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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

#391

Post by jiggawatts »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #240
inkyoto wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, technically it can't. An individual writing to an MP is rarely sufficient by itself. Australia’s embedded network landscape is a peculiarly intricate tangle of nuance, complexity and regulatory optimism. Note that the embedded networks are distinctly unique and different from retail utility providers. Please bear with my lengthy explanation for a few rather long moments. Embedded networks are private distribution…

Ok, this post has to be a Top 10 HN of all time for me. Massively informative. Thank you. +9000 Plus, extra Internet points for using this Unicode char that I didn't know about: ↝

I knew the situation was bad, but I didn't know it was this bad. What an illuminating comment indeed!

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

#392

Post by lenkite »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #291
kiproping wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is China's government corrupt? specifically when it comes to solar? Are they not accused of the opposite, overdoing solar? Help me understand your critique.

The have hardly any solar per capita compared to Australia. They are occasionally held up as an example by misguided westerners as if what they’ve achieved is an example of good policy on solar when it’s utterly dwarfed on a per capita basis by countries like Australia.

For every single person alive in Australia, there >52 alive in China. So comparing solar per capita to Australia is a useless metric.

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

#393

Post by thelastgallon »

stubish wrote: post #211
thelastgallon wrote: post #47

Ideally, they should pay the EV owners because electricity price goes negative. The EV owners are spending their own money to create a scalable on-demand storage infrastructure. This saves CapEx/OpEx of BESS and also eliminates peaker natural gas plants. EV owners should be paid once for allowing storage, and paid again for using the power to supply back to the grid (V2G).

The EVs with V2G are just big batteries, nothing special. You certainly can charge your battery on the free power and sell it back during peak periods, and people are doing just that today. Just mostly using their 50 kWh household batteries rather than their EVs though, because V2G is still mostly science fiction unless you buy one of the few models of car that actually support it and have a compatible charger and in…

For V2G, its a simple feature that enables a car to participate and make money in the energy ecosystem. Govts have to standardize it for cars, just like mandating usb-c.

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

#394

Post by simondotau »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #386
simondotau wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reply — and especially the attached article — misunderstand the reality of operating a grid at scale. Responding to you: Solar and wind are just as relevant to pumped hydro, which is really just a different kind of battery. The real question is how much short-duration storage is needed from chemical batteries and how much long-duration storage is needed from pumped hydro. Chemical batteries are essential for gri…

We want to eliminate fossil fuels and lower costs as quickly as possible. Vague claims that some alternative like nuclear or Snowy 2.0 will somehow make that last 1% of fossil easier to eliminate are both dubious and irrelevant if their construction uses money that could have easily eliminated 1% of fossil fuel every year for decades. And once we get close to that last few percent of fossil gas in the electric system…

[flagged]

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

#395

Post by manarth »

chicken-stew wrote: post #137
thedays wrote: post #131

This article is misleading as it implies that Australian energy retailers must provide every household with 3 hours of free electricity. This is not the case. From 1 July 2026, Australian energy retailers with more than 1,000 customers must offer at least one energy plan which includes 3 hours of free electricity, capped at 24kWh per day, to residential customers in 3 states - NSW, SE Queensland and South Australia.…

Wait, capped at 24 kWh a day? Our household consumed 8 kWh per day over the past week (gas cooking, no airco). So with a home battery that sinks 10 kWh during those 3 hours you have minimal energy costs?

Given that energy prices are negative during this period (because of surplus solar which needs to be drained into a load to keep the grid balanced) – this is effectively consumers providing "free" balancing-services to the grid.

With sufficient take-up and consumers funding the cost of battery storage, this could replace an amount of commercial balancing services and reduce the overall cost of grid-management.

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

#396

Post by pqtyw »

mothballed wrote: post #253
pqtyw wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor. Or people have a tendence to perceive a system where everyone is required to pay their "fair share" as more just and are more willing to (often begrudgingly) participate in it. If the system was fully voluntary the average contribution would be significantly lower that it is now. A…

I can tell you you're absolutely wrong about the average person. I live in a place with no public infrastructure (I'm talking about, not even public roads, and not some rich HOA, a ~poor unorganized community without any infrastructure association) which has allowed me to view how average people react when there is no taxation based infrastructure. When it breaks, the neighbors help. I help maintain the roads for my…

> It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbour also pays, otherwise they can get fucked

You are seeing all of this in a very, very black and white way. It's about how much the average person is willing (or forced to) to contribute in either system especially when you try to scale it up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Libertarianism is an utopian ideology not particularly different to Communism in the sense that both are incompatible with human nature.

I mean there is simply no empirical evidence this approach scales beyond small high trust (usually homogeneous) communities. Tragedy of the commons is a thing.

> your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor

That's extremely reductive... and you are making this way too personal than it should be ; )

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

#397

Post by thatsit »

Australia is in fact primed to go all-in on all-electric. They have an hyperabundance of solar and wind (+land where it can be installed) and have the purchasing power to buy cheap panels and electric cars from China. Even the mining industry is going electric as it is plainly cheaper to operate mining trucks on solar PV. They couldn’t care less about that strait of hormuz disaster. Energy to cheap to meter at last!

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

#398

Post by jeffybefffy519 »

Reason077 wrote: post #327
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite simply put this is what they ask you to do. To the point that the Australian government will heavily subsidise (30%) home battery installation. Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course). It’s not hard to achieve this for any competent government. Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is…

> ”Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course).” China is adding around 10X Australia’s total installed solar power generation every single year. Half of the entire world’s deployed solar is in China. And while Australia’s solar growth is impressive, it’s worth remembering that it’s only possible because of China. It was Chinese government policy that pushed to develop the h…

And our solar market regulator is corrupt AF, its just a giant money spinner for battery and solar makers/installer.

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

#399

Post by thatsit »

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.

Well, i can only be cheaper to shift demand to high production hours then building a battery. Especially as you don’t only need an inverter for the battery but also the charger or MPPT to suck up the peak solar power which is only lasts for about 3 hours. So you can save building a lot of excess batteries

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

#400

Post by dannyw »

reyoz wrote: post #221

Many retailers have been offering this for ~6 months already. Very popular with home battery owners (which have taken off over the last 9 months thanks to subsidies), so much so that the effect of people turning on loads is suspected as the reason for an increasing dip in grid frequency at 11 am [1]. [1] https://wattclarity.com.au/articles/2026/06/system-frequency...

24 kWh free for the three hours seems like a reasonable amount anyway.
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