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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Australia is comparable in size, split by a giant middle desert (literally and figuratively) And has two grids.

Balancing the east coast grid is sometimes hard. Its weak, badly in need of capital investment and somewhat mired in inter-state/federal madness.

Personally, I think privatizing the utility function was insane.

There are some cool things which emerged after the 1970s grounded capital investment: High Voltage DC is very cool. Avoids some of the issues of phase and load mis-alignment between regions, generation models.

Arguments for a different kind of net exist. More local resiliency. More load shedding, more respect for home solar and batteries, as well as storage in the network.

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> And has two grids.

Not just two. There's also the Darwin/Katherine system which serves about 150k customers. The NWIS and Alice Springs system both have 20k+ customers. Australia has some really interesting power systems.

Sorry I didn't capture that. I bet the NT gets better service outcomes than either WA or east coast, sooner (because more focussed)

there's issues with decades of one provider also owning the infra. It got split up in recent years, but we've yet to see new providers connected.

in the top end, fruitbats and cyclonic storms are common disruptions

its got better in the suburbs since lotsa wires went underground, but just a few km down the highway and the grade of service drops.

Among US utilities, local public utilities seem to work best. Federal run facilities are deeply mired in bureaucracy and acquisition guidelines, while fully private power companies are prone to get bought out by large investor conglomerates and end up too driven by quarterly profit to invest in maintenance.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-18/australian-gold-plate...

It seems to be both overinvested and underinvested? How can it be both? (Sorry looking for insight not trying to disprove what you say)

Gold plating is a bit of a misnomer. Capital investment made in transmission was assured a rate of return above CPI. It was a gold class, form of spending money to earn future revenue under regulation. They didn't invest in the parts which we need now, in the light of shifts in transmission models from Coal and Gas, to both inter-state dependencies on trunks, and the in-local-distribution network storage and generation. They chose to invest in the assets they had, which were not the ones we need to invest in, to cope with variable load in wind and solar, and distributed generation in the home.

Demand management, variable load, need for Syncons and storage and need for more resiliency in the inter-state connections and the "rhombus of regret" are where money needs to go.

the gold plating was not made there. And in any case, its rent-seeking behaviour: its not a good model.

(this is highly subjective opinion btw. A good economist to read on this is John Quiggin, and a good alternative engergy advocate is Giles Parkinson, reneweconomy. They are also partisan, but knowledgeable.)

Thanks, that was really interesting. Always hear one side of news, especially when it's a semi-complex subject and I will have a look at reneweconomy.

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