The Australian wind industry has a habit of spearing its turbines way beyond the back of beyond. Increasingly remote wind farm locations require serious upgrades to transmission infrastructure, adding hundreds of $millions to transmission costs, that would have otherwise been avoided, had Australia simply stuck with conventional generators and not squandered $60,000,000,000 in subsidies to intermittent wind and solar.
As any first-year physics student will tell you, transmitting electricity over distances results in a mathematically predictable loss of the power transmitted, over any given distance. The greater the distance, the greater the absolute loss.
Just like the value of prime real estate, the most beneficial situation for generating capacity is all about location, location, location.
In the main, conventional generators are sited close enough to the majority of the load (i.e. power consumers) – such that the transmission losses involved amount to relative trickles. Not so with the roughly…
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