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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

#211

Post by qlte »

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!

In theory it sounds like a great deal for the imperial center, but the system also requires high tariffs on all goods produced outside the empire to preserve the privileged mercantile relationships. If the same goods are cheaper imported from a different part of the world, then consumers would pay more despite all the self-important optics of being the "dominant" colonial power and presumably benefiting from the exploitation of their clients.

This helped produce the huge "imperial preference" controversy within the Conservative party in the late 1800s and contributed to the rise of the Liberals. Hardliners like Joseph Chamberlain refused to bend on external tariffs, so disaffected Tories like Winston Churchill defected in advocacy of free trade/cheaper goods being more important than blindly "pro-Empire" economics that were no longer competitive in the global market.

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

#212

Post by mullingitover »

soperj wrote: post #200
vablings wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good for them. They really can’t win: if they don’t modernize they get blamed for high CO2 emissions and used as an excuse for the US to shirk its responsibilities to the Paris Agreements. If they do, and help the rest of the world at the same time, they get accused of dumping.

If only everyone else had the guts to follow their lead.

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

#213

Post by JuniperMesos »

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.

This is a really important reason why it's not actually obvious that everyone should be getting rooftop solar - not everyone lives in a situation where they can make arbitrary capital improvements to their roof, or even owns their own roof to begin with (I personally live in a rented apartment in a building where the roof space is shared among many tenants). That doesn't mean rooftop solar panels are necessarily a bad idea for people who can do it - it's quite possibly a good idea. But solar panels ultimately require a lot of land area to generate power, and it's often better to use cheap land for this far outside urban areas, than it is to try to put solar panels on the limited sunlight-facing land available in urban areas.

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

#214

Post by toasty228 »

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

[dead]

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

#215

Post by AnotherGoodName »

leonidasrup wrote: post #192
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...

Which is incredible since it was 70% in fyi 2013/2013

https://ieefa.org/resources/slump-eastern-australia-gas-dema... (See section on power mix which mention coal at the bottom).

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

#216

Post by toasty228 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #83
toasty228 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I looked into it it didn't make sense to use an EV as a solar battery, the chemistry isn't made for high cycle counts compared to regular home/solar batteries.

You looked wrong. These batteries can do 100,000 charge-discharge cycles while retaining 80% of their capacity.

Hm sorry but no, feel free to read the specs of any manufacturer, they're rated for a few thousands cycles at best, usually under 5k, closer to 2k

Even lifepo4 home storage batteries designed for frequent cycling are rated for ~10k cycles.

As far as I can tell there are literally no battery chemistry that can survive 100k cycles and retain 80% capacity

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

#217

Post by lazide »

sarchertech wrote: post #190
Waterluvian wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

That assumes he has a fixed profit per person. In reality most business can do things like cut hours for staff, postpone upgrades or long term maintenance, cut amenities, raise prices etc… If most businesses were structured in a way that a small decline in customers immediately puts them out of business, any minor economic downturn would be an unrecoverable positive feedback loop for the economy. I’m not saying a 10%…

Uh, why do you think the Fed injects funds the way it does?

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

#218

Post by laurencerowe »

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…

In California consumer electricity is high because of distribution costs stemming form wildfire risks from distribution in rural areas and sprawl into the wildland-urban interface where many people live as urban areas have historically blocked development. Wholesale generation costs are some of the lowest in the country.

These costs of distortion vary very little based on how much you as an individual consume but they are awkwardly bundled into per-unit charges. As a renter in an urban area I certainly don't think I should pay those costs while those with home solar don't! At current prices I really don't think we should be subsidising home solar at all since it is so much more expensive than utility scale solar.

While a small part of that cost comes from tariffs on solar panels, they're so cheap it doesn't make much difference. The bigger part of the cost differential with Australia seems to be much higher permitting and sales costs.

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

#219

Post by II2II »

sarchertech wrote: post #190
Waterluvian wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

That assumes he has a fixed profit per person. In reality most business can do things like cut hours for staff, postpone upgrades or long term maintenance, cut amenities, raise prices etc… If most businesses were structured in a way that a small decline in customers immediately puts them out of business, any minor economic downturn would be an unrecoverable positive feedback loop for the economy. I’m not saying a 10%…

I was going to say that curring hours just offloads the problem onto their employees, but the reality is it does that and creates new problems for the bbusiness.If the employee cannot afford to keep the job, they will be forced to search for a new or additional job. The business is either hiring and training inexperienced people, or dealing with staff who have reduced availability.

They also cannot do much about fixed costs; postponing maintenance typically increases long term maintenance costs; postponing upgrades, cutting amenities, and raising prices may deter even more customers (keep in mind, nearly everyone is feeling the pinch these days). That is assuming that the business isn't doing that already.

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

#220

Post by bigfatkitten »

fishpen0 wrote: post #191
actionfromafar wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Australian electricians (as with most skilled trades) undergo 4 year apprenticeships where they split their time between learning on the job and attending a trade school.

There’s nothing wrong with this model, it produces tradespeople with solid fundamentals and practical experience that they would not receive in a diploma mill.

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