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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

#161

Post by epistasis »

actionfromafar wrote: post #158
epistasis wrote: post #110

This is exactly what utility propaganda and PUC manipulation in the US has successfully stopped from happening. From NEM3 in California, to charging a high fixed fee for being on the grid in other areas of the country, utilities have manipulated rules at every step to prevent a future that has cheaper electricity for rate payers. They come up with rather fantastic propaganda about how ratepayers with solar are burden…

Isn't it because the US has a more entrenched "clean beuatiful coal" class of people?

On the particulars of residential solar deployment, it's the utilities. (And to a degree, the US's completely backwards permitting system which varies by municipality and mostly exists to drive up costs for everything and maintain stasis.)

Utility leadership is highly tech-averse, change averse, and rooting for the "clean beautiful coal" sports team. But also they can't imagine a future where there's massive electrification, with people switching from gas to getting their car energy from the grid, and being able to profit from it. It's somewhat shocking, but just like US car manufacturers, utility leadership is from a different era and are rentiers, rather than innovators.

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

#162

Post by sidewndr46 »

tialaramex wrote: post #98
alexpotato wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an article a few years back about how homeowners in Hawaii were buying solar panels to try to get cheaper power. Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.

> the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar. I'm sure this is the way you remember it, and maybe even the way it was explained in that article but if you bought a solar panel the sunlight to power it is free, so your electricity from the panel is free. You're not "buying" that power and so the commercial supply can't be "cheaper". Now if I've paid $50…

Sure, if you live somewhere you own the power you generate. I don't own the power I generate if I had solar.

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

#163

Post by testing22321 »

dalyons wrote: post #119
testing22321 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty much every house in Victoria had gas, and gas furnaces, winter is cold enough

I grew up in Victoria in a town of 20,000. Not a single house has gas.

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

#164

Post by hdgvhicv »

hinkley wrote: post #123
Symbiote wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or outsourced their pollution to a foreign supplier.

Carbon taxes collapse as they don’t account for imports correctly.

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

#165

Post by Waterluvian »

password4321 wrote: post #152
0xWTF wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 50% price decline doesn't imply there's 50% less demand for petroleum. If 6% less demand is all the margin consumers need to get their supply, then price can drop quickly. It's all in the margins.

What is the best way to learn more about this, are there any examples? This seems a bit counterintuitive to me.

Not fully sure this is that, but it reminds me of something an American friend explained about their business under the Trump regime (as a rant about how laypeople were deeply under-reacting to the tourism decline):

If it takes 100 tourists to pay his bills, taxes, staffing, and other expenses for the day, the next 5 tourists represent the profit. A tourism decline of 10% doesn’t mean 10% less profit, it means the catastrophic inviability of the whole business as it’s currently structured.

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

#166

Post by pydry »

plantain wrote: post #118
pydry wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also ignoring that Australia is building snowy 2 which is the world's largest battery by far, due to be finished in 2027-2028.

Are you really holding up Snowy 2 as a success story? We're past 20bn on Snowy 2 now. Run those numbers against grid scale BESS, on both capacity and peak generation and get back to me - 10 years ago it looked good, now it's not favourable.

OK.

lots of people confuse a $75-$120 / kWh cell price for grid scale battery installed price, which these days is about $300 / kWh.

1 gigawatt hour of installed BESS therefore at current prices is roughly $300 million.

Snowy 2 is 350 gigawatt hours, which would cost $105 billion in equivalent batteries which is about $150 billion in Australian dollars, or ~7x cheaper per gwh.

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

#167

Post by danans »

SoftTalker wrote: post #130
danans wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

} 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 is that different than any other weather related house damage? You'd call your insurance company and a licensed contractor. Assuming the house is habitable, you'd still have grid power, or if not you'd move temporarily while repairs took place.

The point is, if it's your home solar system, damages and repairs are your problem to manage. Localized grid outages might be more common, but you don't have to lift a finger or pay anything extra to get them repaired. The utility just does it. And they start working immediately, even in the middle of the night or on weekends.

> Localized grid outages might be more common, but you don't have to lift a finger or pay anything extra to get them repaired.

I'm not arguing against the electric grid. In fact, I'm an advocate. The grid has different failure and restoration modes than local generation and storage.

Unless you actually have no grid connection option at all (or it's prohibitively expensive) it makes a great deal of sense to pair a solar+battery system with the grid.

Done smartly, these systems can actually support each other.

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

#168

Post by vablings »

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…

I have made this argument several times that capitalism literally solves the issue of solar panels if the market allows arbitrage and true dynamic pricing.

Good to see now a working example that capitalism is an excellent system of rewarding those who solve inefficiencies in markets

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

#169

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

Wacari wrote: post #16
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.

Good thing he just interviews the technical experts who do. He more or less just gives people in the energy industry a megaphone to discuss the things they are doing.

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

#170

Post by tialaramex »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #162
tialaramex wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar. I'm sure this is the way you remember it, and maybe even the way it was explained in that article but if you bought a solar panel the sunlight to power it is free, so your electricity from the panel is free. You're not "buying" that power and so the commercial supply can't be "cheaper". Now if I've paid $50…

Sure, if you live somewhere you own the power you generate. I don't own the power I generate if I had solar.

I don't understand. If you owned a solar calculator you'd have to pay somebody because you made power ? Huh ? We've discussed before on HN the fact that the "Lets own everything" capitalists apparently didn't realise they needed to own the Sun and Wind (modulo Simpsons cartoon) but I guess maybe yours do? How much do you pay for a sunny day, on average, and if you won't pay do you get clouds or what ?
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