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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

#41

Post by nickpp »

plantain wrote: post #18

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, scho…

Cost is never the only factor though. Being energy independent and self-sufficient feels awesome. Also whole house backup rocks, together with a smart app showing and optimizing your energy usage.

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

#42

Post by collinmcnulty »

dataengineer56 wrote: post #31
Wacari wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does "LCOE" stand for?

Levelized cost of electricity. All the costs that go into producing from a given source (capex and opex) divided by the total power generated.

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

#43

Post by zipy124 »

surfmike wrote: post #28

California is also adding a lot of battery storage… but why are electricity prices falling in Australia and not in CA? Are they outpacing us?

"Energy Minister Chris Bowen said that Australia now has more home batteries than the United States, which has a population 12 times larger."

Yes.

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

#44

Post by rswail »

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.

You could combine the best of dodgem cars with drone nets by encasing all the highways in electrified wiring.

Some people drive as if they're in dodgem cars as it is.

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

#45

Post by pnw »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #17

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 a…

If you read the article, most of the decline in gas consumption in Australia is from changes in industrial usage. Residential demand is only down by 6% and part of that is likely due to the effective ban on gas in new residential construction which started in 2023 in Victoria. Prior to 2023 residential gas usage was increasing.

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

#46

Post by sanderjd »

plantain wrote: post #18

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, scho…

Honestly this seems like a pretty good efficiency multiplier for a distributed vs. centralized solution at that scale!

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

#47

Post by ch4s3 »

ericmay wrote: post #34
plantain wrote: post #18

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, scho…

> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? Because government is failing to address these issues? Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time. But what t…

This isn't a federal government issue in the US. Local and state governments dropped the ball here. No one wants to pay what it costs to bury power lines in most locales, and we have a ton of byzantine regulations that make it slow and expensive to add generation capacity.

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

#48

Post by america_sux »

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!

The electricity is "free" because the energy generation is highest at noon (sun is at its zenith), and the population is at the work (low demand for residential electricity). So there is an oversupply of energy at that point. Just like there is an under supply of (solar) electricity at night time when people are using lights, watching tv and eating dinner but the sun isn't shining.

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

#49

Post by collinmcnulty »

I've long thought that any country should buy solar panels from any other country that's crazy enough to sell them to you at a subsidized price. It's not like buying oil; once you have the panels, that energy independence belongs to you.

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

#50

Post by skew-aberration »

plantain wrote: post #18

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, scho…

I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies I've ever seen in this country. The numbers are much worse than you make out. The program has spent more than 2.5bn (the projected figure) and we don't know yet how much. The subsidy was closer to 70% for a typical large battery install. The government's own gen cost report would have put grid storage 1.5x ahead on ROI.

Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.

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