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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

#51

Post by rswail »

greenleafone7 wrote: post #32

This whole thing started because of some power pylons got destroyed and electricity was not restored for about a year right?

Not quite. It was already starting, but the Federal government at the time was very anti RE.

South Australia had a single interconnect to the rest of the Australian Energy Market that covers the states except for WA and Northern Territory.

There was a big storm that took out an interstate interconnect and the voltage spike caused all the other generators to disconnect to protect themselves.

Then Elon promised to build utility storage in 6 months or the state would get it for free.

That was the Hornsby battery which is mainly used for Frequency services (basically when supply/demand fluctuates, it keeps things stable).

That used to be done by gas plants, but the battery saved a large chunk of its cost in the first year by being able to switch on much faster.

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

#52

Post by sanderjd »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #26
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.

elaborate

I'm way less skeptical of Roberts than the parent commenter appears to be, but IMO he is more of a policy person than an engineering person. I still find the podcast very useful, with this lens in mind. There are other podcasts that get deeper into the engineering substance, and it's totally ok for different things to have different emphases.

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

#53

Post by dcan »

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…

Is this not free market capitalism?

Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term.

This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term!

The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck.

Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.

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

#54

Post by mrtesthah »

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…

There are still advantages to distributed power generation beyond overcoming governance failures—-microgrids lie somewhere in between and can increase resilience in the face of more severe and unpredictable climate events.

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

#55

Post by skew-aberration »

boxed wrote: post #37
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…

Do you have some citation to back those numbers up?

Final numbers are not known yet. The Australian government's own 'Gencost' report put grid vs home based storage at 2x as efficient. In this subsidy program, the ratio of private to public money per a battery is about 1:2 (ie 70% subsidy). It was in my own case. Therefore, we would have had more battery storage if the government had just built grid storage.

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

#56

Post by jebarker »

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…

Yep. Here in Colorado I installed two powerwalls moderately subsidized by the electricity company. It’s not going to save me meaningful amounts of money even in the long term and I would much rather see energy issues solved at a societal level. But our electricity provider is just unable to reliably keep the lights on through winter and wildfire season, I.e. most of the year. Since installing the batteries a couple years ago our home has stayed warm and lit through two multi-day outages when neighbors have had to go stay in a hotel.

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

#57

Post by testing22321 »

pnw wrote: post #45
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.

Australia never had much residential gas usage. Mr he very vast majority of residential homes don’t even have gas. No need for a furnace.

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

#58

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it? How many days will it take? Have fun.

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

#59

Post by jgilias »

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…

My neighbour has a battery installation because where I live they subsidise both - the panels and the battery. In the event of a power outage he can keep running his house for ~3 days if being somewhat frugal with consumption.

And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.

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

#60

Post by Symbiote »

pnw wrote: post #45
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.

It would be useful to know if the industrial use is factories replacing their use with other sources (e.g. I have read that food manufacture is switching to electricity in Denmark, although it can be held up waiting for a grid connection if there's a data centre ahead of it).

Or, did they improve their efficiency.

Or, have they closed.

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