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Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

lenergy.com.au

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Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#31

Post by AtlasBarfed »

kaelwd wrote: post #25
bruce511 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the higher elec prices for the benefit of those of us not in Aus? Is that because of the smart meter requirement?

Before: 25c/kwh all day After: 30c/kwh most of the day, 0c from 11-2 It's still worth it if you have a lot of load you can shift to the middle of the day (like a pool heater or battery), but for most 9-5 workers you just end up paying more at the times you're actually home. Smart meters are free, most people already have one.

Get a battery

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#32

Post by grey-area »

oliyoung wrote: post #20
testing22321 wrote: post #18

It’s very cool to see what happens where there are simply so many residential solar installs. Power price goes negative during peak sunshine hours so they just give it away. Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.

As an Australian, the lack of anxiety and guilt you get when you're using 10-12 hours of air conditioning in the middle of summer and not paying for a cent of it because your solar panels are covering is worth more than anything

You should still feel some guilt for the heat pollution your air conditioning causes for those outside your house, esp. in an urban area.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#33

Post by simondotau »

3stacks wrote: post #17
mchusma wrote: post #14

Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.

They've already burned at least $15bn on that disastrous Snowy Hydro "battery" project... Could've just rolled out consumer batteries on a large scale instead.

At current battery project prices, matching Snowy 2.0’s roughly 350 GWh of energy storage capacity with Tesla Megapacks would cost around AUD $218 billion [0] and require Tesla’s entire global Megapack production capacity redirected to a single client for five years.

$15 billion is far more than Snowy 2.0 should have cost. But it remains substantially cheaper than any lithium-ion battery build for bulk storage. Storage on this scale is essential in a post-coal electricity grid, and batteries are not (yet) plausible substitutes for bulk storage.

[0] This assumes linear scaling. In reality, placing an order like this would grossly distort supply and demand on many levels. Thus the cost would ultimately be superlinear.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#34

Post by Animats »

nharada wrote: post #6
protocolture wrote: post #4

The fine print is interesting, theres a cap, fair use provisions and it requires a smart meter. Smart meters are still a bit contentious. Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.

A 24 kWh cap per day seems very reasonable. Drawing 8 kW is quite a lot.

It's not enough to charge a car fully.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#35

Post by robin_reala »

asdefghyk wrote: post #26
3stacks wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already burned at least $15bn on that disastrous Snowy Hydro "battery" project... Could've just rolled out consumer batteries on a large scale instead.

From Australlian ABC news... The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from \(\$12\) billion to as high as \(\$42\) billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission). Originally announced in 2017 with a $2 billion price tag, the project has faced massive scale and logistical blowouts. The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro pro…

Dinorwig[1] was opened in 1984, and is looking at a £1B refurbishment shortly for “at least another 25 years” lifespan.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

[2] https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/analysis/re-planting-the-...

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#36

Post by stephen_g »

3stacks wrote: post #17
mchusma wrote: post #14

Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.

They've already burned at least $15bn on that disastrous Snowy Hydro "battery" project... Could've just rolled out consumer batteries on a large scale instead.

That was exactly the point of the project though - it was designed by the conservative side of politics in our country to try and crowd out investment in batteries and other renewables while taking enough time to build to keep coal plants operating longer in the meantime.

It didn't work at all for that though - we had a lot of private investment in large-scale batteries anyway, because the cost came down quickly just as most people (apart from the conservatives) expected. Then the other side of Government got in and put a subsidy scheme to get hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, which has been multiple times better bang-for-buck than the Snowy 2.0 scheme, as well as taking far shorter a time. At the same time coal plants are shutting down as expected because they are increasingly unreliable given their old ages.

Snowy 2.0 be an expensive stranded asset basically, it will work and be somewhat useful but extremely uneconomical so basically relying on the cost being written off - if it had to recoup any investment then it couldn't run because it'd never be able to sell the power for high enough.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#37

Post by kaelwd »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #31
kaelwd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before: 25c/kwh all day After: 30c/kwh most of the day, 0c from 11-2 It's still worth it if you have a lot of load you can shift to the middle of the day (like a pool heater or battery), but for most 9-5 workers you just end up paying more at the times you're actually home. Smart meters are free, most people already have one.

Get a battery

45% of us either rent or live in apartments.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#38

Post by josephcooney »

mchusma wrote: post #14

Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.

One of my co-workers (I'm Australian) has 500 kilowatt-hours of storage at home...which is wild. Much more common is the 10-20 kilowatt-hours of domestic storage for a house.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#39

Post by lnsru »

grey-area wrote: post #32
oliyoung wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Australian, the lack of anxiety and guilt you get when you're using 10-12 hours of air conditioning in the middle of summer and not paying for a cent of it because your solar panels are covering is worth more than anything

You should still feel some guilt for the heat pollution your air conditioning causes for those outside your house, esp. in an urban area.

Can you please elaborate more on pollution from air conditioning equipment and heat pumps. I was thinking they are closed systems.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#40

Post by jondwillis »

josephcooney wrote: post #38
mchusma wrote: post #14

Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.

One of my co-workers (I'm Australian) has 500 kilowatt-hours of storage at home...which is wild. Much more common is the 10-20 kilowatt-hours of domestic storage for a house.

What is their fire suppression setup like??? Granted I guess they could be doing pumped hydro storage lol
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