Random power glut means 80% of solar plant output was thrown away on Sunday

By Jo Nova

It’s barely spring in Australia and already we’re reaching the point where there’s too much solar. There’s such an excess of useless energy, prices are negative, meaning the hapless generators have to pay people to take the poison power away. And on Sunday, at a time when investors ought be making their peak profit for the day, they were rushing to turn 80% of their panels off.

Feel the pain — the stunted curve of the solar plants (below) is supposed to be the same shape as the rooftop PV.

In reality, this is how we make the parabolic curve of orbital solar physics fit a rectangular box — by building five times as much as we need and wasting most of it.

Anero.id

Bear in mind, this is just the start of a the lumpy road to nowhere. Even though we already have more solar panels than we can use, we’re supposed to be installing 22,000 more panels every day in Australia to reach our mystical NetZero target.

Paul McArdle of WattClarity noticed the dire situation. As he says “rooftop PV is killing [...]