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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

#131

Post by matt2000 »

plantain wrote: post #115
matt2000 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair points, but you are glossing over important issues: 1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping. 2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries. 3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of dem…

1. The subsidy was fixed per kWh at a level that has always been vastly above utility scale BESS. 2. Power usage is flatlining. There is no reason to need transmission upgrades for BESS. Successful projects are colocated at retiring generators, or at existing major grid terminus. 3. Are those benefits worth 4x the price? Noting again, that's 4x the subsidy , not even the actual installed cost which is closer to 8-12x…

re: Power usage is flatlining...

Where are you getting that? The 2026 AEMO plan says:

"Electricity consumption is expected to almost double over the coming decades, driven by population and economic growth, electrification across homes, businesses and industry and the emergence of new large loads such as data centres."

https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp...

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

#132

Post by thelastgallon »

modo_mario wrote: post #106
collinmcnulty wrote: post #49

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.

In the end you have to replace those panels and nobody in your country now produces them or has the incentive to start producing them unless they not only drop the subsidies but sell well over market value.

You have 25 - 50 years. Put your STE people to work. CSIRO is probably a decent org, give them a Manhattan project?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO

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

#133

Post by organsnyder »

KaiserPro wrote: post #20
thelastgallon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Workplaces (and other locations) could offer free/reduced-cost charging, with the caveat that V2L is required. They could guarantee that the vehicle will be at a certain charge level at a designated time, and that the vehicle will never go below a threshold (in case an unanticipated trip is required).

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

#134

Post by jebarker »

ceejayoz wrote: post #102
jebarker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Isn't "subsidized by the electricity company" partially fulfilling "at a societal level"?

It is, yeah. The condition of the subsidy is that up to 60 times a year the electricity company can pull the power from our batteries to cover higher demand. When I said "at a societal level" I was more imagining solar farms and grid level storage though.

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

#135

Post by organsnyder »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #85
toasty228 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On today's episode of "HNer's totally realistic and not deluded idea"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trolleybus_systems_in_... It already exists and works so, not that crazy

It's much more difficult when the ownership of the vehicles isn't centralized.

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

#136

Post by munksbeer »

skew-aberration wrote: post #94
tialaramex wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included). I am generally sympathetic to this POV but I think for solar and batteries actually I end up leaning the other way. Solar PV scales appropriately for home owners unlike wind or indeed any conventional generation and both solar and batteries change how their owners fe…

As I said in another comment, > For 2N government dollars, the program gets 3N home battery. Grid is 2x more efficient by their own accounting. Therefore, we could have gotten 4N grid storage. This is not comparable to the home solar programs - which I understand to 'enticed' more private investment. Simply buying votes and lying to the public. I feel for the renters who paid their taxes and never saw a cent. I'd rat…

I thought the point of this article was they are benefiting from reduced grid costs?

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

#137

Post by Danox »

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.

The boss may get a free charge, but no one else will…

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

#138

Post by epistasis »

ceejayoz wrote: post #128
jandrese wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is even more amazing is how many of Australia's politicians have been in the pocket of coal barons and yet they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption. Compare that to places like California where they've been fighting tooth and nail against green power.

> they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption They put up plenty. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2024/o... As with climate change, there comes a point where the propaganda just stops working becuase it's impossible to contest.

What's funny is that Australian-born Rupert Murdoch has been far more effective in the US than in Australia on this front.

The propaganda is still going really strong in the US. Talk to the population and 1/3 to 1/2 will happily tell you that EVs have fully failed and are being abandoned and will never gain traction in the future. And solar? Lol. Even the people who are saving money with it tend to refuse to talk about it due to the cognitive dissonance.

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

#139

Post by thelastgallon »

epistasis wrote: post #129
thelastgallon wrote: post #127

Australia is now ready for vertical solar, add a few more hours of production in the morning and evening. Panels are dirt cheap anyway, use them as fences, put them on high rise buildings. Change the building to require structural elements to hold the panels and build new homes with vertical + rooftop. The electric code should be updated to allow v2g. With BESS (home, grid) and EVs (always plugged in, parked 95% of t…

Given the durability of panels, it'd be fascinating to see roof redesigns, and some changes in panel packaging, that standard large rectangles become the basic components of a 30 year roof. Or as siding. I've seen them used vertically on the Southern walls of commercial buildings in Alaska, and they looked great.

Absolutely. Energy has to be baked into every structural element. Either producing energy, or storing energy, or providing insulation, or acting as a transfer medium (heat pump).

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

#140

Post by matt_eeee »

skew-aberration wrote: post #40

The subsidy was closer to 70%, and in my case I was paid the equivalent of about 10 years of free electricity for a battery with a 10-year warranty. In total somewhere around 5-7 billion AUD was paid out (not yet public) - the wholesale market for comparison is around $16B AUD annually. Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy…

I suspect in practice putting the money into grid scale storage would have taken a lot longer and been more of a PITA.

For a grid scale battery you have to organise financing, deal with local government and NIMBYs putting obstacles in the way, comply with all the red tape etc. On the other hand anyone that owns a home can finance their own mini solar power plant and battery and skip all that. It's kind of genius even if it's not in theory the most efficient way to do it.

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