You can-not have DC transmission lines. DC power does not travel to well. power has to be converted to AC first. Solar will make a gigantic difference in the coming years. Get in early and set up a solar farm, sell shares to the locals.

@579: You can-not have DC transmission lines. DC power does not travel to well.

Nah 579, you need to read up on DC transmission. As always, the Wikipedia article is a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

You have it backwards. High Voltage DC Transmission travels far better than AC. Here "far better" means efficiently. A High Voltage DC transmission line running from Cairns to Perth following the coast would lose 22% (8,000 km) to line losses. That doesn't sound good, but AC could not do it at all. As a consequence the transmission lines that connect Tasmania’s Hydro Dams to Victoria are DC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink

AC's advantage is it is really easy to convert High Voltage (which is good for transmitting efficiently) to low voltage (ie, 240V) which is safe to use in houses. All you need is a transformer, which can be mounted on a pole. HVDC needs huge expensive stacks of semi conductors do the job. It is a very expensive technology, but can move enormous amounts of power huge distances.

The reason it is useful for renewables is it can help mask their unreliability. Whether the wind blowing in Perth is unlikely to be correlated with whether the wind is blowing in Cairns, thus the sum of the power generated by both of them is more reliable than the power generated by just Cairns or Perth alone.

That is right what you say, i was inferring you lose to much power. Long distance DC is good for just that, it's like pumping water, if you take some out half way you only get half at the other end. My solar loses 2% from the panels to the inverter, a distance of 6 meters. AC is more constant power because it rocks back and forth. DC goes one way. IT is not practical to have DC in suburban lines.

Sigh!