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AnotherGoodName 2 hours ago [-]
It started with a solar boom, many small home scale solar roofs popping up everywhere. Australia has a free trade agreement with much of the world, including China, and solar panels have literally dropped to 1/50th of the price they were in 1990 ($10/W to $0.2/W today). A shout out to the work that was done to establish dynamic grid pricing too.
Anyway that caused power prices to reliably go negative during the day as the solar boom led to too much energy being produced. So everyone started buying batteries (you can even get live feed in/out pricing as a consumer). In fact the government even today will pay you a $3000 subsidy to go install a battery. This is in a country where people can buy cheap batteries with no tariffs (free trade's amazing, seriously!). So everyone who could started doing it. For those in apartments etc. that couldn't easily install solar and batteries they won too since the entire power grid is now half the price.
Another consequence of all this, aside from the cheap power prices during a datacenter boom and Hormuz blockade is that fossil fuel usage is plummeting. Particularly gas https://ieefa.org/resources/slump-eastern-australia-gas-dema... . No need for a gas peak power plant when the grid is packed with batteries. Which is helpful since one of the main issues with the current blockade is a lack of gas globally.
pnw 1 hours ago [-]
If you read the article, most of the decline in gas consumption in Australia is from changes in industrial usage. Residential demand is only down by 6% and part of that is likely due to the effective ban on gas in new residential construction which started in 2023 in Victoria. Prior to 2023 residential gas usage was increasing.
0xWTF 1 hours ago [-]
A 50% price decline doesn't imply there's 50% less demand for petroleum. If 6% less demand is all the margin consumers need to get their supply, then price can drop quickly. It's all in the margins.
Symbiote 1 hours ago [-]
It would be useful to know if the industrial use is factories replacing their use with other sources (e.g. I have read that food manufacture is switching to electricity in Denmark, although it can be held up waiting for a grid connection if there's a data centre ahead of it).
Or, did they improve their efficiency.
Or, have they closed.
hinkley 7 minutes ago [-]
Or outsourced their pollution to a foreign supplier.
AnotherGoodName 1 hours ago [-]
It has a whole section on the impact of power policy though and 15% of power mix to 7% for gas is significant. Coals fall is notable too.
testing22321 1 hours ago [-]
Australia never had much residential gas usage.
Mr he very vast majority of residential homes don’t even have gas. No need for a furnace.
dalyons 15 minutes ago [-]
Pretty much every house in Victoria had gas, and gas furnaces, winter is cold enough
linksnapzz 21 minutes ago [-]
free trade's amazing, seriously!
Time was, mercantilist countries would use foreign colonies for resource extraction; and sell the goods manufactured with these resources back to them.
It was great for everyone!
hinkley 6 minutes ago [-]
Yes, everyone is always telling me how great colonialism was for the locals.
bborud 16 minutes ago [-]
...and then the "colonies" figured out how to weaponize it and turn the balance in their favor.
Or, not quite: the workers are being exploited just like they were during the colonial period. But at least now their rulers have power over our rulers that they didn't have before. So they get to be happy about that as they make novelty items out of toxic plastic for Temu.
epistasis 29 minutes ago [-]
This is exactly what utility propaganda and PUC manipulation in the US has successfully stopped from happening.
From NEM3 in California, to charging a high fixed fee for being on the grid in other areas of the country, utilities have manipulated rules at every step to prevent a future that has cheaper electricity for rate payers. They come up with rather fantastic propaganda about how ratepayers with solar are burdens on the grid, or concentrated in high-income areas, to try to hide the reality of what's possible with highly distributed electricity generation.
And the media in the US have been very willing accomplices in perpetuating this as well.
I have not figured out why its so different between Australia and the US, but it does seem that Australia has a far greater free-market bent when it comes to these things than the US. It's why solar is 4-6x cheaper to install than in the US.
jandrese 2 minutes ago [-]
What is even more amazing is how many of Australia's politicians have been in the pocket of coal barons and yet they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption. Compare that to places like California where they've been fighting tooth and nail against green power.
collinmcnulty 1 hours ago [-]
I've long thought that any country should buy solar panels from any other country that's crazy enough to sell them to you at a subsidized price. It's not like buying oil; once you have the panels, that energy independence belongs to you.
modo_mario 32 minutes ago [-]
In the end you have to replace those panels and nobody in your country now produces them or has the incentive to start producing them unless they not only drop the subsidies but sell well over market value.
collinmcnulty 30 minutes ago [-]
In 25 years, those panels will still be producing 80% of their starting value. Imagine what you can do with 25 years of energy independence.
hinkley 4 minutes ago [-]
Well it’s about 40 years since the US started getting stupid about foreign trade and things are not going so well here now. Send help.
pocksuppet 46 minutes ago [-]
How many solar panels did you buy?
collinmcnulty 32 minutes ago [-]
11, and I wish I'd bought 15
philjohn 22 minutes ago [-]
I bought 32 and wished I got another 6 for the south west aspect of the house ... but still, producing 11mWh a year in the UK on an east/west aspect, electricity bill for the year (even with all cars in the household being EV's) is negative. Battery makes the difference - load shifting is doing the heavy lifting in the winter.
quickthrowman 17 minutes ago [-]
I hope you’re generating more than 11 milliwatt-hours per year, guessing you meant MWh :)
32*250*1400=11,200,000 watt hours, which makes more sense ;)
iAMkenough 34 minutes ago [-]
Probably depends on what country they live in and whether their government is spending billions of their taxpayer dollars to simply not build renewable energy projects and invest additional billions on top of that in new oil, gas and coal instead.
skew-aberration 1 hours ago [-]
The subsidy was closer to 70%, and in my case I was paid the equivalent of about 10 years of free electricity for a battery with a 10-year warranty. In total somewhere around 5-7 billion AUD was paid out (not yet public) - the wholesale market for comparison is around $16B AUD annually. Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included). Given the extreme volatility of power prices, a figure such as '47% decline' should be taken with a grain of salt - but power prices are certainly a bit lower than last year.
tialaramex 1 hours ago [-]
> Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included).
I am generally sympathetic to this POV but I think for solar and batteries actually I end up leaning the other way. Solar PV scales appropriately for home owners unlike wind or indeed any conventional generation and both solar and batteries change how their owners feel about this so that you end up with people who have "skin in the game" in a way they didn't have when it was a BESS install six miles away they saw on TV once and have never thought about since.
skew-aberration 51 minutes ago [-]
As I said in another comment,
> For 2N government dollars, the program gets 3N home battery. Grid is 2x more efficient by their own accounting. Therefore, we could have gotten 4N grid storage. This is not comparable to the home solar programs - which I understand to 'enticed' more private investment. Simply buying votes and lying to the public. I feel for the renters who paid their taxes and never saw a cent.
I'd rather the 50% of Australians who don't own the home they live in had skin in the game! But I do love my 42kwhr battery
AnotherGoodName 49 minutes ago [-]
It definitely has led to a lot of 'I'm not an environmentalist but of course i got solar on the roof and a battery!'. eg. https://xkcd.com/3226/
plantain 2 hours ago [-]
The program has so far spent $2.5bn, and installed 11GWh. That's just the cost of the subsidy (~30% discount), not the cost of what home owners tipped in.
Utility scale batteries are now at ~$66m/GWh, or about ~$726m equivalent.
It does not make sense for everyone to be doing a bespoke installation inside their own home. It is ridiculously inefficient.
We are a society. We don't build our own roads, water, grid, schools, hospitals. Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? (A: failure of governance)
matt2000 1 hours ago [-]
Fair points, but you are glossing over important issues:
1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping.
2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries.
3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of demand. It also increases resilience of the grid.
4. You assume the political will was there for government and taxpayers to bear the full cost burden of development of the batteries.
plantain 19 minutes ago [-]
1. The subsidy was fixed per kWh at a level that has always been vastly above utility scale BESS.
2. Power usage is flatlining. There is no reason to need transmission upgrades for BESS. Successful projects are colocated at retiring generators, or at existing major grid terminus.
3. Are those benefits worth 4x the price? Noting again, that's 4x the subsidy, not even the actual installed cost which is closer to 8-12x.
4. It would have been cheaper even at just the subsidy rate.
pydry 58 minutes ago [-]
also ignoring that Australia is building snowy 2 which is the world's largest battery by far, due to be finished in 2027-2028.
plantain 16 minutes ago [-]
Are you really holding up Snowy 2 as a success story? We're past 20bn on Snowy 2 now. Run those numbers against grid scale BESS, on both capacity and peak generation and get back to me - 10 years ago it looked good, now it's not favourable.
figbert 1 hours ago [-]
Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. This is a big deal.
I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.
plantain 1 hours ago [-]
We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants.
> Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale.
A couple of electricians doing 20kWh (average install size) once per day, with an individual inverter, gateways, etc. is not at scale, by any means of the word.
mrngld 30 minutes ago [-]
No, we do not in fact have the "power pipes". Those "pipes" have capacity limits. Those "pipes" and getting them approved and built in the US is a key limiting factor that throttles... pretty much everything. Yes, it holds up data centers, but also I've heard 'green' energy advocates complaining for decades about how difficult it is to get the permits and approvals to get wind and solar facilities hooked up, they're holding up nuclear plants, they're holding all kinds of things up.
There's also something to be said for distributed production and storage. We don't all live in ultra-compact cities. I agree apartment buildings don't need to be playing this game. But Australia (and the US) are extremely dispersed relative to Europe, for example. There should, in theory, be resilience in distributed production and storage that grid managers could call upon to help manage point failures.
ceejayoz 39 minutes ago [-]
> We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants.
And when they break, many people lose power.
Ukraine's seen some of the benefits of hyper-local generation over centralized production.
marcosdumay 37 minutes ago [-]
A thousand electricians doing 20kWh installations every week-day add up to 5GWh/year.
There are probably more than a thousand electricians in Australia.
alexpotato 1 hours ago [-]
There was an article a few years back about how homeowners in Hawaii were buying solar panels to try to get cheaper power.
Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
otherme123 1 hours ago [-]
Which translates to "the local power company was knowingly using ineficient sources to steal from their clients, until their clients did something about it and forced them be efficient".
tialaramex 43 minutes ago [-]
> the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
I'm sure this is the way you remember it, and maybe even the way it was explained in that article but if you bought a solar panel the sunlight to power it is free, so your electricity from the panel is free. You're not "buying" that power and so the commercial supply can't be "cheaper".
Now if I've paid $5000 for a product which makes me electricity for free and then later you offer me the same amount of electricity for just $4000 you could say yours is cheaper, but, er, I already bought that $5000 product, I'm already out $5000 and my electricity is free, yours is not actually cheaper now. What we're seeing here is just "Did you know solar panels have become cheaper over time?"
vladgur 33 minutes ago [-]
That doesn’t sound like Hawaii
This does
“ A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted
Photovoltaics proved so successful in Hawaii that the local utility, HECO, has instituted policies to block further expansion”
I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies I've ever seen in this country. The numbers are much worse than you make out. The program has spent more than 2.5bn (the projected figure) and we don't know yet how much. The subsidy was closer to 70% for a typical large battery install. The government's own gen cost report would have put grid storage 1.5x ahead on ROI.
Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.
plantain 1 hours ago [-]
I've tried to be as charitable on both sides. As you note the real subsidy is higher, but the owner contributions are still high, and the projected cost of the program is now closer to 7.5Bn.
It's pure middle-class welfare.
skew-aberration 53 minutes ago [-]
For 2N government dollars, the program gets 3N home battery. Grid is 2x more efficient by their own accounting. Therefore, we could have gotten 4N grid storage. This is not comparable to the home solar programs - which I understand to 'enticed' more private investment. Simply buying votes and lying to the public. I feel for the renters who paid their taxes and never saw a cent.
otherme123 1 hours ago [-]
Decentralization might be dollar-inefficient, but brings resiliency and redundancy to the system. The whole internet infrastructure would be probably cheaper with more centralization. Data backups are also ridiculously innefficient dollar-wise.
skew-aberration 33 minutes ago [-]
These systems are not truly redundant in that sense though - as they are intended to be centrally coordinated (the manufacturer provides a web API). So they are potentially vulnerable to e.g cyberwarfare.
rglullis 1 hours ago [-]
Not all inneficiencies are bad. If the cost to build ridiculously redundant systems is low enough, the system overall is more robust to black swan events than any central planner could ever be.
jgilias 1 hours ago [-]
My neighbour has a battery installation because where I live they subsidise both - the panels and the battery. In the event of a power outage he can keep running his house for ~3 days if being somewhat frugal with consumption.
And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.
skybrian 58 minutes ago [-]
It makes enough sense in rural areas for a Vermont power company to lease batteries to residential customers. They avoid having to do expensive upgrades that way:
Are we a society though? Margaret Thatcher famously said "There's no such thing as society" and a lot of people have been doing their best to make that true.
There's no use pretending. Utility scale has a single political point of failure. Batteries in home do not.
ghaff 1 hours ago [-]
Sort of. While not really mainstream, there are private roads (and long driveways), wells, and a (limited) amount of home-schooling. Not hospitals obviously as that requires specialized training and equipment.
sanderjd 1 hours ago [-]
Honestly this seems like a pretty good efficiency multiplier for a distributed vs. centralized solution at that scale!
nickpp 1 hours ago [-]
Cost is never the only factor though. Being energy independent and self-sufficient feels awesome. Also whole house backup rocks, together with a smart app showing and optimizing your energy usage.
dyauspitr 1 hours ago [-]
That’s great value for money! Even with gas peaked plants that would cost roughly $10 billion in the US. They should massively expand this program.
dcan 1 hours ago [-]
Is this not free market capitalism?
Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term.
This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term!
The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck.
Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.
barney54 1 hours ago [-]
No. The modern grid has little relation to capitalism. There is some private ownership, but there are massive government barriers to entry and massive regulation of the system.
nutjob2 1 hours ago [-]
The subsidy has the effect of prompting the wealthiest consumers to spend around 2.25x the amount of subsidy on battery installations while reducing the load on the grid, lowering prices for all grid users.
Investing in more grid power would require additional grid capacity which would raise the price for all grid users, and with cheap renewables that would be an increasing amount of power bills.
mrtesthah 1 hours ago [-]
There are still advantages to distributed power generation beyond overcoming governance failures—-microgrids lie somewhere in between and can increase resilience in the face of more severe and unpredictable climate events.
boxed 1 hours ago [-]
Do you have some citation to back those numbers up?
skew-aberration 1 hours ago [-]
Final numbers are not known yet. The Australian government's own 'Gencost' report put grid vs home based storage at 2x as efficient. In this subsidy program, the ratio of private to public money per a battery is about 1:2 (ie 70% subsidy). It was in my own case. Therefore, we would have had more battery storage if the government had just built grid storage.
lazide 1 hours ago [-]
Having your own battery + inverter setup dramatically reduces the ability for the grid utility to screw you over.
Everyone I know has had that happen at one time or another, and it’s extremely common to want home battery just for the degree of ‘power sovereignity’ it grants you.
boxed 1 hours ago [-]
It says the subsidy is 30%. You just said it's 70% and that it's 50% in the same sentence. Surely you can give one link to something that backs up anything you said.
skew-aberration 56 minutes ago [-]
Everyone in my office paid around 7.5-8.5k AUD for batteries around the 24k mark, so I know this to be the case. I could email you the invoice if you don't believe me xD
You can read up on the subsidy itself too - they basically set a cost per kwhr target based on the few bespoke batteries on the market, before it was flooded with cheaper Chinese options. Because it was based on capacity rather than a percentage discount, this caused the effective discount to be much higher than intended at the outset.
We don't know the final numbers yet - but government has reforecast for 7 billion for the program's duration, which includes a much smaller subsidy continuing until 2030. I expect it will be close to about 5B spent so far.
plantain 57 minutes ago [-]
The program is of course much more complex than can be fit in a HN comment, and it has evolved over time. The simplest answer is the government contributes $252/kWh. Approx. 4x the cost if the government funded a utility scale BESS - noting the installed cost of a home battery is 400-1200$/kWh depending on brand/options etc.
ericmay 1 hours ago [-]
> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?
Because government is failing to address these issues?
Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time.
But what the hell are you supposed to do when the power goes out and it takes a few days to get turned back on? Well, spend $10,000 - $20,000 and install your own backup power. Is it inefficient? Sure! Does that matter? Absolutely not.
jebarker 1 hours ago [-]
Yep. Here in Colorado I installed two powerwalls moderately subsidized by the electricity company. It’s not going to save me meaningful amounts of money even in the long term and I would much rather see energy issues solved at a societal level. But our electricity provider is just unable to reliably keep the lights on through winter and wildfire season, I.e. most of the year. Since installing the batteries a couple years ago our home has stayed warm and lit through two multi-day outages when neighbors have had to go stay in a hotel.
ceejayoz 36 minutes ago [-]
Isn't "subsidized by the electricity company" partially fulfilling "at a societal level"?
ch4s3 1 hours ago [-]
This isn't a federal government issue in the US. Local and state governments dropped the ball here. No one wants to pay what it costs to bury power lines in most locales, and we have a ton of byzantine regulations that make it slow and expensive to add generation capacity.
SoftTalker 1 hours ago [-]
What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it? How many days will it take? Have fun.
triceratops 1 hours ago [-]
> Who will you call to repair it?
Solar installer
> Who will pay for it?
Homeowner or insurance.
> How many days will it take?
Depends on the availability of installers.
I don't know why this is some gotcha. How many times have you had a storm rip your roof off and take down the entire neighborhood's grid? And if that happened would you still live in your house or find temporary accomodation?
danans 1 hours ago [-]
} What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it?
How is that different than any other weather related house damage? You'd call your insurance company and a licensed contractor.
Assuming the house is habitable, you'd still have grid power, or if not you'd move temporarily while repairs took place.
joering2 44 minutes ago [-]
> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?
That's simple! As per Felon Musk - to sell overhead to electricity providers. Allegedly they will gladly buy energy from you! So with big enough roof, you can just sit home relax and watch TV, while your solar panels make your living.
Worth a listen, both to learn about how ridiculous the US situation is, and just how good the "news" of abundant solar is.
Wacari 2 hours ago [-]
David Roberts does not have an EE degree and misunderstands anything related to power system operations. Great for positive vibes and LCOE parading tho.
cinntaile 1 hours ago [-]
You could try using arguments instead of an appeal to authority fallacy?
dataengineer56 1 hours ago [-]
What does "LCOE" stand for?
collinmcnulty 1 hours ago [-]
Levelized cost of electricity. All the costs that go into producing from a given source (capex and opex) divided by the total power generated.
danans 58 minutes ago [-]
> All the costs that go into producing from a given source (capex and opex) divided by the total power generated
... total energy generated.
stoneman24 1 hours ago [-]
Perhaps Low Cost Of Electricity?
dataengineer56 54 minutes ago [-]
I'm not asking for guesses thank you (especially if they turn out to be incorrect).
cinntaile 1 hours ago [-]
Your sibling comment is right. It stands for Levelized Cost Of Electricity.
red-iron-pine 1 hours ago [-]
elaborate
sanderjd 1 hours ago [-]
I'm way less skeptical of Roberts than the parent commenter appears to be, but IMO he is more of a policy person than an engineering person. I still find the podcast very useful, with this lens in mind. There are other podcasts that get deeper into the engineering substance, and it's totally ok for different things to have different emphases.
triceratops 1 hours ago [-]
> David Roberts does not have an EE degree
Elon Musk doesn't have an automotive or aeronautical engineering degree. People can understand work they don't have a degree in.
> misunderstands anything related to power system operations
Do you have some examples?
kleiba2 2 hours ago [-]
> The government has moved to make use of this surplus solar energy, including by offering free power in the early afternoon to homeowners in Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia, regardless of whether they have solar panels on their roof or not. The goal is to spur more consumers to run appliances or charge electric vehicles during this window.
Taking the term "1st world problems" to new heights!
cube00 2 hours ago [-]
You pay a higher daily supply charge and more per kWh outside this window so it's more like free (conditions apply)
The supply charge is 6% higher for the Solar Sharer plan, while the peak rate is 92% higher. Solar Sharer’s peak rate is almost double the flat rate. The off-peak rate is 17% lower than the flat rate.
Some of that will be electricity usage that otherwise wouldn't happen, but a lot of it will be shifting load from times where electricity is carbon-intensive to produce to times where there is a surplus that would otherwise go to waste
america_sux 1 hours ago [-]
The electricity is "free" because the energy generation is highest at noon (sun is at its zenith), and the population is at the work (low demand for residential electricity). So there is an oversupply of energy at that point. Just like there is an under supply of (solar) electricity at night time when people are using lights, watching tv and eating dinner but the sun isn't shining.
hylaride 13 minutes ago [-]
Solar panels don't necessarily get the most power at noon, as it can depend on what angle they're at if they're static (eg on a roof). Ideally you would want it facing the sun in the afternoon (especially if you don't have batteries and are trying to cut into your AC bill) or morning as you'll get more direct sunlight. It would also depend on how far on the horizon the sun is, which will depend on latitude. So peak generation will depend on how much exposure you'll get.
IMO, this plays into how solar is used. An individual household would have different goals than a grid-level solar/battery project depending on how they consume electricity. A grid is going to optimize (ignoring any desire for extra capacity for days without sun) for the peak that tends to happen between 4-6 for most western grids.
Wacari 2 hours ago [-]
cause they have massive operational issues induced by effectively must-run oversupply that has increased costs for both ratepayers (and sometimes shifted to the taxpayer to hide costs).
And then try to fix those problems with populist TOU rate magic (they won't be fixed), and bills continue to rise!! But hey, LMPs are down LOLOLOLOL
KaiserPro 1 hours ago [-]
you're gonna have to expain that to me.
so cheaper 'leccy prices are bad? or that this upfront cost to get batteries installed are bad? even though long term costs will be dropping?
I mean whats the cost of 30% of 500k batteries compared to creating a new peaker genny or five?
m101 23 minutes ago [-]
Is the only reason that a behind the meter subsidy is more efficient because it reduces the upfront for an equivalent kWh storage (with the consumer footing the difference)? I would have thought few, larger, batteries at local substations was more efficient otherwise.
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
Use EVs as energy storage. Millions of EVs form an energy reservoir. 20% of solar is curtailed now and q lot more in future, instead charge EVs. Pay the EV owners because they are creating a storage layer with their capital and power prices go negative hundreds of millions of times every year. No need of home batteries.
rswail 1 hours ago [-]
In Australia people do both. We don't have V2G yet, but EVs plugged in at home overnight with L1 charging can get charged by the home battery that was charged up during the day by the PV on the roof.
The solar PV and now storage rollouts in Australia have been one of the best government investments in public infrastructure in my lifetime here.
The more we electrify, the less reliant we are on the crude -> foreign refineries -> imported/distributed fuel risk.
Harvesting solar power is an awesome thing to do both at home and utility level.
PV and wind utility installations are being built with storage co-located, there are companies building synthetic condensers to maintain the grid stability and the job of frequency support is now done mostly by batteries, not gas.
We need to make electricity basically "too cheap to meter" and electrify our primary industries, mining and agriculture.
toasty228 2 hours ago [-]
When I looked into it it didn't make sense to use an EV as a solar battery, the chemistry isn't made for high cycle counts compared to regular home/solar batteries.
dyauspitr 60 minutes ago [-]
You looked wrong. These batteries can do 100,000 charge-discharge cycles while retaining 80% of their capacity.
ghostly_s 2 hours ago [-]
1. A couple orders of magnitude more people own homes than EVs; 2. EVs already are used as energy storage, but the thing about EVs is people want to use that energy to yknow, drive them.
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
That's why paying EV owners is th right incentive. All new cars will be EVs. In 20 years, all cars are EVs.
Wacari 1 hours ago [-]
Agreed. V2G is actually one of the best DER strats out there. The EVs are already purchased, the batteries and PCS are already configured for bidirectional flow in most brands. Coordination/visibility problem remains at Dx level, but actually worth the investment.
jmyeet 2 hours ago [-]
The issue here is that EVs tend to be charged when the sun is down. When sun is up you tend to be at work or driving. The surplus power is coming from solar.
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
EVs are parked 95% of the time. If it's parked, it can be charged. Work places also have electricity.
cube00 2 hours ago [-]
>Work places also have electricity.
Only households can access the free electricity window. If you're not on a free plan you can get reduced rates during the peak window but business accounts aren't allowed to access those either.
KaiserPro 2 hours ago [-]
but you're assuming that work provides parking. Its not a given, plus whats in it for the drivers?
plug my car in, it might be full, it might be empty, either way its racking up the charge cycles for no direct benefit for me.
Batteries on a house makes a better sell for customers, and also targets the problem of both over supply and over consumption at source.
Wacari 1 hours ago [-]
Depends. residential fleets v commercial fleets. different behaviours.
Even most residential batts that get plugged in when they get home typically have SOC >40% (depending on jurisidiction).
bad_haircut72 2 hours ago [-]
surely its possible to invent a "plug in road" system, then cars could charge (at least on highways etc) even when driving. I had this thought ages back when EVs first came out, to tackle the problem of long charge times when doing cross country road trips.
gerdesj 1 hours ago [-]
You could run a line overhead on pylons and put a pick up on a pole on the cars.
I imagine this would make road repair even more common, intensive, and disruptive than it already is?
surfmike 1 hours ago [-]
California is also adding a lot of battery storage… but why are electricity prices falling in Australia and not in CA? Are they outpacing us?
zipy124 1 hours ago [-]
"Energy Minister Chris Bowen said that Australia now has more home batteries than the United States, which has a population 12 times larger."
Yes.
Wacari1 57 minutes ago [-]
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testing22321 1 hours ago [-]
I put 7.3kw of panels on our roof for $0 of our money thanks to a $5k rebate and $8k interest free loan. It makes 7.2Mwh of power a calendar year, which would cost $1000 if we had to pay for it.
So for 8 years we pay the loan instead of for the power, then we get -25 years of $1000 a year in our pockets. The price of power is also pre approved to increase a minimum of 5% a year every year here, so the savings will be more than that.
Right now we get a 1:1 credit for anything we put into the grid. If and when that changes I’ll get a battery.
The kicker? We’re in Canada in a tight valley where it snows a ton. If it works here…
greenleafone7 1 hours ago [-]
This whole thing started because of some power pylons got destroyed and electricity was not restored for about a year right?
rswail 1 hours ago [-]
Not quite. It was already starting, but the Federal government at the time was very anti RE.
South Australia had a single interconnect to the rest of the Australian Energy Market that covers the states except for WA and Northern Territory.
There was a big storm that took out an interstate interconnect and the voltage spike caused all the other generators to disconnect to protect themselves.
Then Elon promised to build utility storage in 6 months or the state would get it for free.
That was the Hornsby battery which is mainly used for Frequency services (basically when supply/demand fluctuates, it keeps things stable).
That used to be done by gas plants, but the battery saved a large chunk of its cost in the first year by being able to switch on much faster.
Opposite story here in the US with very recent news about Trump breaking offshore wind farm agreements and using billions of US taxpayer dollars to pay repercussive fees to those operators. Our decline/regression in terms of clean energy and how easily the current administration's pulled it off and continues to is an ugly fucking mystery ...
Apreche 2 hours ago [-]
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Wacari 2 hours ago [-]
so in other words, heavily subsidize another technology (introducing cost shifts onto non-adopters, typically poorer people) to try and solve operational problems directly caused by oversubsidizing rooftop solar (another regressive cost-shift and extremely inefficient cost allocation relative to tx-connected solar) by bringing down wholesale prices (already a minority of the utility bill).
Fixed costs, the majority of the utility bill, continue to increase. But hey, LMPs (something residential tarriffs are not as exposed to) are lower!!! LMFAO
rswail 1 hours ago [-]
Wholesale power is ~37% of the customer bills.
The other costs are the "poles and wires" distribution network and the HV transmission network.
The government is also building out the transmission network to various renewable energy zones, which has the added benefit of making the transmission network more resilient.
With large coal plants, the network was only one interconnector failure from blacking out a state (as happened to South Australia).
Now there is a much better network of interconnected transmission across the entire east and south coast of Australia, covering something like 80% of the population.
The government just bailed out an aluminium smelter that was going to close because of the increased cost of power because it was relying on an old coal plant. Now that will be replaced with renewables.
So we get the benefit of the continued operation of the smelter, as well as the build out of replacement generation for the old coal plants at EOL that will be closed by 2030.
skew-aberration 1 hours ago [-]
I think you could use more citations.
The South Australia blackout was not caused by coal or renewables or lack of interconnectors. If there had been zero interconnects (the local grid was self-sufficient) it wouldn't have happened! The primary cause of the extended blackout was simply a lack of readiness/contingency planning/compliance particularly at several large windfarms. See wiki article.
Coal is generally cheaper for baseload power like an aluminum smelter, even though solar is cheaper during the day. Firming with wind/battery is not yet competitive but is getting very close and is at the point where building new coal power plants is not viable. Refer to gencost report. However, replacing such a large load with brand new renewable capacity is almost certainly more expensive than simply continuing to burn coal, particularly when factoring in the grid upgrades required to make such a transition.
Wacari1 1 hours ago [-]
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fitsumbelay 8 minutes ago [-]
in other words there's no winning because circular arguments about how things "really" work, plus insisting on and worst-possible-case-outcomes-as-inevitabilities.
Anyway that caused power prices to reliably go negative during the day as the solar boom led to too much energy being produced. So everyone started buying batteries (you can even get live feed in/out pricing as a consumer). In fact the government even today will pay you a $3000 subsidy to go install a battery. This is in a country where people can buy cheap batteries with no tariffs (free trade's amazing, seriously!). So everyone who could started doing it. For those in apartments etc. that couldn't easily install solar and batteries they won too since the entire power grid is now half the price.
Another consequence of all this, aside from the cheap power prices during a datacenter boom and Hormuz blockade is that fossil fuel usage is plummeting. Particularly gas https://ieefa.org/resources/slump-eastern-australia-gas-dema... . No need for a gas peak power plant when the grid is packed with batteries. Which is helpful since one of the main issues with the current blockade is a lack of gas globally.
Or, did they improve their efficiency.
Or, have they closed.
Time was, mercantilist countries would use foreign colonies for resource extraction; and sell the goods manufactured with these resources back to them.
It was great for everyone!
Or, not quite: the workers are being exploited just like they were during the colonial period. But at least now their rulers have power over our rulers that they didn't have before. So they get to be happy about that as they make novelty items out of toxic plastic for Temu.
From NEM3 in California, to charging a high fixed fee for being on the grid in other areas of the country, utilities have manipulated rules at every step to prevent a future that has cheaper electricity for rate payers. They come up with rather fantastic propaganda about how ratepayers with solar are burdens on the grid, or concentrated in high-income areas, to try to hide the reality of what's possible with highly distributed electricity generation.
And the media in the US have been very willing accomplices in perpetuating this as well.
I have not figured out why its so different between Australia and the US, but it does seem that Australia has a far greater free-market bent when it comes to these things than the US. It's why solar is 4-6x cheaper to install than in the US.
32*250*1400=11,200,000 watt hours, which makes more sense ;)
I am generally sympathetic to this POV but I think for solar and batteries actually I end up leaning the other way. Solar PV scales appropriately for home owners unlike wind or indeed any conventional generation and both solar and batteries change how their owners feel about this so that you end up with people who have "skin in the game" in a way they didn't have when it was a BESS install six miles away they saw on TV once and have never thought about since.
> For 2N government dollars, the program gets 3N home battery. Grid is 2x more efficient by their own accounting. Therefore, we could have gotten 4N grid storage. This is not comparable to the home solar programs - which I understand to 'enticed' more private investment. Simply buying votes and lying to the public. I feel for the renters who paid their taxes and never saw a cent.
I'd rather the 50% of Australians who don't own the home they live in had skin in the game! But I do love my 42kwhr battery
Utility scale batteries are now at ~$66m/GWh, or about ~$726m equivalent.
It does not make sense for everyone to be doing a bespoke installation inside their own home. It is ridiculously inefficient.
We are a society. We don't build our own roads, water, grid, schools, hospitals. Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? (A: failure of governance)
1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping.
2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries.
3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of demand. It also increases resilience of the grid.
4. You assume the political will was there for government and taxpayers to bear the full cost burden of development of the batteries.
I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.
> Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. A couple of electricians doing 20kWh (average install size) once per day, with an individual inverter, gateways, etc. is not at scale, by any means of the word.
There's also something to be said for distributed production and storage. We don't all live in ultra-compact cities. I agree apartment buildings don't need to be playing this game. But Australia (and the US) are extremely dispersed relative to Europe, for example. There should, in theory, be resilience in distributed production and storage that grid managers could call upon to help manage point failures.
And when they break, many people lose power.
Ukraine's seen some of the benefits of hyper-local generation over centralized production.
There are probably more than a thousand electricians in Australia.
Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
I'm sure this is the way you remember it, and maybe even the way it was explained in that article but if you bought a solar panel the sunlight to power it is free, so your electricity from the panel is free. You're not "buying" that power and so the commercial supply can't be "cheaper".
Now if I've paid $5000 for a product which makes me electricity for free and then later you offer me the same amount of electricity for just $4000 you could say yours is cheaper, but, er, I already bought that $5000 product, I'm already out $5000 and my electricity is free, yours is not actually cheaper now. What we're seeing here is just "Did you know solar panels have become cheaper over time?"
This does
“ A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted Photovoltaics proved so successful in Hawaii that the local utility, HECO, has instituted policies to block further expansion”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-solar-boom-so-s...
As of today Hawai’i rates are at $0.40+ per kWh
Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.
It's pure middle-class welfare.
And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.
https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-sourc...
There's no use pretending. Utility scale has a single political point of failure. Batteries in home do not.
Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term.
This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term!
The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck.
Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.
Investing in more grid power would require additional grid capacity which would raise the price for all grid users, and with cheap renewables that would be an increasing amount of power bills.
Everyone I know has had that happen at one time or another, and it’s extremely common to want home battery just for the degree of ‘power sovereignity’ it grants you.
You can read up on the subsidy itself too - they basically set a cost per kwhr target based on the few bespoke batteries on the market, before it was flooded with cheaper Chinese options. Because it was based on capacity rather than a percentage discount, this caused the effective discount to be much higher than intended at the outset.
We don't know the final numbers yet - but government has reforecast for 7 billion for the program's duration, which includes a much smaller subsidy continuing until 2030. I expect it will be close to about 5B spent so far.
Because government is failing to address these issues?
Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time.
But what the hell are you supposed to do when the power goes out and it takes a few days to get turned back on? Well, spend $10,000 - $20,000 and install your own backup power. Is it inefficient? Sure! Does that matter? Absolutely not.
Solar installer
> Who will pay for it?
Homeowner or insurance.
> How many days will it take?
Depends on the availability of installers.
I don't know why this is some gotcha. How many times have you had a storm rip your roof off and take down the entire neighborhood's grid? And if that happened would you still live in your house or find temporary accomodation?
How is that different than any other weather related house damage? You'd call your insurance company and a licensed contractor.
Assuming the house is habitable, you'd still have grid power, or if not you'd move temporarily while repairs took place.
That's simple! As per Felon Musk - to sell overhead to electricity providers. Allegedly they will gladly buy energy from you! So with big enough roof, you can just sit home relax and watch TV, while your solar panels make your living.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-rooftop-solar-power-as
Worth a listen, both to learn about how ridiculous the US situation is, and just how good the "news" of abundant solar is.
... total energy generated.
Elon Musk doesn't have an automotive or aeronautical engineering degree. People can understand work they don't have a degree in.
> misunderstands anything related to power system operations
Do you have some examples?
Taking the term "1st world problems" to new heights!
The supply charge is 6% higher for the Solar Sharer plan, while the peak rate is 92% higher. Solar Sharer’s peak rate is almost double the flat rate. The off-peak rate is 17% lower than the flat rate.
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/solar-sharer-plans-compa...
IMO, this plays into how solar is used. An individual household would have different goals than a grid-level solar/battery project depending on how they consume electricity. A grid is going to optimize (ignoring any desire for extra capacity for days without sun) for the peak that tends to happen between 4-6 for most western grids.
And then try to fix those problems with populist TOU rate magic (they won't be fixed), and bills continue to rise!! But hey, LMPs are down LOLOLOLOL
so cheaper 'leccy prices are bad? or that this upfront cost to get batteries installed are bad? even though long term costs will be dropping?
I mean whats the cost of 30% of 500k batteries compared to creating a new peaker genny or five?
The solar PV and now storage rollouts in Australia have been one of the best government investments in public infrastructure in my lifetime here.
The more we electrify, the less reliant we are on the crude -> foreign refineries -> imported/distributed fuel risk.
Harvesting solar power is an awesome thing to do both at home and utility level.
PV and wind utility installations are being built with storage co-located, there are companies building synthetic condensers to maintain the grid stability and the job of frequency support is now done mostly by batteries, not gas.
We need to make electricity basically "too cheap to meter" and electrify our primary industries, mining and agriculture.
Only households can access the free electricity window. If you're not on a free plan you can get reduced rates during the peak window but business accounts aren't allowed to access those either.
plug my car in, it might be full, it might be empty, either way its racking up the charge cycles for no direct benefit for me.
Batteries on a house makes a better sell for customers, and also targets the problem of both over supply and over consumption at source.
Even most residential batts that get plugged in when they get home typically have SOC >40% (depending on jurisidiction).
A smaller version of these things: https://sandtoft.org/wp/
Some people drive as if they're in dodgem cars as it is.
It already exists and works so, not that crazy
Yes.
So for 8 years we pay the loan instead of for the power, then we get -25 years of $1000 a year in our pockets. The price of power is also pre approved to increase a minimum of 5% a year every year here, so the savings will be more than that.
Right now we get a 1:1 credit for anything we put into the grid. If and when that changes I’ll get a battery.
The kicker? We’re in Canada in a tight valley where it snows a ton. If it works here…
South Australia had a single interconnect to the rest of the Australian Energy Market that covers the states except for WA and Northern Territory.
There was a big storm that took out an interstate interconnect and the voltage spike caused all the other generators to disconnect to protect themselves.
Then Elon promised to build utility storage in 6 months or the state would get it for free.
That was the Hornsby battery which is mainly used for Frequency services (basically when supply/demand fluctuates, it keeps things stable).
That used to be done by gas plants, but the battery saved a large chunk of its cost in the first year by being able to switch on much faster.
Hornsdale - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
Fixed costs, the majority of the utility bill, continue to increase. But hey, LMPs (something residential tarriffs are not as exposed to) are lower!!! LMFAO
The other costs are the "poles and wires" distribution network and the HV transmission network.
The government is also building out the transmission network to various renewable energy zones, which has the added benefit of making the transmission network more resilient.
With large coal plants, the network was only one interconnector failure from blacking out a state (as happened to South Australia).
Now there is a much better network of interconnected transmission across the entire east and south coast of Australia, covering something like 80% of the population.
The government just bailed out an aluminium smelter that was going to close because of the increased cost of power because it was relying on an old coal plant. Now that will be replaced with renewables.
So we get the benefit of the continued operation of the smelter, as well as the build out of replacement generation for the old coal plants at EOL that will be closed by 2030.
The South Australia blackout was not caused by coal or renewables or lack of interconnectors. If there had been zero interconnects (the local grid was self-sufficient) it wouldn't have happened! The primary cause of the extended blackout was simply a lack of readiness/contingency planning/compliance particularly at several large windfarms. See wiki article.
Coal is generally cheaper for baseload power like an aluminum smelter, even though solar is cheaper during the day. Firming with wind/battery is not yet competitive but is getting very close and is at the point where building new coal power plants is not viable. Refer to gencost report. However, replacing such a large load with brand new renewable capacity is almost certainly more expensive than simply continuing to burn coal, particularly when factoring in the grid upgrades required to make such a transition.
right ...