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In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

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Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

#11

Post by thelastgallon »

ghostly_s wrote: post #5
thelastgallon wrote: post #2

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.

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.

That's why paying EV owners is th right incentive. All new cars will be EVs. In 20 years, all cars are EVs.

Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

#13

Post by bad_haircut72 »

jmyeet wrote: post #7
thelastgallon wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

#14

Post by Wacari »

kleiba2 wrote: post #4

> 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!

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

Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

#15

Post by squigz »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #13
jmyeet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I imagine this would make road repair even more common, intensive, and disruptive than it already is?

Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

#16

Post by Wacari »

black_puppydog wrote: post #3

As ever, Volts did a really good episode on this: 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.

David Roberts does not have an EE degree and misunderstands anything related to power system operations. Great for positive vibes and LCOE parading tho.

Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

#17

Post by AnotherGoodName »

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.

Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

#18

Post by plantain »

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)

Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

#19

Post by toasty228 »

thelastgallon wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

#20

Post by KaiserPro »

thelastgallon wrote: post #8
jmyeet wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

EVs are parked 95% of the time. If it's parked, it can be charged. Work places also have electricity.

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.

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