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.
> The government has moved to make use of this surplus solar energy, including by offering free power in the early afternoon to homeowners in Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia, regardless of whether they have solar panels on their roof or not. The goal is to spur more consumers to run appliances or charge electric vehicles during this window.
Taking the term "1st world problems" to new heights!
so 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 of the utility bill, continue to increase. But hey, LMPs (something residential tarriffs are not as exposed to) are lower!!! LMFAO
In Victoria, today, you could get a $10,000 loan, install a battery in your apartment, and switch to a free power or VPP plan costing just $0.30/day after kickbacks, and have it all pay for itself in 5-10 years. The people being left behind are renters, so some incentive there still needed to get landlords on board. Or legalize and subsidize the wallsocket plugin batteries now on the market so renters can make their own investment.
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 as the solar boom led to too much energy being produced. So everyone started buying batteries (you can even get live feed in/out pricing as a consumer). In fact the government even today will pay you a $3000 subsidy to go install a battery. This is in a country where people can buy cheap batteries with no tariffs (free trade's amazing, seriously!). So everyone who could started doing it. For those in apartments etc. that couldn't easily install solar and batteries they won too since the entire power grid is now half the price.
Another consequence of all this, aside from the cheap power prices during a datacenter boom and Hormuz blockade is that fossil fuel usage is plummeting. Particularly gas https://ieefa.org/resources/slump-eastern-australia-gas-dema... . No need for a gas peak power plant when the grid is packed with batteries. Which is helpful since one of the main issues with the current blockade is a lack of gas globally.
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
Another effect - although wholesale prices are falling for the energy itself - energy providers increased their daily "power grid use" fees. As a result, having electricity at home is still more expensive compared to before.
Australia actually advanced the tech a lot in the 80s with PERC coming from UNSW but as a nation did nothing with it.
One member on the research team transferred the knowledge to China where he got state backing to commercialize it.
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.
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 pay directly you pay for it in other ways like geopolitical power.
Fwiw the reason the ~$6k price point is common in that list is because the rebate is 30% up to $3k including install+inverter. So that's the price point everyone's trying to aim for. You could get smaller systems but may as well maximize that rebate.
Australia's average daily household usage is 15kwh. So 10kwh works well in a country that doesn't need significant night time heating, just daytime (when powers cheap) air conditioning.
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, schools, hospitals. Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? (A: failure of governance)
A distributed grid is a resilient grid. Legacy grid needs massive transmission infrastructure. Solar + batteries at home have zero real estate costs, zero transmission infrastructure costs. Keeps a lot of people employed.
A government subsidized home improvement project is an easy political sale. It gets the homeowners on board, because they will see an immediate drop in energy costs, plus they also get to personally pocket the increased property values.
Versus spending money on utility scale buildouts, where the benefits will come at an undetermined later date, unceremoniously, when the utility company lowers prices. And even after that happens your political enemies will still wag finger at the price tag of your project and ask why don't you spend that somewhere else.
Inefficient and overly preferential towards homeowners? Sure. But better than a policy that will be dead by political reasons. It is what it is.
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.
I wouldn't say they are falling. The pricing is just being distributed differently to make it look like you can beat the system.
For my specific plan, the daily rate (supply charge) has gone up from $1.13 to $1.80. That is a price regardless of any usage. This varies depending on what you select for your usage rates. So if you happen to get a lower per kWh rate, then your supply rate goes up.
Time of use also is manipulative. If you have a variable rate (time of use) then your peak time is much higher than your off peak which is higher still if you were on a fixed rate plan. If you select a plan that has 3 "free" hours then the peak time is rediculous priced.
So to sum up.. You have to have a very good understanding of how you use your power.
Home battery systems, and solar to some extent, are essentially 'pre-pay' schemes. A shift of where your money goes. At least for the next 7 to 10 years which is a rough payback period for solar/battery.
I would also like to mention, when Australia introduced the solar panel schemes, the retailers were paying 60c/kWh for infeed, now they are paying 1 to 2c. The high infeed allowed a home owner to offset their bills by infeeding while at work, sometimes even generate a credit just from solar. Certainly not these days. So what would be the next shift after they get everyone on home battery systems.
I put 7.3kw of panels on our roof for $0 of our money thanks to a $5k rebate and $8k interest free loan. It makes 7.2Mwh of power a calendar year, which would cost $1000 if we had to pay for it.
So for 8 years we pay the loan instead of for the power, then we get -25 years of $1000 a year in our pockets. The price of power is also pre approved to increase a minimum of 5% a year every year here, so the savings will be more than that.
Right now we get a 1:1 credit for anything we put into the grid. If and when that changes I’ll get a battery.
The kicker? We’re in Canada in a tight valley where it snows a ton. If it works here…
I think it would be less click-baity to re-write your first sentence as:
"I put 7.3kw of panels on our roof for a $8k interest free loan and a $5k rebate."
> The price of power is also pre approved to increase a minimum of 5% a year every year here, so the savings will be more than that.
That 5% growth rate sounds economically unsustainable. Power prices in rich, highly-developed countries in the last 50 years surely have grown much slower than 5% per year.
The subsidy was closer to 70%, and in my case I was paid the equivalent of about 10 years of free electricity for a battery with a 10-year warranty. In total somewhere around 5-7 billion AUD was paid out (not yet public) - the wholesale market for comparison is around $16B AUD annually. Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included). Given the extreme volatility of power prices, a figure such as '47% decline' should be taken with a grain of salt - but power prices are certainly a bit lower than last year.
I suspect in practice putting the money into grid scale storage would have taken a lot longer and been more of a PITA.
For a grid scale battery you have to organise financing, deal with local government and NIMBYs putting obstacles in the way, comply with all the red tape etc. On the other hand anyone that owns a home can finance their own mini solar power plant and battery and skip all that. It's kind of genius even if it's not in theory the most efficient way to do it.
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.
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 burdens on the grid, or concentrated in high-income areas, to try to hide the reality of what's possible with highly distributed electricity generation.
And the media in the US have been very willing accomplices in perpetuating this as well.
I have not figured out why its so different between Australia and the US, but it does seem that Australia has a far greater free-market bent when it comes to these things than the US. It's why solar is 4-6x cheaper to install than in the US.
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.
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 they are awkwardly bundled into per-unit charges. As a renter in an urban area I certainly don't think I should pay those costs while those with home solar don't! At current prices I really don't think we should be subsidising home solar at all since it is so much more expensive than utility scale solar.
While a small part of that cost comes from tariffs on solar panels, they're so cheap it doesn't make much difference. The bigger part of the cost differential with Australia seems to be much higher permitting and sales costs.
Is the only reason that a behind the meter subsidy is more efficient because it reduces the upfront for an equivalent kWh storage (with the consumer footing the difference)? I would have thought few, larger, batteries at local substations was more efficient otherwise.
Distribution infrastructure capacity is a current and ongoing concern for summer peak loads (every house turning on air conditioners at once) even with the large government subsidies that have existed for residential solar panels, residential batteries, reverse cycle heat pump cooling/heating and insulation. The cost to rebuild every distribution substation, change every pole-top transformer and rewire suburbs would be much higher if these subsidies never existed.
For most of Australia's population you can look up an annual report that each transmission and distribution operator is required to publish annually for their predicted demand on substations, transmission lines and distribution lines. For example in Victoria this report is the TCPR, an example available at [1]. For many distribution substations, the 10th percentile maximum demand is predicted to occur in the early 2030's, meaning that at least transformers at substations would need upgrading, or the substation rebuilt or expanded. The reasons include higher density development in urban areas, electric vehicle charging and for winter, electrification of gas heating.
As an example of the impact of residential solar generation, [2] states that for an urban growth corridor of Melbourne being built largely in the era of residential solar panels being a standard housing feature, a distribution substation ATS West has 2x 150MVA transformers operating at combined peak of 200MVA, also with 125MW of embedded residential solar generation. Without that 125MW embedded residential solar generation, this substation and feeders perhaps would have had to be replaced years earlier to allow import of ~325MVA rather than ~200MVA. Also not mentioned explicitly in this report is residential battery storage which may be reducing maximum demand from predictions made before residential batteries were widely installed.
As a side note, perhaps Australia perhaps has the most open and transparent electricity market in the world? I don't know any other country where the entire electricity grid down to 230/400VAC distribution lines running on poles in every residential street is available publicly on a map, including serial numbers of poles and ratings of pole-top transformers. And substation schematics and constraint reports, etc are all available through various public reports. I think the transparency demonstrates a great deal of confidence in the electricity grid and how it is managed.
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 ...
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 the time), there may be enough storage to start replacing baseload. This will take decades, but can be done. We gotta start somewhere.
In Europe the battery subsidies could've been used to double the price of electricity and make things worse for everyone paying for it. What a wasted business opportunity.
This works best in areas where cloud cover is consistently low, so solar power doesn't vary much from day to day. That's most of Australia. Two days of dark overcast and the load on non-solar sources goes way up. How much battery do you need before there's no demand for peaking plants? In some places, a day. In others, months?
I looked at cloud coverage maps. There are monthly and annual average maps, and raw data from satellites. Building a map of run length of overcast days would be useful.
While direct government subsidy is one way to increase battery adoption to increase power generation efficiency, a market based approach is for electric power companies to use batteries installed on customer premises as a power bank for the entire grid.
If you ever check out gridstatus.io [0] or similar resources, you may have noticed "storage" or "battery" as a part of the fuel mix. These are most often power company owned centralized facilities.
Another approach is for power companies to leverage batteries installed on customer premises. "A critical mass of home batteries scattered across a region and networked together through so-called virtual power plants, or VPPs, he says, marks 'the shift from energy storage as backup to energy storage as an active grid asset.' [1]"
Landlords have little incentive to install solar if the tenant is paying the power bill. Perhaps legislate that the landlord has to include power in the rent so they have an incentive to install solar.
We also have a solar boom in Germany, unfortunately our minister is trying to stall the deployment of solar instead of copying what Australia is doing very successfully here... it's really a shame!
This article is nothing but a press release. It presents no evidence for it's claim, or details on what prices in what area at what time have been cut.
Meanwhile any Australian can see contary evidence just by looking at their power bill.
It's only natural that countries with an abundance of sunlight will switch over to solar and batteries, especially if the price of the latter comes down.
In the not so distant future, LFP and sodium batteries will become very cheap, no more than a $200 or so for a day's storage of daily electricity usage. That means that in the majority of nations people will essentially have free electricity for their homes and maybe even their cars.
53 comments
[ 254 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadhttps://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-make-rooftop-solar-power-as
Worth a listen, both to learn about how ridiculous the US situation is, and just how good the "news" of abundant solar is.
Taking the term "1st world problems" to new heights!
Fixed costs, the majority of the utility bill, continue to increase. But hey, LMPs (something residential tarriffs are not as exposed to) are lower!!! LMFAO
Anyway that caused power prices to reliably go negative during the day as the solar boom led to too much energy being produced. So everyone started buying batteries (you can even get live feed in/out pricing as a consumer). In fact the government even today will pay you a $3000 subsidy to go install a battery. This is in a country where people can buy cheap batteries with no tariffs (free trade's amazing, seriously!). So everyone who could started doing it. For those in apartments etc. that couldn't easily install solar and batteries they won too since the entire power grid is now half the price.
Another consequence of all this, aside from the cheap power prices during a datacenter boom and Hormuz blockade is that fossil fuel usage is plummeting. Particularly gas https://ieefa.org/resources/slump-eastern-australia-gas-dema... . No need for a gas peak power plant when the grid is packed with batteries. Which is helpful since one of the main issues with the current blockade is a lack of gas globally.
Good to see now a working example that capitalism is an excellent system of rewarding those who solve inefficiencies in markets
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/australia#what-sou...
They did this with a reason. Either to raise prices later or to create a dependency. Even if you don't pay directly you pay for it in other ways like geopolitical power.
Fwiw the reason the ~$6k price point is common in that list is because the rebate is 30% up to $3k including install+inverter. So that's the price point everyone's trying to aim for. You could get smaller systems but may as well maximize that rebate.
Australia's average daily household usage is 15kwh. So 10kwh works well in a country that doesn't need significant night time heating, just daytime (when powers cheap) air conditioning.
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, schools, hospitals. Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? (A: failure of governance)
Versus spending money on utility scale buildouts, where the benefits will come at an undetermined later date, unceremoniously, when the utility company lowers prices. And even after that happens your political enemies will still wag finger at the price tag of your project and ask why don't you spend that somewhere else.
Inefficient and overly preferential towards homeowners? Sure. But better than a policy that will be dead by political reasons. It is what it is.
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.
That equates to AUD$66/kWh, after shipping, installation and connection to the grid. It seems very low. Have you got citations for that number?
For my specific plan, the daily rate (supply charge) has gone up from $1.13 to $1.80. That is a price regardless of any usage. This varies depending on what you select for your usage rates. So if you happen to get a lower per kWh rate, then your supply rate goes up.
Time of use also is manipulative. If you have a variable rate (time of use) then your peak time is much higher than your off peak which is higher still if you were on a fixed rate plan. If you select a plan that has 3 "free" hours then the peak time is rediculous priced.
So to sum up.. You have to have a very good understanding of how you use your power.
Home battery systems, and solar to some extent, are essentially 'pre-pay' schemes. A shift of where your money goes. At least for the next 7 to 10 years which is a rough payback period for solar/battery.
I would also like to mention, when Australia introduced the solar panel schemes, the retailers were paying 60c/kWh for infeed, now they are paying 1 to 2c. The high infeed allowed a home owner to offset their bills by infeeding while at work, sometimes even generate a credit just from solar. Certainly not these days. So what would be the next shift after they get everyone on home battery systems.
Lots of other stuff affects end-user prices though.
So for 8 years we pay the loan instead of for the power, then we get -25 years of $1000 a year in our pockets. The price of power is also pre approved to increase a minimum of 5% a year every year here, so the savings will be more than that.
Right now we get a 1:1 credit for anything we put into the grid. If and when that changes I’ll get a battery.
The kicker? We’re in Canada in a tight valley where it snows a ton. If it works here…
"I put 7.3kw of panels on our roof for a $8k interest free loan and a $5k rebate."
That 5% growth rate sounds economically unsustainable. Power prices in rich, highly-developed countries in the last 50 years surely have grown much slower than 5% per year.For a grid scale battery you have to organise financing, deal with local government and NIMBYs putting obstacles in the way, comply with all the red tape etc. On the other hand anyone that owns a home can finance their own mini solar power plant and battery and skip all that. It's kind of genius even if it's not in theory the most efficient way to do it.
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 burdens on the grid, or concentrated in high-income areas, to try to hide the reality of what's possible with highly distributed electricity generation.
And the media in the US have been very willing accomplices in perpetuating this as well.
I have not figured out why its so different between Australia and the US, but it does seem that Australia has a far greater free-market bent when it comes to these things than the US. It's why solar is 4-6x cheaper to install than in the US.
These costs of distortion vary very little based on how much you as an individual consume but they are awkwardly bundled into per-unit charges. As a renter in an urban area I certainly don't think I should pay those costs while those with home solar don't! At current prices I really don't think we should be subsidising home solar at all since it is so much more expensive than utility scale solar.
While a small part of that cost comes from tariffs on solar panels, they're so cheap it doesn't make much difference. The bigger part of the cost differential with Australia seems to be much higher permitting and sales costs.
For most of Australia's population you can look up an annual report that each transmission and distribution operator is required to publish annually for their predicted demand on substations, transmission lines and distribution lines. For example in Victoria this report is the TCPR, an example available at [1]. For many distribution substations, the 10th percentile maximum demand is predicted to occur in the early 2030's, meaning that at least transformers at substations would need upgrading, or the substation rebuilt or expanded. The reasons include higher density development in urban areas, electric vehicle charging and for winter, electrification of gas heating.
As an example of the impact of residential solar generation, [2] states that for an urban growth corridor of Melbourne being built largely in the era of residential solar panels being a standard housing feature, a distribution substation ATS West has 2x 150MVA transformers operating at combined peak of 200MVA, also with 125MW of embedded residential solar generation. Without that 125MW embedded residential solar generation, this substation and feeders perhaps would have had to be replaced years earlier to allow import of ~325MVA rather than ~200MVA. Also not mentioned explicitly in this report is residential battery storage which may be reducing maximum demand from predictions made before residential batteries were widely installed.
As a side note, perhaps Australia perhaps has the most open and transparent electricity market in the world? I don't know any other country where the entire electricity grid down to 230/400VAC distribution lines running on poles in every residential street is available publicly on a map, including serial numbers of poles and ratings of pole-top transformers. And substation schematics and constraint reports, etc are all available through various public reports. I think the transparency demonstrates a great deal of confidence in the electricity grid and how it is managed.
[1] https://www.powercor.com.au/network-planning-and-projects/ne... -- refer to the PDF document in the TCPR zip file download for a substation-by-substation analysis in easy to read format.
[2] https://media.powercor.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/121...
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.
I looked at cloud coverage maps. There are monthly and annual average maps, and raw data from satellites. Building a map of run length of overcast days would be useful.
If you ever check out gridstatus.io [0] or similar resources, you may have noticed "storage" or "battery" as a part of the fuel mix. These are most often power company owned centralized facilities.
Another approach is for power companies to leverage batteries installed on customer premises. "A critical mass of home batteries scattered across a region and networked together through so-called virtual power plants, or VPPs, he says, marks 'the shift from energy storage as backup to energy storage as an active grid asset.' [1]"
0. https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
1. https://e360.yale.edu/features/home-battery-vpps
In the not so distant future, LFP and sodium batteries will become very cheap, no more than a $200 or so for a day's storage of daily electricity usage. That means that in the majority of nations people will essentially have free electricity for their homes and maybe even their cars.