Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

e360.yale.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 328 posts

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

#191

Post by fishpen0 »

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?

Its also electrician unions fighting things like balcony solar (SB 868) and maintaining regulatory capture over licensing and certification to bottleneck how many people can enter the industry by forcing antiquated models like 4-6 year apprenticeships into a career path that could be 2-4 semesters of vocational courses and bi-annual relicensing exams. This keeps installation rates sky high.

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

#192

Post by leonidasrup »

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…

Australia produced 42% of it's electricity from domestic coal in 2025.

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/australia#what-sou...

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

#193

Post by EliRivers »

linksnapzz wrote: post #113
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…

free trade's amazing, seriously! Time was, mercantilist countries would use foreign colonies for resource extraction; and sell the goods manufactured with these resources back to them. It was great for everyone!

To a degree, this is Australia in this case, no? Resources are extracted from Australia, exported to China, turned into high value goods and sold back to them. In this case, it's exactly what OP is happy about!

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

#194

Post by arcticfox »

vablings wrote: post #168
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

This only makes sense way downstream of massive subsidies, not the least of which is China determining at a federal level that they wanted to produce an obscene amount of solar panels.

And now it's complicated because the ideal move would just be to say "thank you" and buy all the cheap panels and batteries, but that hollows out your own industry.

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

#195

Post by adolph »

While direct government subsidy is one way to increase battery adoption to increase power generation efficiency, a market based approach is for electric power companies to use batteries installed on customer premises as a power bank for the entire grid.

If you ever check out gridstatus.io [0] or similar resources, you may have noticed "storage" or "battery" as a part of the fuel mix. These are most often power company owned centralized facilities.

Another approach is for power companies to leverage batteries installed on customer premises. "A critical mass of home batteries scattered across a region and networked together through so-called virtual power plants, or VPPs, he says, marks 'the shift from energy storage as backup to energy storage as an active grid asset.' [1]"

0. https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso

1. https://e360.yale.edu/features/home-battery-vpps

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

#196

Post by leonidasrup »

barney54 wrote: post #66
dcan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cos…

No. The modern grid has little relation to capitalism. There is some private ownership, but there are massive government barriers to entry and massive regulation of the system.

Electric grid are excellent example of natural monopoly.

"An industry is a natural monopoly if a single firm can supply the entire market at a lower long-run average cost than if multiple firms were to operate within it."

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

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

#197

Post by officeplant »

SoftTalker wrote: post #58
ericmay wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Could be like my one neighbor who built a whole 8kw rig of panels on a wheeled frame so he can pull it into his garage during storms (Hurricane prone area). Otherwise he just moves it around his yard daily to prevent dead spots in the grass.

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

#198

Post by stanislavb »

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…

Another effect - although wholesale prices are falling for the energy itself - energy providers increased their daily "power grid use" fees. As a result, having electricity at home is still more expensive compared to before.

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

#199

Post by jandrese »

wffurr wrote: post #175
epistasis wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

I thought it was the opposite; it's blindingly obvious that everyone should be getting rooftop solar. The only thing holding me back is the need to work with the condo association on a new roof first.

In the US there are certainly cases where the install costs are just too high and the local utility too hostile to solar for the system to make sense.

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

#200

Post by soperj »

vablings wrote: post #168
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

Solar panels were made in China. The reason that solar panels are so cheap there is that the state has bankrolled these companies to produce them at a massive scale.
Post reply on HN