One of those with 8kw on the roof in suburban Adelaide, South Australia I found solar was a great investment.

Started with 3kw, and added another 5kw about 3 years ago just made sense when you work it out. When you work out the price (a 5kw+inverter system typically costs AU$4,000) and when a quarterly electricity bill saving is about $600 it does not take long to repay that. I used to get about 15c for what I export to the grid that i dont use (now its about 8c) and it costs 50-60c per kw/h importing (now its about 35-40c), only the price of battery tech needs to come down to make it fully self sustainable and for the panels to be made locally (sorry but this issue with China and its military world domination has most of us wanting to wipe the dictator and the regime off the map and save everyone from slavery especially the people in China)

Governments elsewhere used to berate us for going hard on renewables, but now that is changing. its how we must go for both the environment not to mention the economics.

When I come down the hill where there is a retirement village, the first thing you see is a vast amount of roofs , and everyone with panels.

It makes sense.

Just my 2c worth.

Firstly as part of the setup, AFAIK ( I applied for my partner to be part of the process before the SA state government scaled back the applications ) the power from solar+batteries is available to SA Power Networks to draw on at THEIR request, I assume via internet link to the battery system when the power is required.

The process is Free of Charge to the tenant/owner, the system has started off to public housing trust tenants who get the benefit of lower power pricing but then was made available to a limited number of other customers, basically all paid by Tesla & SA Government.

We have to go renewable, and Im glad I live here where many (it seems like most) homes have solar panels on the roof ( I have 8.5kw but no battery yet until the prices of batteries / redflow batteries go down). When I come down the road the first thing I see is a large scale retirement village where EVERY roof is full of panels (although I think they were done about 10 years ago and most likely would be the old 80w panels).

We live here in a situation where coal plants are coming to their end of life, nuclear is NOT (hopefully EVER) going to be an option, lots of sunshine, lots of wind , although only a few turbines in the country and the Tesla batteries at Jamestown have saved our asses a number of times. Its time for radical change and for the prime minister who brought a piece of coal in to parliment house demanding power companies build new coal power plants and have the federal government punish/rubbish SA for going renewables strongly , hopefully these dinosaurs die (or get thrown out) soon

Sometimes you need to invest first,

So Little Time... So Much to Destroy/

Darren

shhhhh.... Dont Tell China.. theyll sue for trademark violation.

Agreed about Solar Power, It pays for itself quickly and gives a more reliable (when combined with a redflow.com / lithium battery) grid.

I upgraded the solar on my roof to 8.5kw/h (from 3kwh), it works well, and when you work out the rebates (15c feed in to grid vs 45c import from grid) the payback time is 2-3 years. In South Australia we are very energy conscious given that 2 years ago the grid failed and the blackout for several hours took the whole states infrastructure with it. Since then Musk installed the worlds largest battery (plus Sanjeev Gupta investing to build another large scale), so currently we are one of the world leaders in Solar Wind & Geothermal, and as the big coal plants come to the end of the working life, and when problems occur as happened last year, the battery system kept the nations grid up. Unfortunately our federal government has coal for brains, but on the ground with people like myself Solar and other renewables are essential.

We cant keep raping the planet, so any initiative to mandate solar panels I see as important as mandating plumbing ( and I would suggest double glazing to increase the energy efficiency of homes). The Extra $AU4,000 for the 5.5kw upgrade is negligable when you are building a home when you factor that in three years (largely depends upon your location) is paid for and for the next 20+ years you are in front.

Its time to be smart, so a little extra upfront is the greatest bargain, whilst its not mandatory here, I would guess about 40-50% of homes here have solar pv panels currently.

Darren

Same here

With all the violations to my privacy I had enough about 12 months back, there is a much better way to work than to just take the crap thap Microsoft slings at people, combined with NSA spying and violating our security (im now semi retired due to severe health issues so have time to volenteer when I have pain levels under control) especially with voluntary pre-patent work to assist with genetic research (which the NSA is known to assist their "commercial interests" against ours who develop it), this spying made it mandatory for all researchers to protect our IP and boycott Microsoft (and others) completely. The leaders in the "five eyes" countries should be called to account for their "cooperation" which benefits the wealthiest fraction only to control all assets and the rest as slaves.

Once you move over to Linux (Im on Mint 17.3) you never want to move back.Its fast, its reliable and so flexable, you just need to make the paradigm shift and do it. Yes it was a reasonable amount of work to move our data and applications over, but once done you notice a significant acceleration in productivity.

Make the move

Sadly showing my age here, at 50 (last week), but remember gopher well too, kind of like an early yahoo but where the community really made life so much more informative and far far less junk (and basically no advertising) until the world "spoiled" it. When I wanted to know something I was able to find what I needed to know and was fairly confident (give or take) that what I found was reliable and accurate, and in less time that it would take now with my broadband connection @6mb/s than it was on a 300 and later a 1200 bps modem at the time.

Started using bbs's at 12, old by todays standards but then it was about 15 being average, and from 15 on the early stages with AARNET (and later Senet one of the first commercial ISPs) and from there onward working as systems programmer & analyst when I started work at about 16, up until I had to retire (for health reasons) 2 years ago.

I do miss the simpler times pre www (although I do like technology and how far it has come) but productivity wise we are no near near ahead as we should be.

Who knows though with the way surveillance and intrusion into out privacy, maybe in 20 years time people will be talking more about .onion and how it was when http / https was around.

Darren

The more the world changes, the more it stays the same

Hi Everyone,

For me the answer is absolutely nothing.

I do a lot of work with Excel and writing code in VBA, but when the recent details of Microsoft's Security Violations came to light we had to investigate the changeover to Linux ( My secondary machine is Linux Mint and has been for nearly a year now).

Libreoffice actually was very good, and although it means an entire rewrite of the codebase (fortunately not as big as it sounds) which does the data mining research as Libreoffice is very different in the way code needs to be written to interface from Excel VBA, it was actually not a great issue with over 90% now ported (although the last 10% will take time due to lack of documentation at this stage).

The biggest Issue I have is that NTFS on Linux is a bit of a hack and I dont consider reliable, meaning I have to transfer something like 40+TB of research raw data to drives formatted under EXT4, and verify the data (Tip - Try DC++ to generate the TTH for the files so you can compare), before the previous source drive is reformatted for the next transfer of a drive. As im working with sensitive data I have no choice but to ditch Windows for good after air-gapping the network for now.

When it became apparent what was happening with the Microsoft/NSA spying, it sent shudders down my spine, I am trained in PCI Compliance and data mining /security and this would mean the all corporates who deal with creditcards (and users who use their card online) are leaking data to Microsoft and NSA et al, and this is NOT ON!.

Goodbye Microsoft, you may have had me as a customer for over 30 years being an IT professional, but no more. The only issue I have now is finding a good antivirus (dont laugh I have used Trend for sometime, and they just dont have one as Linux is a lot more damn secure than Windows).

Where Do I want to go today? Definately not with MS.

Looks Like Chernobyl isnt the only thing that suffered a meltdown.. another incident of the slashdot affect.

Seti's current data explosion is just a small step, once the Paul Allen (Co Founder Microsoft) new array of telescopes and research centres comes online, the data requiring processing will go up by several magnitudes (dont know how they are going to solve that one, maybe ask Larry Page and Sergey Brin if they could "borrow" the spare clock cycles from all the googleplex data centres), unless Paul has also provided a few millions for their own setiplex.

We Live in Interesting times.

Darren Stephens
Adelaide, South Australia