than the still well-intentioned and welcome winter warmth payment to us superannuitants.
Thanks btw to pat and Poission.
With more distributed solar the transmission costs are better sustained (around 30% of your unit cost) during daytime usage it helps to conserve fast start hydro.
NZ uptake is low 38000 household connections,around 200mw by year end and 300mw by 2025 so still growing.
For your information Mac,Octopus energy has set up in NZ,and it targets the purchase of residential solar,with a buyback rate of 17c for exports to the grid.
Really? My provider offers me 9 cents per kw/h.
I get 12c,from genesis.
That’s the problem in NZ, according to my son whose expertise is in this area, electric power production cost is only about 7c in NZ, the real cost is moving it over long distances and to relatively small settlements. The major problem here with a large uptake of solar is the need to maintain connection to the main grid so that privately produced power can be traded, if too many people go off-grid the transmission costs will rise because there will be fewer users to spread the costs over.
This is not an easy country to provide services economicaly for, the same goes for roading and rail.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/130314027/governments-interim-health-plan-will-not-fix-staffing-shortages-union-says
The headline says it all. Union doesn't see the govts interim health plan making much difference to the staff shortage. Our health system is in real trouble. Expect it to get worse. Little needs to down tools and put all his energy into the workforce shortage, which is at crisis point.
Little puts the blame at the feet of National. FFS they have been in power for five years. Ian Powell former head of salaried medical specialists told David Clark, the then Minister of Health that there were three issues facing the Health system when Labour first came in……workforce shortage, workforce shortage and workforce shortage. We had two or so years covid free. That would have been very enticing for staff overseas dealing with covid to work in a covid free environment. But no, Labour and Little to busy spending money and wasting time on health reforms
Of course there is no quick fix, even more money won’t do it. Every country in the world is recruiting and there is a world wide shortage of nurses. The base pay is high by any measure and add-ons lift that by another 20%. $ 100k take home for an experienced nurse ( 5 plus years ) is not unusual ).
The two major problems are the growing complexity of treatment requiring a larger workforce because the hospital system can cure or fix far more conditions than even 20 years ago, and the on-going stupidity of the nursing spokespeople who constantly describe the job as onerous, over worked and underpaid making it seem like the last place on earth that a school leaver could possibly want to go to. Just STFU and it may become more attractive.
The job does require a quite high level of intelligence both mental and emotional, and that narrows the available cohort considerably. Want to solve the nursing crisis? Stop getting sick, stop doing stupid shit and stop everything that we enjoy that’s not good for us! Yeah, right. Fat chance.
Retaining medical staff after they finish training, could in part be addressed by reducing the financial pull of overseas, as they graduate with sizable student loans and debt.
Scholarships that require the student to remain for a period of time after study, not only retains those graduates in the country, but also retains them while they seek a better work/life balance, and most likely form relationships. If they do this overseas, their links to NZ have more chance of becoming tenuous, if they do this here, their connections grow and strengthen.
Address the issue of natural wanderlust, by creating robust programmes with other countries that create opportunities for medical staff – particularly in areas where NZ has little skill or experience. This will also allow medical staff to travel overseas on secondment, and increase the chances of them returning with needed skills rather than losing them completely.