solar power so in australia they're having problems with too much rooftop solar power. gee, there's a shock. consider your heart. it pumps the blood. the arteries near your heart are big. as the blood moves away from the heart, the arteries split into smaller and smaller arteries. until the blood gets to its destination in the capillaries. then the blood goes back in your veins. which merge to make ever larger veins until some really big veins are plugged into your heart. well. not exactly. but it suits my purposes. the power station is like your heart. it pumps electrons into wires. big wires near the station. the wires split into smaller and smaller wires. until the wires get to your house. now suppose you put solar panels on your roof. that's kinda like putting a tiny little heart in your fingertip. the idea is to reduce the amount of work your heart has to do. the little heart pumps the blood for the fingertip. and your hand if it's got the extra power. wait. so the blood would flow upstream? well yeah the analogy breaks down here. but let's go with it just a bit more. electricity is like pressure. so we're imagining your cells run on blood pressure instead of the chemicals in the blood. the problem is, the tiny little veins and arteries aren't designed to handle the extra pressure when the fingertip hearts are running. you get too much pressure. so the hearts have to shut down. that's the problem they're seeing in australia. the rooftop solar panels are generating more power than is safe to put into the wires. there's not enough local load. so the panels have to shut themselves down to keep from creating an overvoltage situation. which is kinda sub optimal. it's even worse. there's no coordination from the central power station. they kinda go offline whenever they want. and sometimes they get synced up. like fireflies at night. so the voltage goes too high. the panels trip. and voltage goes too low. so they all click back on again. and round we go. one solution would be to upgrade the wires. but that would be expensive. another solution would be to allow only what the user is likely to consume. another proposal would be to put "your" solar panels on a big farm somewhere. a farm that's connected to big wires. connected to smaller wires. connected to smaller wires. connected to the little wires connected to your house.  ¶ 8:00 AM