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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

#231

Post by wolvoleo »

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 is amazing when it works. But it doesn't in many cases. Even with those solar panels: China has put many western manufacturers out of business by selling them under cost price with government support. It's cool for the consumer but it's an artificial trick that actually reduces the free market viability.

They did this with a reason. Either to raise prices later or to create a dependency. Even if you don't pay directly you pay for it in other ways like geopolitical power.

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

#233

Post by hn_submit »

It's only natural that countries with an abundance of sunlight will switch over to solar and batteries, especially if the price of the latter comes down.

In the not so distant future, LFP and sodium batteries will become very cheap, no more than a $200 or so for a day's storage of daily electricity usage. That means that in the majority of nations people will essentially have free electricity for their homes and maybe even their cars.

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

#234

Post by neeiicirjdj »

wolvoleo wrote: post #231
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 is amazing when it works. But it doesn't in many cases. Even with those solar panels: China has put many western manufacturers out of business by selling them under cost price with government support. It's cool for the consumer but it's an artificial trick that actually reduces the free market viability. They did this with a reason. Either to raise prices later or to create a dependency. Even if you don't…

If only western governments invested in saving the planet, then the Chinese would have had some competition. Their monopoly doesn’t seem like a Chinese governance problem and nor does it seem like an issue with the free market. The panels are sold above cost price.. unlike a lot of AI tokens

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

#235

Post by pennomi »

wolvoleo wrote: post #231
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 is amazing when it works. But it doesn't in many cases. Even with those solar panels: China has put many western manufacturers out of business by selling them under cost price with government support. It's cool for the consumer but it's an artificial trick that actually reduces the free market viability. They did this with a reason. Either to raise prices later or to create a dependency. Even if you don't…

Virtually free, clean, decentralized energy is a far greater advantage than any of those disadvantages. It’s a strategic failure for the US to pass up on China’s solar overproduction and subsidization.

As the saying goes, don’t interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.

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

#236

Post by daemin »

arcticfox wrote: post #194
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

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.

Speaking of subsidies it is often the case that fossil fuel industries are very heavily subsidised, yet they are still losing out to solar panels.

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

#237

Post by fishpen0 »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #220
fishpen0 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apprenticeships in the US come with minimum wage and no to low benefits of any kind, often with no healthcare. If I want to switch from my job to electrician I have to forgo a living wage for multiple years to make that switch. Unless of course I am connected or related to someone already in the industry. The apprentice system is rife with easy low grade fraud where anyone already licensed can simply claim you've done work for them. Meanwhile people coming in from the outside fight an uphill battle moving from shuttered llc to shuttered llc struggling to collect hours that still can be verified years later

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

#238

Post by skissane »

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.

> 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.

There's a lot of people who would get gas if only it were available. My house (in NSW), the gas main ends two streets away, they won't connect me unless I paid them some insane amount of money ($100K or whatever) to extend it to us. My father (different part of NSW), his neighbour had gas, but the gas main stopped outside his neighbours house, and it would have cost him thousands to get it extended so he could connect; then his neighbour on the other side paid those thousands, and they extended the gas main right past his front door, and then he could get connected for $500. Anyway, I think the measured demand isn't always the same as the real demand.

Also, there's still a decent chance the Victorian government loses the state election this November–although with Ben Carroll replacing Jacinta Allan, it is less of a sure thing than it was–and the Liberals have already said they will wind back the new gas connection ban.

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

#239

Post by skissane »

jandrese wrote: post #126
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…

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.

> 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.

More than 80% of coal mined in Australia is exported. So reduction of coal consumption internal to Australia has only a limited impact on Australia's coal industry.

Long-term, adoption of green power in emerging markets and developing countries is a huge threat to Australia's coal industry – but there is very little Australian industry lobbyists can do about that. And whether Australia goes down that route has only limited influence on whether the coal importing countries will.

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

#240

Post by jeeeb »

Tepix wrote: post #224
thelastgallon wrote: post #2

Use EVs as energy storage. Millions of EVs form an energy reservoir. 20% of solar is curtailed now and q lot more in future, instead charge EVs. Pay the EV owners because they are creating a storage layer with their capital and power prices go negative hundreds of millions of times every year. No need of home batteries.

Volkswagen will limit your car to 100kWh of charging your home. That's not a whole lot.

It’s not really clear what you mean. 100kWh is more than the entire battery capacity of the EV.
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