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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

#181

Post by UltraSane »

vablings wrote: post #168
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…

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

a $3,000 battery subsidy is the opposite of free trade.

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

#182

Post by nico_h »

Retric wrote: post #156
bborud wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and then the "colonies" figured out how to weaponize it and turn the balance in their favor. Or, not quite: the workers are being exploited just like they were during the colonial period. But at least now their rulers have power over our rulers that they didn't have before. So they get to be happy about that as they make novelty items out of toxic plastic for Temu.

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.

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

#183

Post by willismichael »

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.

It really depends on the battery chemistry of the specific EV, how many watts you charge at, and deep cycle vs. shallow cycle. Not all EV batteries will hold up to that many charge-discharge cycles.

Even at that, 100,000 cycles is an exaggeration. From what I can tell, you can expect up to 3000 cycles from Nickel Manganese Cobalt batteries before they hit 80% of original capacity. Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries can last for 10,000 cycles before dropping to 80% of original capacity.

https://bslbatt.com/blogs/lfp-vs-nmc-lithium-battery-compari...

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

#184

Post by moepstar »

epistasis wrote: post #155
password4321 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't they do this for cars?

I'd imagine the difference between flat and curved, in addition to very different wear patterns, and inability to get your desired color. Even slight changes in packaging to adapt the panels to a structural material might increase cost. But doing custom shapes to fit the panels of a car? Getting just the right shape? That's an entirely different manufacturing process nothing like what currently gets produced. The ben…

…which is also never in an ideal angle for production..

Sono Motors tried it and went under..

In theory, it sounds great and even obvious, but once you get into the details - not so much..

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

#185

Post by natmaka »

password4321 wrote: post #152
0xWTF wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 50% price decline doesn't imply there's 50% less demand for petroleum. If 6% less demand is all the margin consumers need to get their supply, then price can drop quickly. It's all in the margins.

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

There is a (IMHO) good explanation at https://www.next-kraftwerke.com/knowledge/what-does-merit-or...

Keyterms: "marginal cost", "merit order", "market-clearing price".

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

#186

Post by figbert »

plantain wrote: post #75
figbert wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. Th…

We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants. > Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. A couple of electricians doing 20kWh (average install size) once per day, with an individual inverter, gateways, etc. is not at scale, by any means of the word.

Base Power is, at present, installing nearly 100 40kWh batteries on homes per day throughout Texas and the Chicago area. It is doubling total deployed capacity approximately every six months (currently at a bit over 0.6GWh total, to hit 1GWh by EoY). Read: at scale.

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

#187

Post by ericd »

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.

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

#188

Post by pocksuppet »

dcan wrote: post #53
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…

Is this not free market capitalism? Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term. This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cos…

No. When the government pays for it, that isn't capitalism.

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

#189

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #180
collinmcnulty wrote: post #49

I've long thought that any country should buy solar panels from any other country that's crazy enough to sell them to you at a subsidized price. It's not like buying oil; once you have the panels, that energy independence belongs to you.

Grid and energy producers will have nothing of that nonsense. If enough people do that, they will see their business crumble and because they are an "strategic sector" they have enough sway on most countries to pass laws that prevent that.

Which quickly becomes politically untenable when a large part of the voters either have their own distributed renewables and storage or benefit from lower electricity prices.

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

#190

Post by sarchertech »

Waterluvian wrote: post #165
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.

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% drop won’t put a lot people out of business, but it’s not as much of an existential crisis for the economy as a whole as that story makes it seem.

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