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Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

lenergy.com.au

51–60 of 427 posts

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

#51

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.

This is heat that would have escaped the house anyway

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

#52
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.

That's ~8 used EV batteries. Each cost less than 10k, maybe 6-8k AUD.

If you know your way around high voltage DC, got a tractor and appropriate emulator - not exactly difficult or super expensive to pull off.

Granted it's pretty uncommon setup as grid batteries themselves are pretty cheap too and used EV battery is simply too large for home user, too much hassle, liability, etc to save like $2-3k.

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

#53
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sorry autocorrect changed heat pollution to ‘what pollution’, I’ve fixed that now. There is some impact on others, particularly those without ac.

If you’re using rooftop solar then presumably the net heat generated by your aircon is the same as the amount your roof is no longer absorbing. Otherwise you just described a perpetual motion machine?

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

#54
I miss having Griddy in Texas. Direct access to the wholesale market is probably not good for the lower end of the consumer segment, but for people with some functional marbles it can make a big difference on the demand side of the grid.

I feel like they had to kill griddy before all the powerwall solutions started showing up. We simply cannot empower the peasants with both things at once. The ability to store energy makes access to wholesale prices substantially more effective.

I'll never forget the days where we would get push notifications about negative prices. I'd throw the dryer and oven on every time to try and unwind the meter a bit.

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

#56
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.

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. Stora…

Yeah the battery storage story has to acknowledge the fact that global production capacity simply isn't actually high enough to deliver that many batteries so we need alternative solutions to the problem as well.

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

#58

Dynamic pricing and deployment of digital smart meters should by mandatory in all electric grids dominated by renewables. Large electric consumers are already buying electricity at dynamic prices, small consumers should have the same incentives to shift the demand to day hours.

I'm so on board for this. It would be kind of fun to wire all my appliances in to home assistant to have the dishwasher / dryer / etc all run during the free hours. I imagine eventually we might end up with some thermal storage where during peak renewable production you heat/freeze a large tank of water and then utilize it to heat/cool your house for the rest of the day. A large tank of water is much cheaper than bat…

Or plug them into a UPS that charges when it's free but you can run them whenever.

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

#60

Dynamic pricing and deployment of digital smart meters should by mandatory in all electric grids dominated by renewables. Large electric consumers are already buying electricity at dynamic prices, small consumers should have the same incentives to shift the demand to day hours.

I'm so on board for this. It would be kind of fun to wire all my appliances in to home assistant to have the dishwasher / dryer / etc all run during the free hours. I imagine eventually we might end up with some thermal storage where during peak renewable production you heat/freeze a large tank of water and then utilize it to heat/cool your house for the rest of the day. A large tank of water is much cheaper than bat…

Storing energy in hot water is common is sunny regions, for example Turkey.

Some large cold storage facilities in Germany are trying to optimize electric demand to use cheap peak day electricity. But they have to observe limitations in range of temperatures and capacity of cooling devices.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/cold-storage-facilities...

" Compared to conventional cold storage systems, renewable energy-driven cold storage demonstrates a 10–35 % reduction in energy losses"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...

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