I am not asking for your money to invest in my scam but consider following 
:
Imagine that all the money you don't have you spent on Solar Panel farm far away.
I did this calculations before so there just reminder.
Imagine following scenario:
One day you decided:
- to sell your home appartment at CBD for $550 k
- throw you good job at near office that bring you $50k per year before taxes but waste 10 hours a day that you could spent in better place
NOW
you received free or cheap government grant on the land in the place nobody want to live. You will get 10 or even 100 years lease on the 10 hectares desert in the middle of nowhere !
Nobody want to live there, even me or you.. so you don't have to.
You just bought for all the money left for the sales $500k solar panels at the best price you could bargain today $0.5 per watt.
That gave you
$500,000 / $0.5 per watt = 1,000 kw of power in solar panel !!! to worry about
or 1 Megawatt own electricity plant that produce ZERO emission !!
Now you could walk and ask for million dollars grants, subsidies RECs and Carbon Fees to pocket it all ( in somebody else expense).
But you don't need this.
All you need is NO RED TAPE and free and fair market economy.
At today energy prices :
1,000 kw (your power plant) x 5 kwh ( output per day) x $0,06 (electricity wholesale price) x 365 day ( no allowance for rainy day given ) = $109,000 income per year
That is what your average city apartment is worth put to work.
Macro, the transmission infrastructure is the deal breaker. Transmission lines are all lossy - have you done the calculations? DC transmission is indeed more efficient - you are correct on this point for the wrong reasons, however, superconductivity at room temperature is a pie in the sky.
The second deal breaker is the peaky nature of solar. Good storage for PV-generated energy hasn't been developed yet. So, at night, you'll have to rely on an alternatively generated baseload energy. Digression, but my pick for that would be nuclear - it's a great option for Australia, because the fuel cycle can be closed fully, and the carbon emissions are almost none. Since baseload will always be a requirement, the price for the "peak-at-noon" PV-generated electricity will keep going down as more panels get installed.
You get around that problem by simply using the solar farm to charge batteries that are then transported by solar train to the cities.
I have available to me around five acres of land on the north side of a hill. This is on the mid north coast of NSW, so not a million miles from anywhere, and actually in the middle of a fairly well populated area with the largest power stations around 400 kms away in the Hunter Valley.
I would not mind doing something like this there. Sure you will get more cloudy days on the coast and sometimes it rains for weeks upon end. However its fairly sunny there plus much of the infrastructure is already closeby, decent roads and big powerlines.
I also have a flat in the city, not worth $500K but close to it. However half of that is owing on our mortgage.
Its either this, or planting macadamia nut trees.
I have few acres myself in the middle of the city but covered by very big trees... so not much lucky unless I could buy some cheap dirt nearby to test my ideas...
)
I still don't think much of the investment potential.
The market price of a resource is governed by supply and demand. The demand is more or less constant in this case. The supply, on the other hand, peaks at noon, if there are no clouds. So what happens when you add the energy all the PV producers in, say, Sydney area? A huge peak at 12:00, and huge drops whenever thunderstorms pass by. Nothing at night. So, during the peak production hours, the price will drop due to oversupply. It's already happening. The only solution is efficient storage, which currently does not exist, at least not in an environmentally friendly form.
And talking about storage - Macro - you mentioned molten sodium. Yes, it's a good energy capacitor. I can see how you are going to heat it, but how are you going to extract the energy from it at night? The current industry practice is a steam turbine. Are you happy to place one on your property?
From what I understand of electricity generation in Australia is most of it is generated by coal fired steam turbines. These turbines are happiest spinning at a constant speed twenty four hours a day.
Peak electricity consumption is in the evening. Off peak is in the middle of the night. There is a little peak in the morning as everyone has a morning shower. There are shoulders to the early evening peak in the afternoon and later evening.
So already there is an issue as there must be capacity for the peak, leading to excesss generation at other times.
I've read that in NSW/Victoria at least they get around this by pumping water into dams at the head of the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme during offpeak times and then release the water back down at peak times.
If this is the case then I don't see the problem with generating more electricity during the day in NSW or Victoria. There is a system in place to store the electricity.
What it comes down to is the price received for electricity generated and at this stage in NSW its a constant price, doesn't matter if its sold day or night. The price is low, about five or six cents a kw/h. This is after the super generous 65 cents per kw/h that stopped a couple of years ago.
TRAIN GAIN
Imagine that electricity market is now open for all players.
Gina R must send her trains full of iron ore anyway from the mine to the port.
But then she decided not to this do at random but smart way.
She load and run electric train express at night at low electric traffic buying electricity to power her train to 180 km/h at 6 cents a kilowatt/hour.
Then the route is calculated to reach destination at peak power, then train instead of brakes employs the same motors to produce electricity back to the train grid.
Now selling it at 46 cents (peak power price)
Is it worth it or shouldn't be bothered at all?
For calculation we could use the biggest train BHP ever used - 100,000 tons in capacity. Speeding at 180 km/h ( or 50 m/s) and accumulated such energy
100,000,000 kg x 50 m/s x 50 m/s /2 = 125,000 Mega Jule
Now she is going to sell it at the gain
46c she is selling - 6c kwh she bought = 40 cents profit on 1 kWh
now to convert train energy to dollar $$
125,000 MJ / 3.6 (conversion to kwh) x $0.4 per kwh = $13,888 profit
Not bad, Just for synchronizing departure time and arrival time with best electricity prices for one train.
Now how many trains per year with iron ore are running every year ?
Then suppose all trains with iron ore in Australian are synchronized smartly from now on. What about coal may you ask ?
(It will be impractical to synchronize passenger trains even if you could run 350 km/h Who want to wait for departure till lower electric tarrif then wait for peak ?)
420,000,000 tones ( yearly export) / 100,000 tones (one train) = 4200 trains running full load from mine to the shipping port every year with iron ore only.
4200 trains x $13.8k profit on electricity on single train = $58 millions extra pocket cash on smart train timetables
in comparison to AC lines that do require a such.
Nobody is looking at this from the perspective of the local electricity utility.
They are trying to balance the supply and demand.
The demand is of course fluctuating so they want a steady supply like from hydro or coal, NG or nuclear.
As the supply comes more from wind and solar it becomes more intermittent as wind is gusty and the sun is subject to clouds.
Their paying customers raise holy hell when the power blacks out because the supply and demand fluctuates too much to keep the grid going.
Steady baseline power 24 hours a day is needed to keep the grid going.
do you know anything about DC at all? like high school knowledge? Google it mate. there's a reason why we dont use it for transmission
don't forget RED is positive !)
Macro: the "5 kwh" term in your formula I don't understand. Could you explain this formula ?
myusernam & macro: To transport the electricity, you would want to upconvert it to a very high voltage (the higher the better). To do that you have to convert it to AC... so I guess you might as well keep it at AC during transmission as you have to eventually downconvert it anyway. It's very lossy process doing this. 60-80% losses for stepping up or down. Plus, solar panels are a hard one to get maximum energy. I'm no expert, but you need to constantly match the source resistance of the solar panels to get maximum efficiency out of them (add that loss as well). If you had a solar system that produced a very high voltage (and no, joining them all up probably won't work), then transmitting this as HV DC would be the best, and then down convert it at the other end (convert it to AC, then step it down etc). End of the day, you would need to do your power budget to see what's really happening plus analyse the technologies that will do it so see how reliable they will me.
I would go with nuclear me personally... but you know, politics and stupidity "what feels good" have always railroaded this option, yet we are happy to sell uranium to the world.
