Opposite story here in the US with very recent news about Trump breaking offshore wind farm agreements and using billions of US taxpayer dollars to pay repercussive fees to those operators. Our decline/regression in terms of clean energy and how easily the current administration's pulled it off and continues to is an ugly fucking mystery ...
In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
121–130 of 328 posts
Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
#122so in other words, heavily subsidize another technology (introducing cost shifts onto non-adopters, typically poorer people) to try and solve operational problems directly caused by oversubsidizing rooftop solar (another regressive cost-shift and extremely inefficient cost allocation relative to tx-connected solar) by bringing down wholesale prices (already a minority of the utility bill). Fixed costs, the majority o…
in other words there's no winning because circular arguments about how things "really" work, plus insisting on and worst-possible-case-outcomes-as-inevitabilities.
right ...
Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It would be useful to know if the industrial use is factories replacing their use with other sources (e.g. I have read that food manufacture is switching to electricity in Denmark, although it can be held up waiting for a grid connection if there's a data centre ahead of it). Or, did they improve their efficiency. Or, have they closed.
Or outsourced their pollution to a foreign supplier.
Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
#124It 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!
Yes, everyone is always telling me how great colonialism was for the locals.
Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the end you have to replace those panels and nobody in your country now produces them or has the incentive to start producing them unless they not only drop the subsidies but sell well over market value.
In 25 years, those panels will still be producing 80% of their starting value. Imagine what you can do with 25 years of energy independence.
Well it’s about 40 years since the US started getting stupid about foreign trade and things are not going so well here now. Send help.
Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
#126This 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.
Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
#127Australia 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 the time), there may be enough storage to start replacing baseload. This will take decades, but can be done. We gotta start somewhere.
Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
#128This 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.
> 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.
Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
#129Australia 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…
Given the durability of panels, it'd be fascinating to see roof redesigns, and some changes in panel packaging, that standard large rectangles become the basic components of a 30 year roof. Or as siding. I've seen them used vertically on the Southern walls of commercial buildings in Alaska, and they looked great.
Re: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
} 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 is that different than any other weather related house damage? You'd call your insurance company and a licensed contractor. Assuming the house is habitable, you'd still have grid power, or if not you'd move temporarily while repairs took place.
The point is, if it's your home solar system, damages and repairs are your problem to manage. Localized grid outages might be more common, but you don't have to lift a finger or pay anything extra to get them repaired. The utility just does it. And they start working immediately, even in the middle of the night or on weekends.