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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

#251

Post by thrixton »

testing22321 wrote: post #163
dalyons wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of regional towns don't have mains gas so had to rely on deliveries. Living in outer Melbourne, I've always had gas, same with my friends and neighbours, and have always had gas hot water, stove top and heating, it's been the main heat source all my life, going away now with new builds not allowing gas connections, never mind if we have another massive electricity outage like 2022 when we were lucky to have gas for cooking and hot water, good luck charging batteries off solar in winter in a blackout if you're lucky enough to have proper blackout protection.

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

#252

Post by Retric »

bborud wrote: post #246
Retric wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern China is a vastly better place to live than China of 60+ years ago. Many countries are nicer places to live, but 1+ Billion people are simply better off making the “exploitation” narrative ridiculous.

It can both be better than 60 years ago and worse than what you would consider a «good» life. Exploitation and being less poor are not mutually exclusive. It is easier to think poor quality of life is ok for people you cannot identify with.

In living memory things when from famine so bad cannibalism was a widespread issue, to traffic jams. You can’t argue about quality of life here outside of profound ignorance.

The CCP was objectively the worst government across thousands of years, and foreign markets didn’t fix the underlying problems but they helped the general population in a way the government was never going to without them.

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

#253

Post by Retric »

nico_h wrote: post #182
Retric wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern China is a vastly better place to live than China of 60+ years ago. Many countries are nicer places to live, but 1+ Billion people are simply better off making the “exploitation” narrative ridiculous.

Porque no los dos? Given the number of billionaires in China, it can both be true that workers are exploited, meaning they could earning more for less hours, and that the living conditions are better on average and possibly medianely than the local minima of 1966.

1960 was way worse than 1966. My point was you can’t reasonably look at thousands of years of horror suddenly ending and then blame the solution for not being perfect.

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

#254

Post by inemesitaffia »

jeeeb wrote: post #240
Tepix wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe lifetime?

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

#255

Post by whatever1 »

imtringued wrote: post #223
password4321 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Think of the knapsack problem but you're trying to fill your knapsack while minimizing costs. You have a given amount of demand, you fill your knapsack using a simple greedy strategy. You pick the lowest bid, then you pick the next lowest bid and so on, until the knapsack is full. Now the question is, why is everyone paid as much as the most expensive bid that was needed to fill the order? Because those bidders could…

This is nice and fair only when you have infinitely many small producers.

In reality you have two huge players who can cut production at will and set prices based on the least efficient small fish in the pond.

Enjoy your free market

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

#256

Post by skew-aberration »

munksbeer wrote: post #136
skew-aberration wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Retail prices have barely fallen - the article makes a cherry-picked statement about falling average prices in Q2 (winter). This is true, but it is a reduction from a historic peak. $140/MWhr -> $74/MWhr. For comparison, the Q1 (summer/autumn) price has been stable at $75/MWHr which is still over 10% ABOVE wholesale price in USA, etc. Essentially, Australian's paid over double the typical winter wholesale prices for a few years during the transition, which has finally paid off. I would need to pull numbers, but I suspect wind is more relevant here than batteries. With more batteries coming, we're still in a period of extreme investment relative to the size of the market, and it will take time to know just how far prices will fall.

How bad was the Q2 peak that prices have fallen from?

> The wholesale 30-minute energy prices exceeded $5,000 per MWh 66 times in the quarter - 19 times in NSW, eight times in Queensland, 15 times in Victoria, 15 times in South Australia and nine times in Tasmania. This compares to 11 high prices in the previous quarter and 19 high prices in the same quarter last year.

https://www.aer.gov.au/news/articles/communications/aer-repo...

But ultimately, I was given $14K cheque from the government. My tax bill is above the national median full-time income. How long would it take my neighbour to see that ROI? If they did get a 50% discount due to the home batteries on their average $1.4k annual power bill it would take 20 years! (and it's silly to say only home batteries have caused this trend - there's a huge amount of renewable investment which is reaping rewards now). Doesn't sound fair to me.

Building grid scale batteries would have reduced the costs further and faster and would have been far more equitable.

PS the policy comes with no obligation that I'm required to export the power I generate -> I could just use it to mine crypto. I do know of one such person who uses theirs to heat a pool.

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

#257

Post by aaron695 »

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…

[dead]

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

#258

Post by skew-aberration »

matt_eeee wrote: post #140
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…

The largest lithium battery grid storage in the world (at the time) was built in South Australia in under 100 days in 2017. It's the equivalent of about 11 thousand of the largest batteries install in the home battery scheme, which take an electrician + apprentice ~1 day on average to install.

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

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

#259

Post by stubish »

testing22321 wrote: post #163
dalyons wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I live in a Victorian town of similar size. Houses have mains gas even when they don't have sewage, and it has been this way at least 30 years. I'm guessing the mains gas didn't get to your town. I've visited houses further afield who use bottled gas, and the gas delivery truck is a not uncommon site. But I imagine usage has plummeted and more people getting themselves disconnected to avoid the connection fees, with solar visible on roughly half the roofs.
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