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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

#221

Post by ColdStream »

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…

It has hit so cheap that here in Victoria that as of 1st October there will be 3 hours of free electricity in the middle of the day. Capped at 24KW a day but that is still impressive. As such, we can load up the washer/dryer and just schedule them for an 11am start.

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

#223

Post by imtringued »

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.

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 simply predict what the most expensive bid is and then set their bid accordingly, if their prediction is too high, you actually made electricity more expensive by not paying everyone the same clearing price. If their bid is too low they get free money simply by predicting a higher price.

So you can just make the system honest and pay everyone the equilibrium price.

Of course, the big question that arises is "what if the last producer needed to clear the market is unreasonably expensive?", then there is suddenly a windfall for all the cheap producers called producer surplus. The opposite is also true when you get rid of these expensive producers, the price collapses down to the second highest bid. This is consumer surplus.

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

#224

Post by Tepix »

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.

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

#225

Post by epistasis »

laurencerowe wrote: post #218
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…

In California consumer electricity is high because of distribution costs stemming form wildfire risks from distribution in rural areas and sprawl into the wildland-urban interface where many people live as urban areas have historically blocked development. Wholesale generation costs are some of the lowest in the country. These costs of distortion vary very little based on how much you as an individual consume but the…

Yes, because utilities get a fixed rate of profit from grid expenses; but generation costs of electricity are not tied to their profits.

Instead, highly distributed generation, and in particular distributed storage, drastically reduce grid costs. If a house is providing electricity for itself, and feeding back ok to the grid to also power the neighbor, it skips a ton of transmission infrastructure and costs.

And since all grid components must be sized for the peak usage, rather than average usage, and since storage shaves off peaks, distributed battery storage greatly reduces the need for more grid capacity.

(Side note, even though grid costs are $~0.30/kWh and generation is ~$0.10 in California, that $0.10/kWh is still a large fraction higher than in most of the US)

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

#226

Post by m463 »

laurencerowe wrote: post #218
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…

In California consumer electricity is high because of distribution costs stemming form wildfire risks from distribution in rural areas and sprawl into the wildland-urban interface where many people live as urban areas have historically blocked development. Wholesale generation costs are some of the lowest in the country. These costs of distortion vary very little based on how much you as an individual consume but the…

> distribution costs stemming form wildfire risks

They have a wildfire risk solution, they just cut power like a GFCI. This is cheap.

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

#227

Post by Sabinus »

UltraSane wrote: post #181
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

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

No it isn't. The 3k goes to the consumer to buy the battery from their preferred/cheapest global supplier, not to Australian manufacturing.

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

#228

Post by Waterluvian »

sarchertech wrote: post #190
Waterluvian wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

> If most businesses were structured in a way that a small decline in customers immediately puts them out of business […]

No business chooses to be structured this way.

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

#229

Post by thelastgallon »

password4321 wrote: post #153
epistasis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why don't they do this for cars?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk6aTKV-des

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

#230

Post by grebc »

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…

Electricity is not half the price.
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