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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

#291

Post by grebc »

ceejayoz wrote: post #128
jandrese wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption They put up plenty. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2024/o... As with climate change, there comes a point where the propaganda just stops working becuase it's impossible to contest.

Trump being elected, twice even, is testament propaganda works better than truth.

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

#292

Post by robocat »

stubish wrote: post #264
wolvoleo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Selling under our cost price. Not selling under their cost price. China can destroy western manufactures even while making a profit.

Oh no - those bastards started selling something cheaper than we can.

The irony of China beating us at capitalism

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

#293

Post by toasty228 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #276
toasty228 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, I have no idea where I came up with that from. It’s completely wrong.

You might have read 100 000 miles?

They do last a long time when used for their purpose (driving), statistically you'll get a gas engine failure earlier than a battery failure. But they're not made for at home day to day energy storage

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

#294

Post by skissane »

stubish wrote: post #288
skissane wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people still prefer gas stoves for cooking Yes you can get bottled LPG gas, but it is a pain – you worry about running out, you have to call up and get them to deliver it. With piped gas you just set up a direct debit for the bill and never think about it ever again. Also, some people prefer gas heaters because it is a different kind of heat. My father replaced his wood combustion heater with a gas one, even…

Key words here are 'some people' and 'prefer'. I think this causes prices to spiral up (but this might be papered over by government subsidies). Do you prefer gas enough to pay $300/year for the connection fee? Or will you take the less-preferred but economically more palatable option and disconnect? And everyone who disconnects drives the prices higher for the fewer holdouts. Until retailers and suppliers pull the p…

> For your father's gas heating, this really sounds like an emotional decision. Modern gas heating produces the same heating as reverse cycle, where air is passed over a hot bit of metal and expelled into the room. One bit of metal is heated by an enclosed and externally ventilated flame and the other bit of metal is heated by a heat pump, but the interior side is practically the same.

No, it literally isn't. The reverse cycle air con just blows hot air into the room–it is purely convective. The gas heater console provides radiant heating as well.

Also, the air feels different. Reverse cycle air con tends to deliver a higher volume of air at a lower temperature; gas heaters (especially if we are talking about console units as opposed to ducted systems) tend to deliver less air, but hotter air. It feels different on the skin.

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

#295

Post by duxup »

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 they pay you 3k to install a battery, what’s the cost of the battery overall?

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

#296

Post by ZeroGravitas »

stubish wrote: post #262
skissane wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

With gas getting more and more expensive here in Victoria, and electricity prices plummeting and already free if you get a decent sized battery, the gas connection ban seems mostly pointless. Nobody will pay $300/year for the connection (+installation) so they can have the privilege of paying for their heating and cooking, and even without a battery you are still looking at 3-4 times the cost with gas heating vs. ele…

The ban isn't pointless. It's a network and the prices are based on assumptions nearly everyone connecting and staying connected for decades paying off the costs a little at a time.

Once that assumption breaks you need to avoid the costs being foisted onto people unexpectedly.

Any reasonable approach is effectively a ban at that point, like paying upfront for the whole expected lifetime cost.

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

#297

Post by rswail »

discordance wrote: post #114
rswail wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. It was already starting, but the Federal government at the time was very anti RE. South Australia had a single interconnect to the rest of the Australian Energy Market that covers the states except for WA and Northern Territory. There was a big storm that took out an interstate interconnect and the voltage spike caused all the other generators to disconnect to protect themselves. Then Elon promised to buil…

>That was the Hornsby battery Hornsdale - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve

Was going on memory and didn't want to google. :)

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

#298

Post by solatic »

plantain wrote: post #18

The program has so far spent $2.5bn, and installed 11GWh. That's just the cost of the subsidy (~30% discount), not the cost of what home owners tipped in. Utility scale batteries are now at ~$66m/GWh, or about ~$726m equivalent. It does not make sense for everyone to be doing a bespoke installation inside their own home. It is ridiculously inefficient. We are a society. We don't build our own roads, water, grid, scho…

> ridiculously inefficient

So too is building single-family homes an inefficient way of providing housing, compared to apartment buildings, not to mention the cost of suburban roads and utility connections etc.

> We are a society

Indeed, and part of living in a society is about making progress that is politically feasible. That the 2nd Avenue subway (in New York City) costs such a stratospherically insane amount in time and money is not an argument against subways or public transportation.

Politics is the art of the possible, and Australia's progress should be celebrated here, not second-guessed.

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

#299

Post by ZeroGravitas »

pydry wrote: post #166
plantain wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you price it on throughput and not storage size, because Snowy 2 is very constrained on when it can charge and discharge then the realistic 8Twh per year you can get out of Snowy2 loses to batteries by a factor of 3 based on your costs.

But that's assuming the batteries can charge and discharge in full every day.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle where Snowy can act as seasonal storage with a big capacity that isn't used every day.

I think it would then also lose on price if compared with a portfolio of batteries alongside solar and wind to directly supply electricity and continually recharge the batteries over seasonal scales but that is a more complex comparison.

In general I think even good hydro schemes (and Snowy 2 is not a good one) rely on non-electrical factors to be worthwhile now batteries have plummeted in price, e.g. managing seasonal water flows for agriculture, and the electricity can be seen as an additional benefit.

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

#300

Post by futevolei »

ericd wrote: post #187
thelastgallon wrote: post #127

Australia is now ready for vertical solar, add a few more hours of production in the morning and evening. Panels are dirt cheap anyway, use them as fences, put them on high rise buildings. Change the building to require structural elements to hold the panels and build new homes with vertical + rooftop. The electric code should be updated to allow v2g. With BESS (home, grid) and EVs (always plugged in, parked 95% of t…

I found the challenge with our own was just matching the peak of the panels to the peak voltage accepted by our inverter (including a safe margin for cold+snowy days where peak voltage is the highest), otherwise I totally would’ve loved to overpanel like crazy. George Costanza voice, I would drape my house in panels, if it were socially acceptable.

Tell me more? Why can’t you 2x or nx the number of panels by wiring those additional panel in parallel (as opposed to in series)?
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