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Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

lenergy.com.au

91–100 of 427 posts

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

#92
post #88
post #2

Edited to add: Clarification required in the title that the free energy is only between 11am and 2pm Very interested to see how this turns out. Ultimately we want the transition to benefit both consumers and producers / distributors (the industry). The problem from the rapid uptake of solar in Australia has been an over-supply during this 10/11am to 2/3pm period. If that over-supply is suitably encouraged to be soake…

Surprised they’re putting everyone on same timeslot. Would have expected some staggering to be helpful

From elsewhere:

   this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
so NSW and South Australia will be staggered in real time as they are in different time zones.

As for everybody in the same time zone .. they are all seeing the same sun angle at noon (more or less) and all sharing the same over supply of power from all the grid connected solar power rooftops and farms. It's free surplus power during that time frame.

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

#93
post #90
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.

> but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical They are super economical in Australia and the government even offers discounts and interest free loan of 15k to buy them.

They are super economical… which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?

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

#94

With 3 hours of free power, a 15kW inverter and a 42kWh battery, I could almost do away with my solar panels and just survive of free grid power. I do have a 15kW solar panel set up, but I get very little from selling anything back to the grid.

I have a 12 kW inverter (single phase) and 48 kWh battery. In Australia, 9 months of the year my 16 kW of solar fills the battery and covers all needs including cooking, heating and charging the EV.

In winter, I’ve been using Ovo’s 3 hours free for about a year now and that ensures the battery is filled up daily. My electricity bill returns a credit every month since I got the battery a year ago.

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

#95
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world? Yes, grid scale deployments are cheaper, but I'm generally guessing a lot of the grid scale solar deployments do not price in the grid infrastructure adaptation costs, and I'm not even talking about grid storage. Consumer rooftop solar is fundamentally democratic: it reduces reliance on centralized institutions for power delivery, Make society a…

> Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world? Here in Sweden nearly all of the electricity bill you pay is concentrated on the winter months when there is literally zero sunshine. Even then solar is popular here. I calculated that installing solar would take around 10 years or more to pay for itself, but I have very little hope to stay in the same house all that time so for me it seemed l…

10 year ROI is what I got quoted on a solar setup. I live in Queensland. It’s very sunny here.

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

#96
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical They are super economical in Australia and the government even offers discounts and interest free loan of 15k to buy them.

They are super economical… which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?

Is it so out of the ordinary that a government tries to help people save money or what's the question? Sounds like you've only had the American experience in life unfortunately.

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

#97
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical They are super economical in Australia and the government even offers discounts and interest free loan of 15k to buy them.

They are super economical… which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?

The government loan changes the calculus. Allows for short term thinking and a long term benefit.

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

#98
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.

Yeah this is why a lot of people were thinking that the Australian opposition asking for spending $40-50 billions for nuclear that would come online in 20-30 years and to keep using coal and gas till then were being stupid.

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

#99
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.

Yeah this is why a lot of people were thinking that the Australian opposition asking for spending $40-50 billions for nuclear that would come online in 20-30 years and to keep using coal and gas till then were being stupid.

It's not stupid if they are paid off by the people selling the coal and gas.

It's just a treasonous level of corruption.

Voters opting to be extorted like this would have been stupid.

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

#100
post #88
post #2

Edited to add: Clarification required in the title that the free energy is only between 11am and 2pm Very interested to see how this turns out. Ultimately we want the transition to benefit both consumers and producers / distributors (the industry). The problem from the rapid uptake of solar in Australia has been an over-supply during this 10/11am to 2/3pm period. If that over-supply is suitably encouraged to be soake…

Surprised they’re putting everyone on same timeslot. Would have expected some staggering to be helpful

There's too much available power then (curtailment/negative prices are fairly common now on sunny days), and not enough during the evenings, so it's an incentive for those who don't have/can't get batteries (e.g. renters) to shift their habits. It also can be spun as a cost-of-living action.
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