Very interested to see how this turns out. Ultimately we want the transition to benefit both consumers and producers / distributors (the industry). The problem from the rapid uptake of solar in Australia has been an over-supply during this 10/11am to 2/3pm period. If that over-supply is suitably encouraged to be soaked up then hopefully consumers can reduce their power bills whilst the industry has less effort in managing the oversupply and less stress on infrastructure.
It's also about time that those who lack the means or situation to have solar panels of their own can get some advantage, in a 'herd immunity' kind of way.
I'm in the privileged position to have had solar panels for over a decade, and now have a battery as well, and it was very obvious to me at the time that, in regards to solar, it cost money to save money, so if you couldn't afford it then the savings are inaccessible.
This change hopefully helps those who need it, at least somewhat.
this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
so NSW and South Australia will be staggered in real time as they are in different time zones.
As for everybody in the same time zone .. they are all seeing the same sun angle at noon (more or less) and all sharing the same over supply of power from all the grid connected solar power rooftops and farms. It's free surplas power during that time frame.
Yeah i get that they're all seeing similar but you'd still want to align this new demand with the output curve in some form of approximated pattern. Plus also prevent the sharp spike you'd get from everyone turning on their stuff at a coordinated hour. You're gonna have a bunch of stuff on timers all hit this at the same time. That makes life hard for the people balancing the grid's supply & demand.
Bit like in the UK they had issues with everyone watching popular TV shows and then turning on the kettle after in a perfectly syncronized timing across the country
There's too much available power then (curtailment/negative prices are fairly common now on sunny days), and not enough during the evenings, so it's an incentive for those who don't have/can't get batteries (e.g. renters) to shift their habits. It also can be spun as a cost-of-living action.
I find it amusing that back when solar and wind were niche and expensive the coal + oil lobby would lobby for "let the free market decide what to build".
When solar + wind plunged in price they stopped saying it.
Now that the market has driven down the price of solar, wind and storage, market based mechanisms have become ideal for solving the problem of what to do with surplus electricity.
The change certainly brings in some weirdness too.
For instance, I'm looking at a new hot water system. Economically speaking, I'm better off buying an oversized tank using resistive heating that I only need to heat once per day. The grid provides free power and I buy a cheaper appliance. But environmentally it sucks, as more solar needs to be rolled out to cover the additional non-peak usage (guess about 6x the power usage of a smaller tank with heatpump).
To check I understand you: the smaller tank with heatpump would consume less energy outside the time window in which energy is free than the large tank with resistive heating, but has a higher capital cost which would outweigh the amount saved on energy?
If that's right, it's not obvious to me that building a suitably sized solar panel is environmentally worse than building a heat pump.
The smaller tank with heatpump will consume a lot less energy than the larger tank with resistive heat.
Economically to me, the larger tank is cheaper, because the appliance is cheaper, and I never pay for the power it uses.
Environmentally, yes, it is not obvious. The large tank requires many more solar panels to power it but no battery. The small tank and heatpump needs much less solar but battery for nighttime use.
But it is weird, because for decades heat pump tech has been pushed as the environmental choice and there are still a number of government subsidies to invest in heat pump hot water systems. And maybe that no longer makes sense, with the money saved buying cheaper and less efficient devices spent on more solar deployments.
But it’s also environmentally better for you to take the resistive heating thing. As long as you never need to heat it up outside of the noon-window that’s strictly positive. Because the “additional” solar panels will be necessary anyways to cover the night/late evening usage. The optimal buildout will always have superfluous energy at noon. That’s fine. We just need to get over the whole “energy costs anything” thing. That’s only true if you need to spend fuel to generate it
The magic of market pricing means people will figure out the best solution and optimise towards that.
Hot water heater tanks are easily one of the most obviously good applications of noon excess energy, and resistive heating elements might as well be free.
But it not entirely true. While renewables can cover well over 100% of daytime usage on most days in summer in my region, we are down to about 40% during winter. We need lots more solar panels and wind turbines and enough battery to get us through energy droughts, and installation and maintenance has economic and environmental costs. Much less than other forms of generation, but costs nonetheless. If everyone stops caring how much power they draw because it is 'free', the problem of supplying enough sustainable generation becomes harder and takes longer. The extra generation capacity needed is paid for by consumers in the form of connection fees and/or tax payers.
Victoria has had smart meters rolled out for over a decade.
The rest of the states in the NEM are aiming for 2030 to complete their rollouts.
Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.
>Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.
Eh I sit on the fence on this one. Take your pick as to who is going to abuse the data. Corps or the government to taste.
Consider this very proposal, incentives to use power at certain times are good. But that incentive structure could instead be very anti consumer. Higher prices when we need electricity would be a horrid state of affairs when rents have doubled in 5 years and a lot of people are barely holding on.
Smart meters don't make things better or worse, they are technology that enables better time-of-use metering than the century of multiple meters for peak vs off-peak consumption, as well as making meter reading/billing cheaper.
They enable new services like feed-in tariffs and incorporation of V2G and VPP infrastructure.
Rents have not doubled in 5 years.
Rental inflation peaked at ~8% and is now below 4% pa.
From the article; this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
So yeah, not universal yet. But the precedent means it's moving in that direction. If WA homes end up producing lots of solar at midday then this opens the door there as well.
Hope HVDC really takes off, having a power network that has solar feed covering 3 timezones as well as multiple latitudes adds to the national solar harvest and grid resiliency.
It's still worth it if you have a lot of load you can shift to the middle of the day (like a pool heater or battery), but for most 9-5 workers you just end up paying more at the times you're actually home.
Smart meters are free, most people already have one.
I thought most Australians had different pricing for peak/off-peak. I'm paying 39c/kWh for peak (3pm to 9pm) and 20c/kWh for off-peak (9pm to 3pm the next day).
The utilities don't really want to sell you the cheap solar. They'd rather write op-eds about how too much solar is flooding the grid and beg for more money to invest in the grid elements they can make money from.
The government is having to force them to reflect the abundance of cheap, clean energy at these times in at least one of their tariff offerings.
They can bend the rules slightly by adding other daily charges or limitations and upping the price at other times to reduce uptake and move us all slightly further from the global optimum but maximize their profits.
Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.
I think it's less a question of batteries being economical, and more a question of the relative economics of batteries vs solar panels.
After all, if the highest demand is between 16:30 and 19:00 you could use batteries to store power at 12:00 and sell it at 18:00 - or in famously sunny Australia you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand.
If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.
You won't get 12% return if your panels generate electricity which is only paid between 18 and 19, because there is already overcapacity between 16:30 and 18.
Definitely so. Unless you are on the equator, the sun is up for less than 12 hours a day from the autumnal equinox to the spring equinox. The sun will set before 18:00 local solar time. So apart from funkiness with time zones and summer time (which extends a couple of weeks past the autumnal equinox in Aus), yes, roughly six months of the year.
You're not crazy in the broad sweep of your idea, but actually because the sun isn't a point of light you're also not strictly correct, for example in Singapore the day is always more than 12 hours long.
Singapore is close to the equator (1°17′N) — the days are roughly 12 hours long all year. No, it's not exact. They vary from +3 to +12 minutes. It's close enough (<2% error).
It's not entirely due to the apparent size of the sun — refraction due to the atmosphere has a slightly greater effect.
(Singapore is also in the 'wrong' timezone. The sun sets around 7 pm every day, giving it effectively permanent daylight saving time.)
But regardless, Australia is not near the equator. The timezones are mostly ok. In most of the country (for most of the population anyway) the sun sets before 18:00 for roughly half the year. No amount of solar is going to power the evening peak demand without storage.
> If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.
Sorry, normally I hate this follow-up on HN, but can you share a source? I tried to Google for sources, but there is a pretty wild range of ROI in different countries/regions. My point: Ideally, can you provide personal/anecdotal experience, or something that is specific to a country or region?
EDIT
I forgot to say: I like your idea of intraday arbitrage using batteries! It is a very cool idea. Surely, this could be well modeled to know your expected ROI before investment/build-out.
One of my co-workers (I'm Australian) has 500 kilowatt-hours of storage at home...which is wild. Much more common is the 10-20 kilowatt-hours of domestic storage for a house.
That's ~8 used EV batteries. Each cost less than 10k, maybe 6-8k AUD.
If you know your way around high voltage DC, got a tractor and appropriate emulator - not exactly difficult or super expensive to pull off.
Granted it's pretty uncommon setup as grid batteries themselves are pretty cheap too and used EV battery is simply too large for home user, too much hassle, liability, etc to save like $2-3k.
Does he have a saltwater aquarium, or any other hobby that can make use of it? If not, I can highly recommend that he get into it, if he's into that kind of overkill :)
My dad buys lead acids written off from storm damage to solar systems (The whole system gets replaced under insurance even if the batteries are just a bit worn) and then sells them to preppers in the middle of nowhere. For a while he had above 300KW/h of storage, basically completely off grid with few shutdowns. It was kind of nuts. His house did burn down, but it was arson.
Yeah this is why a lot of people were thinking that the Australian opposition asking for spending $40-50 billions for nuclear that would come online in 20-30 years and to keep using coal and gas till then were being stupid.
I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.
I am talking about the $30 billion that the opposition was making up. My point was that even those made up numbers for nuclear were still more expensive than installing solar and batteries.
They are, and they are being rapidly rolled out and the "post sunset" spikes are rapidly being flattened by both grid storage and "behind the meter" home batteries.
One issue with grid scale batteries is that the solar is predominantly generated in the suburbs, but the grid wasn’t built for a huge “generator” in the suburbs. It requires retrofitting the grid for this huge excess. It would be better to instead store it in the suburbs in household batteries (which they are also building out like crazy).
The fundamental costs and margin requirements in the system haven't changed.
This is a government-mandated electricity plan (a default market offer) that competitive electricity retailers are now required to offer. Those retailers still have network costs, environmental costs, energy costs, and administration costs to recover, and so prices at other times of day necessarily go up.
Some consumers may be better off on this plan (generally at the expense of other consumers), and some will be worse off.
It’s very cool to see what happens where there are simply so many residential solar installs. Power price goes negative during peak sunshine hours so they just give it away.
Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
Yeah, it's been great to see the uptake of rooftop solar in Australia.
One downside is that large scale solar projects aren't profitable any more. It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech, that they aren't getting a good payoff.
The good news is that co-located solar and battery projects are still profitable, but capital costs are higher and payback period of batteries aren't as good.
Co-located PV/BESS or Wind/BESS is the best grid solution anyway. The REZs with transmission infrastructure (subsidized by government) will also add to the return.
The good thing is that even with over a decade of conservative government trying to kill it, renewables are now commercially the only choice for Australia and we will benefit from the rapid advances in storage as well.
Grid level plants are starting to also incorporate synthetic condensers and other FCAS services to make our grid more resilient and reliable, even as our clapped out coal plants move closer to shut down.
Yeah, it's tricky because basically all solar arrays (rooftop and utility) all come online at more-or-less the same time so there's a huge influx of supply which drives the price down.
You can get a sense of it if you look at the daily breakdown:
The price goes negative around 2pm most days, in which case, as a solar only operator you're losing money to generate power, so quite often there's curtailment.
And then at 6pm, the sun is down so solar-only operators can't capitalise on the opportunity.
So unfortunately it's just a very limited opportunity to make a profit on your investment each day. More demand during the peak generation time would help!
> It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech
In the US, these people are known as speculators riding on government subsidy or grant, often shadily awarded - and anyone who couldn’t see consumer panel and consumer power-storage tech hooting its inflection point simply didn’t have a good grasp on the technology.
"Free" electricity is an indication that the economics are out of balance. If the power provider isn't getting paid for those 3 hours, it means they'll need to be paid more at other times. It also means the grid needs to spend more on storage and less on new solar. Its cool if you have the ability to load shift but in general it means costs go up.
The new plans are mostly to charge the hundreds of thousands of household batteries that have been installed over the last few years, which are an economical way to store energy for night time usage (ROI about 8% over 20 years, probably more with the new plans).
Dynamic pricing and deployment of digital smart meters should by mandatory in all electric grids dominated by renewables. Large electric consumers are already buying electricity at dynamic prices, small consumers should have the same incentives to shift the demand to day hours.
I'm so on board for this. It would be kind of fun to wire all my appliances in to home assistant to have the dishwasher / dryer / etc all run during the free hours.
I imagine eventually we might end up with some thermal storage where during peak renewable production you heat/freeze a large tank of water and then utilize it to heat/cool your house for the rest of the day. A large tank of water is much cheaper than battery storage.
Batteries are massively more expensive. Thats why the utility companies are just giving consumers free power over building their own grid scale batteries.
A tank of water is cheap, it’s just not possible to distribute hot water over the grid. But it’s very realistic to store it locally and use for heating and cooling. Which is the bulk of power usage anyway.
There are never designs coming into the market that support only, say, the fridge, and have the software to be time of day use metering aware, that won't totally break the bank.
Storing energy in hot water is common is sunny regions, for example Turkey.
Some large cold storage facilities in Germany are trying to optimize electric demand to use cheap peak day electricity. But they have to observe limitations in range of temperatures and capacity of cooling devices.
Many of us with solar already do this manually, we run the appliances once the sun is up. Even the hotwater heater is programmed to only heat during the middle of the game.
I've been daydreaming about the tank of water idea as well, but the amount of panels you would need on the roof would be crazy.
I don't have smart washers, but I did build a smart ESP32-based [0] zigbee numerical display. Then I use Home Assistant to send the current electricity price to that display when the price changes, and send a notification to all users' phones when electricity is cheap (< 0.05€/kWh) or expensive (> 0.15€/kWh). This helps me plan my laundry and dish washing, which are the only energy intensive appliances I have. I also try to avoid cooking complex meals in the stove+oven.
Ideally, they should pay the EV owners because electricity price goes negative. The EV owners are spending their own money to create a scalable on-demand storage infrastructure. This saves CapEx/OpEx of BESS and also eliminates peaker natural gas plants. EV owners should be paid once for allowing storage, and paid again for using the power to supply back to the grid (V2G).
The EVs with V2G are just big batteries, nothing special. You certainly can charge your battery on the free power and sell it back during peak periods, and people are doing just that today. Just mostly using their 50 kWh household batteries rather than their EVs though, because V2G is still mostly science fiction unless you buy one of the few models of car that actually support it and have a compatible charger and inverter.
I miss having Griddy in Texas. Direct access to the wholesale market is probably not good for the lower end of the consumer segment, but for people with some functional marbles it can make a big difference on the demand side of the grid.
I feel like they had to kill griddy before all the powerwall solutions started showing up. We simply cannot empower the peasants with both things at once. The ability to store energy makes access to wholesale prices substantially more effective.
I'll never forget the days where we would get push notifications about negative prices. I'd throw the dryer and oven on every time to try and unwind the meter a bit.
You might check the rates on Tibber as well. A lot of companies that offer a "free" usage period tend to just move the cost around. If you're comfortable taking the risks associated with a wholesale supplier, then you can likely save a ton of money without even changing your consumption habits.
During this past month with the heatwave, my electricity bill was only about €50 despite running airco all day most days. I have 6 solar panels on my roof for reference (was 3k installed I believe). If I was willing to turn off the A/C at night, I could have easily cut the bill in half since most of the billed usage was between 18-21:00.
You need a battery to take advantage: then you may as well use a direct to market option like Amber. Which benefits grid stability too. 3 hrs without a battery is useless in Australia. As you generally use electricity for heating/cooling and need it longer than that esp. cooling.
It is the extra $/kwh you pay out of those 3 hours subsidizing the free time that will be the issue. So you need to order a large round during happy hour and make those beers last. Somewhat possible by overcooling or overheating but you need a battery ideally.
This will kill new household solar instillation. (This is a signal that we have enough)
The payback time was already well in excess of 10 years, but now that power is free during the day, you can't count those hours as helping pay down your investment. Payback time will be 30 + years at least. You are much better just enjoying your neighbors solar rather than paying for your own.
Note: My state 100% renewable energy so reduction of carbon footprint has not bearing on solar decisions.
This also feels like a fairly heavy handed way to encourage investments in batteries. But in the famous words of George W, "can't fool me again". As soon as there are too many batteries and the grid companies are not making enough money, they will introduce fees to have the batteries, or increase connection fees.
With 3 hours of free power, a 15kW inverter and a 42kWh battery, I could almost do away with my solar panels and just survive of free grid power. I do have a 15kW solar panel set up, but I get very little from selling anything back to the grid.
I have a 12 kW inverter (single phase) and 48 kWh battery. In Australia, 9 months of the year my 16 kW of solar fills the battery and covers all needs including cooking, heating and charging the EV.
In winter, I’ve been using Ovo’s 3 hours free for about a year now and that ensures the battery is filled up daily. My electricity bill returns a credit every month since I got the battery a year ago.
I was trying to understand how to do this, and I formed the opinion that most of the battery providers don’t really allow the degree of ‘on/off’ or ‘charge/discharge’ customisation as might be necessary to make this work? Or was I fooled by the packaged products that are aiming to turn me and my battery and panels into a residential power plant at the whim of the energy company?
The most popular batteries provide all the customization you need and more. Soo many features... it is exhausting. Even 'AI' modes trying to predict usage and solar generation using weather forecasts and top up from the grid at cheap rates if it thinks the power will probably be needed. A battery like Sigenergy's you can setup on a time based charging schedule (most popular for the free power plans), or have it pull Amber's live wholesale rates and put it into AI mode to avoid using their SmartShift VPP, or just hand over the keys to a VPP provider and let them drive.
Ours is a FoxES or something and the included app is pretty straight forward. You can easily set it to ALWAYS pull from the grid during specific times and it will (along with the solar), charge the battery to capacity during that time.
Pretty much what I am doing exactly, bar the credit. We don't have gas in my area, throw in a pool, kids who love air con, way too many computers and we burn through a lot of power.
That's the theory. Others in this thread are reporting the reality.
In practice, any profit-making enterprise will not want to miss out on the income they were previously getting, so will find other times and charges to load it onto. Also, they know some people will specifically choose an energy plan that seems to give them something free, so it's easy to take advantage by increasing the prices they pay less attention to.
We already get free power between 0am and 6am, so with free power between 11am and 2pm we’ll have a whopping 9 hours of free power to charge our car and heat our water storage.
What plan and what provider to get free power from midnight to 6am?
I'm in a plan that gets me $0.08/kWh during those hours, and I'm planning to switch to one that's just over half that, but I haven't come across any free power in that time span.
I’m with Powershop currently, but it was a hard toss-up between Powershop and Ovo. Sorry you’re right, it’s not “free” with Powershop (4.99 cents per kWhr), but it’s cheap enough that it’s basically free compared to the cost of living and what we were spending before.
I'm on AGL and looking to change to the Ovo 4.7 cents per kWh (midnight to 6am) plan. The per day supply cost is higher as are some of the other rates, but overall should still save me roughly $20 a month - by my calculations.
For me, Powershop day rate was only 32 cents or so, which made it cheaper overall. We have solar but we use the induction a lot in the evening, so not having a separate higher “on peak” pricing helped us save.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 70.7 ms ] threadIt's also about time that those who lack the means or situation to have solar panels of their own can get some advantage, in a 'herd immunity' kind of way.
I'm in the privileged position to have had solar panels for over a decade, and now have a battery as well, and it was very obvious to me at the time that, in regards to solar, it cost money to save money, so if you couldn't afford it then the savings are inaccessible.
This change hopefully helps those who need it, at least somewhat.
As for everybody in the same time zone .. they are all seeing the same sun angle at noon (more or less) and all sharing the same over supply of power from all the grid connected solar power rooftops and farms. It's free surplas power during that time frame.
Bit like in the UK they had issues with everyone watching popular TV shows and then turning on the kettle after in a perfectly syncronized timing across the country
When solar + wind plunged in price they stopped saying it.
Now that the market has driven down the price of solar, wind and storage, market based mechanisms have become ideal for solving the problem of what to do with surplus electricity.
For instance, I'm looking at a new hot water system. Economically speaking, I'm better off buying an oversized tank using resistive heating that I only need to heat once per day. The grid provides free power and I buy a cheaper appliance. But environmentally it sucks, as more solar needs to be rolled out to cover the additional non-peak usage (guess about 6x the power usage of a smaller tank with heatpump).
If that's right, it's not obvious to me that building a suitably sized solar panel is environmentally worse than building a heat pump.
Economically to me, the larger tank is cheaper, because the appliance is cheaper, and I never pay for the power it uses.
Environmentally, yes, it is not obvious. The large tank requires many more solar panels to power it but no battery. The small tank and heatpump needs much less solar but battery for nighttime use.
But it is weird, because for decades heat pump tech has been pushed as the environmental choice and there are still a number of government subsidies to invest in heat pump hot water systems. And maybe that no longer makes sense, with the money saved buying cheaper and less efficient devices spent on more solar deployments.
Hot water heater tanks are easily one of the most obviously good applications of noon excess energy, and resistive heating elements might as well be free.
Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.
The rest of the states in the NEM are aiming for 2030 to complete their rollouts.
Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.
Eh I sit on the fence on this one. Take your pick as to who is going to abuse the data. Corps or the government to taste.
Consider this very proposal, incentives to use power at certain times are good. But that incentive structure could instead be very anti consumer. Higher prices when we need electricity would be a horrid state of affairs when rents have doubled in 5 years and a lot of people are barely holding on.
They enable new services like feed-in tariffs and incorporation of V2G and VPP infrastructure.
Rents have not doubled in 5 years.
Rental inflation peaked at ~8% and is now below 4% pa.
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/rent-inflation
So yeah, not universal yet. But the precedent means it's moving in that direction. If WA homes end up producing lots of solar at midday then this opens the door there as well.
Victoria deregulated its market before NSW/SA/Qld.
All of the eastern states (SA/QLD/NSW/VIC/Tas) are part of a single market, with interconnects and wholesale prices set every 5 minutes.
Victoria has its own "default offer" and regulator of the retail market, which is also offering similar "free power" hours.
WA could be part of the NEM with some HVDC across the Nullabor, not sure if it would be economically worthwhile though.
Part of the motive of moving the WEM to 5 minute intervals was to eventually leave this option open.
The largest renewable project in the world is being planned in this area[0] so it's feasible that it all may be connected one day
[0] https://wgeh.com.au/overview/
basically a free IQ test.
After: 30c/kwh most of the day, 0c from 11-2
It's still worth it if you have a lot of load you can shift to the middle of the day (like a pool heater or battery), but for most 9-5 workers you just end up paying more at the times you're actually home.
Smart meters are free, most people already have one.
Even if you're not home I'm thinking there are a number of ways to make use of the free elec. Hot water geyser seems like the obvious first candidate.
I'd also think heating (in winter), cooling in summer. Even if you're not there in those times, the effects will be evident for many hours after.
For those who have programmable washer/dryers or dishwashers it's also good. Even ovens on occasion.
I get that not everyone is best placed to take advantage of this, but equally improvements don't have to be an "everyone or no one" option.
The government is having to force them to reflect the abundance of cheap, clean energy at these times in at least one of their tariff offerings.
They can bend the rules slightly by adding other daily charges or limitations and upping the price at other times to reduce uptake and move us all slightly further from the global optimum but maximize their profits.
Not Victoria which has bankrupted itself building roads and railways it cannot afford.
Victoria's default offer will include the same offer from October [1].
Victoria has a separate regulator because it deregulated its electricity grid before the other states.
[1] https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/households/save-energy-and-mon...
Here are two of SA's (which has the most renewable generation): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://web.archive.org/web/20220523164905/https://www.elect...
After all, if the highest demand is between 16:30 and 19:00 you could use batteries to store power at 12:00 and sell it at 18:00 - or in famously sunny Australia you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand.
If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.
No you could not. For half the year the sun has set by 18:00.
It's not entirely due to the apparent size of the sun — refraction due to the atmosphere has a slightly greater effect.
(Singapore is also in the 'wrong' timezone. The sun sets around 7 pm every day, giving it effectively permanent daylight saving time.)
But regardless, Australia is not near the equator. The timezones are mostly ok. In most of the country (for most of the population anyway) the sun sets before 18:00 for roughly half the year. No amount of solar is going to power the evening peak demand without storage.
EDIT
I forgot to say: I like your idea of intraday arbitrage using batteries! It is a very cool idea. Surely, this could be well modeled to know your expected ROI before investment/build-out.
Are they a hoarder of old car batteries and the like?
If you know your way around high voltage DC, got a tractor and appropriate emulator - not exactly difficult or super expensive to pull off.
Granted it's pretty uncommon setup as grid batteries themselves are pretty cheap too and used EV battery is simply too large for home user, too much hassle, liability, etc to save like $2-3k.
(did you mean 20kwh per user, or 20GW overall?)
They are super economical in Australia and the government even offers discounts and interest free loan of 15k to buy them.
It's just a treasonous level of corruption.
Voters opting to be extorted like this would have been stupid.
I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.
The fundamental costs and margin requirements in the system haven't changed.
This is a government-mandated electricity plan (a default market offer) that competitive electricity retailers are now required to offer. Those retailers still have network costs, environmental costs, energy costs, and administration costs to recover, and so prices at other times of day necessarily go up.
Some consumers may be better off on this plan (generally at the expense of other consumers), and some will be worse off.
It's good politics and only so-so policy.
Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
One downside is that large scale solar projects aren't profitable any more. It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech, that they aren't getting a good payoff.
The good news is that co-located solar and battery projects are still profitable, but capital costs are higher and payback period of batteries aren't as good.
The good thing is that even with over a decade of conservative government trying to kill it, renewables are now commercially the only choice for Australia and we will benefit from the rapid advances in storage as well.
Grid level plants are starting to also incorporate synthetic condensers and other FCAS services to make our grid more resilient and reliable, even as our clapped out coal plants move closer to shut down.
You can get a sense of it if you look at the daily breakdown:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=1d&...
You can see the demand peaks around 12pm and 6pm.
The price goes negative around 2pm most days, in which case, as a solar only operator you're losing money to generate power, so quite often there's curtailment.
And then at 6pm, the sun is down so solar-only operators can't capitalise on the opportunity.
So unfortunately it's just a very limited opportunity to make a profit on your investment each day. More demand during the peak generation time would help!
In the US, these people are known as speculators riding on government subsidy or grant, often shadily awarded - and anyone who couldn’t see consumer panel and consumer power-storage tech hooting its inflection point simply didn’t have a good grasp on the technology.
All important factors for investors.
I imagine eventually we might end up with some thermal storage where during peak renewable production you heat/freeze a large tank of water and then utilize it to heat/cool your house for the rest of the day. A large tank of water is much cheaper than battery storage.
A tank of water is cheap, it’s just not possible to distribute hot water over the grid. But it’s very realistic to store it locally and use for heating and cooling. Which is the bulk of power usage anyway.
Some large cold storage facilities in Germany are trying to optimize electric demand to use cheap peak day electricity. But they have to observe limitations in range of temperatures and capacity of cooling devices.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/cold-storage-facilities...
" Compared to conventional cold storage systems, renewable energy-driven cold storage demonstrates a 10–35 % reduction in energy losses"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...
I've been daydreaming about the tank of water idea as well, but the amount of panels you would need on the roof would be crazy.
[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010546076391.html
The other states are aiming for a 100% rollout by 2030.
I feel like they had to kill griddy before all the powerwall solutions started showing up. We simply cannot empower the peasants with both things at once. The ability to store energy makes access to wholesale prices substantially more effective.
I'll never forget the days where we would get push notifications about negative prices. I'd throw the dryer and oven on every time to try and unwind the meter a bit.
Not everything is for everyone. At no point did I feel like I was getting scammed as a customer. I was using them during the winter event.
https://www.amber.com.au/
During this past month with the heatwave, my electricity bill was only about €50 despite running airco all day most days. I have 6 solar panels on my roof for reference (was 3k installed I believe). If I was willing to turn off the A/C at night, I could have easily cut the bill in half since most of the billed usage was between 18-21:00.
You can wash your clothes during this time to take advantage on this.
You can cook on the electric stove during this time to take advantage of this.
No battery is required to do this. I can't connect your logic to my reality.
The payback time was already well in excess of 10 years, but now that power is free during the day, you can't count those hours as helping pay down your investment. Payback time will be 30 + years at least. You are much better just enjoying your neighbors solar rather than paying for your own.
Note: My state 100% renewable energy so reduction of carbon footprint has not bearing on solar decisions.
This also feels like a fairly heavy handed way to encourage investments in batteries. But in the famous words of George W, "can't fool me again". As soon as there are too many batteries and the grid companies are not making enough money, they will introduce fees to have the batteries, or increase connection fees.
In winter, I’ve been using Ovo’s 3 hours free for about a year now and that ensures the battery is filled up daily. My electricity bill returns a credit every month since I got the battery a year ago.
Coinciding with this, suppliers put daily connection charges up.
In practice, any profit-making enterprise will not want to miss out on the income they were previously getting, so will find other times and charges to load it onto. Also, they know some people will specifically choose an energy plan that seems to give them something free, so it's easy to take advantage by increasing the prices they pay less attention to.
So, maybe this is a correction?
I'm in a plan that gets me $0.08/kWh during those hours, and I'm planning to switch to one that's just over half that, but I haven't come across any free power in that time span.
Clarke and Dawe - The Energy Market Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELaBzj7cn14
I can only imagine the comment warnings on that segment considering that, sadly, John Clarke passed away nine years ago.