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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.
Or, did they improve their efficiency.
Or, have they closed.
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!
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.
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.
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.
The propaganda is still going really strong in the US. Talk to the population and 1/3 to 1/2 will happily tell you that EVs have fully failed and are being abandoned and will never gain traction in the future. And solar? Lol. Even the people who are saving money with it tend to refuse to talk about it due to the cognitive dissonance.
Utility leadership is highly tech-averse, change averse, and rooting for the "clean beautiful coal" sports team. But also they can't imagine a future where there's massive electrification, with people switching from gas to getting their car energy from the grid, and being able to profit from it. It's somewhat shocking, but just like US car manufacturers, utility leadership is from a different era and are rentiers, rather than innovators.
The policy relevant question then boils down to, in two decades how many countries will be producing enough solar panels to export it? How many will be friendly to my country?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO
I am generally sympathetic to this POV but I think for solar and batteries actually I end up leaning the other way. Solar PV scales appropriately for home owners unlike wind or indeed any conventional generation and both solar and batteries change how their owners feel about this so that you end up with people who have "skin in the game" in a way they didn't have when it was a BESS install six miles away they saw on TV once and have never thought about since.
> For 2N government dollars, the program gets 3N home battery. Grid is 2x more efficient by their own accounting. Therefore, we could have gotten 4N grid storage. This is not comparable to the home solar programs - which I understand to 'enticed' more private investment. Simply buying votes and lying to the public. I feel for the renters who paid their taxes and never saw a cent.
I'd rather the 50% of Australians who don't own the home they live in had skin in the game! But I do love my 42kwhr battery
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.
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)
1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping.
2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries.
3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of demand. It also increases resilience of the grid.
4. You assume the political will was there for government and taxpayers to bear the full cost burden of development of the batteries.
Where are you getting that? The 2026 AEMO plan says:
"Electricity consumption is expected to almost double over the coming decades, driven by population and economic growth, electrification across homes, businesses and industry and the emergence of new large loads such as data centres."
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp...
Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.
It's pure middle-class welfare.
I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.
> 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.
There's also something to be said for distributed production and storage. We don't all live in ultra-compact cities. I agree apartment buildings don't need to be playing this game. But Australia (and the US) are extremely dispersed relative to Europe, for example. There should, in theory, be resilience in distributed production and storage that grid managers could call upon to help manage point failures.
And when they break, many people lose power.
Ukraine's seen some of the benefits of hyper-local generation over centralized production.
There are probably more than a thousand electricians in Australia.
Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
This does
“ A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted Photovoltaics proved so successful in Hawaii that the local utility, HECO, has instituted policies to block further expansion”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-solar-boom-so-s...
As of today Hawai’i rates are at $0.40+ per kWh
I don't live in Hawaii anymore, but when I last did and HELCO was still allowing homeowners to participate their home solar with a grid tie they had the following limitations: no matter what your balance of power production to consumption differential was, there was no discount for a base 'connection fee' - essentially the lease of the meter.
They would sell each household kWh at full price, and 'purchases' daytime production at a wholesale rate derived from a mainland commercial grid interconnect rate, the difference was about one order of magnitude, and their meter had the ability to cap output from the panels, such that no matter what the purchase price of excess power would never exceed the consumed power price, and every month there was at least $80ish in connection fee.
This kept most of my neighbors from either, a) considering solar for the household, or b) deciding to stay disconnected from the grid when the house finished installation.
My friends with new houses being built mauka (up-country) also faced a Many-KiloUSD per pole cost to run lines along the road to new housing areas, and if even you could get everyone on a road to pitch in for a new run it often was more economical for everyone to just DIY their own selection of solar, wind, generator, batteries and it still was less expensive than just running the lines, even before accounting for kWh costs.
Even in towns down closer to the coast, it still made more economic sense to use wind+solar and a batteries with a backup generator than to pay for HELCO's power... which also came in with such erratic voltage and irregular wave profiles that it routinely toasted anything sensitive, from refrigerators, televisions, washing machines, you name it... which careful reading of the manufacturer warranties shows that for most main brands they specifically exclude Hawaii from any guarantee of service or replacement.
Now, HECO services a different island than where I lived, and the situation is widely variable in each of the islands, with completely different rules and operating practices. So that's not to say my observations have any validity outside of Big Island, and some limited observation from friends' ohana in Maui.
When we lived in town, it was necessary to put UPS inline for everything more complicated than a toaster oven, and when we moved way up mauka to our little goat farm, the answer was solar and at first golf cart batteries, then a whole stack of recycled/reconditioned submarine iron core 1.2v cells and some very heavy duty cycle inverters; combined with extremely conservative electricity consumption: about 10~15 kWh per week.
One of the benefits of using all LED red lighting at night, and living at elevation to never need A/C, plus methane digester powered by goat waste for refrigeration and mostly using a rocket stove for cooking with guava wood. and no TV, no tower PC, hand crank wringer for laundry like most mainland peoples great-grandparents and line dry on the patio where the rain cant soak them and the wind might get them dry before too long. Its not an easy or soft way to live, but in many ways my wife and I wish we sere still there.
I'm sure this is the way you remember it, and maybe even the way it was explained in that article but if you bought a solar panel the sunlight to power it is free, so your electricity from the panel is free. You're not "buying" that power and so the commercial supply can't be "cheaper".
Now if I've paid $5000 for a product which makes me electricity for free and then later you offer me the same amount of electricity for just $4000 you could say yours is cheaper, but, er, I already bought that $5000 product, I'm already out $5000 and my electricity is free, yours is not actually cheaper now. What we're seeing here is just "Did you know solar panels have become cheaper over time?"
And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.
https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-sourc...
There's no use pretending. Utility scale has a single political point of failure. Batteries in home do not.
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 cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term!
The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck.
Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.
Investing in more grid power would require additional grid capacity which would raise the price for all grid users, and with cheap renewables that would be an increasing amount on power bills.
Everyone I know has had that happen at one time or another, and it’s extremely common to want home battery just for the degree of ‘power sovereignity’ it grants you.
That's simple! As per Felon Musk - to sell overhead to electricity providers. Allegedly they will gladly buy energy from you! So with big enough roof, you can just sit home relax and watch TV, while your solar panels make your living.
Because government is failing to address these issues?
Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time.
But what the hell are you supposed to do when the power goes out and it takes a few days to get turned back on? Well, spend $10,000 - $20,000 and install your own backup power. Is it inefficient? Sure! Does that matter? Absolutely not.
Solar installer. Or DIY if you're handy.
> Who will pay for it?
Homeowner or insurance.
> How many days will it take?
Depends on the availability of installers. Or your skills.
I don't know why this is some gotcha. How many times have you had a storm rip your roof off and take down the entire neighborhood's grid? And if that happened would you still live in your house or find temporary accomodation?
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.
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.
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 benefit on cars is also pretty small, at least whenever I've bothered to calculate it. Cars need a massive amount of energy compared to a house, and have far less surface area.
We could build seasonal overcapacity today, and it would be nearly economically competitive with existing fossil sources.
It's hard to internalize just how cheap solar panels have become. Keeping the same inverter and grid connection, and doubling the panel capacity, nowhere near doubles the cost of the install.
https://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.
Elon Musk doesn't have an automotive or aeronautical engineering degree. People can understand work they don't have a degree in.
> misunderstands anything related to power system operations
Do you have some examples?
Taking the term "1st world problems" to new heights!
The supply charge is 6% higher for the Solar Sharer plan, while the peak rate is 92% higher. Solar Sharer’s peak rate is almost double the flat rate. The off-peak rate is 17% lower than the flat rate.
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/solar-sharer-plans-compa...
IMO, this plays into how solar is used. An individual household would have different goals than a grid-level solar/battery project depending on how they consume electricity. A grid is going to optimize (ignoring any desire for extra capacity for days without sun) for the peak that tends to happen between 4-6 for most western grids.
And then try to fix those problems with populist TOU rate magic (they won't be fixed), and bills continue to rise!! But hey, LMPs are down LOLOLOLOL
so cheaper 'leccy prices are bad? or that this upfront cost to get batteries installed are bad? even though long term costs will be dropping?
I mean whats the cost of 30% of 500k batteries compared to creating a new peaker genny or five?
The solar PV and now storage rollouts in Australia have been one of the best government investments in public infrastructure in my lifetime here.
The more we electrify, the less reliant we are on the crude -> foreign refineries -> imported/distributed fuel risk.
Harvesting solar power is an awesome thing to do both at home and utility level.
PV and wind utility installations are being built with storage co-located, there are companies building synthetic condensers to maintain the grid stability and the job of frequency support is now done mostly by batteries, not gas.
We need to make electricity basically "too cheap to meter" and electrify our primary industries, mining and agriculture.
Only households can access the free electricity window. If you're not on a free plan you can get reduced rates during the solar peak window but business accounts aren't allowed to access those either.
plug my car in, it might be full, it might be empty, either way its racking up the charge cycles for no direct benefit for me.
Batteries on a house makes a better sell for customers, and also targets the problem of both over supply and over consumption at source.
Even most residential batts that get plugged in when they get home typically have SOC >40% (depending on jurisidiction).
A smaller version of these things: https://sandtoft.org/wp/
Some people drive as if they're in dodgem cars as it is.
China has long distance HV transmission, but it's crazy expensive and they built it because most of China's people live near its coast but most of its solar power is in the interior so the power needs to be moved.
Australia is exceptional for having a lot of humans who live somewhere that's incredibly sunny. The whole place is sunny. It'll vary from place to place whether that's only "Southern Spain" sunny or full-on "Middle of the Sahara Desert" sunny, but it's all very sunny indeed, if you were inventing a country to buy solar panels Australia would be that country.
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...
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…
Yes.
South Australia had a single interconnect to the rest of the Australian Energy Market that covers the states except for WA and Northern Territory.
There was a big storm that took out an interstate interconnect and the voltage spike caused all the other generators to disconnect to protect themselves.
Then Elon promised to build utility storage in 6 months or the state would get it for free.
That was the Hornsby battery which is mainly used for Frequency services (basically when supply/demand fluctuates, it keeps things stable).
That used to be done by gas plants, but the battery saved a large chunk of its cost in the first year by being able to switch on much faster.
Hornsdale - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
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
The other costs are the "poles and wires" distribution network and the HV transmission network.
The government is also building out the transmission network to various renewable energy zones, which has the added benefit of making the transmission network more resilient.
With large coal plants, the network was only one interconnector failure from blacking out a state (as happened to South Australia).
Now there is a much better network of interconnected transmission across the entire east and south coast of Australia, covering something like 80% of the population.
The government just bailed out an aluminium smelter that was going to close because of the increased cost of power because it was relying on an old coal plant. Now that will be replaced with renewables.
So we get the benefit of the continued operation of the smelter, as well as the build out of replacement generation for the old coal plants at EOL that will be closed by 2030.
The South Australia blackout was not caused by coal or renewables or lack of interconnectors. If there had been zero interconnects (the local grid was self-sufficient) it wouldn't have happened! The primary cause of the extended blackout was simply a lack of readiness/contingency planning/compliance particularly at several large windfarms. See wiki article.
Coal is generally cheaper for baseload power like an aluminum smelter, even though solar is cheaper during the day. Firming with wind/battery is not yet competitive but is getting very close and is at the point where building new coal power plants is not viable. Refer to gencost report. However, replacing such a large load with brand new renewable capacity is almost certainly more expensive than simply continuing to burn coal, particularly when factoring in the grid upgrades required to make such a transition.
right ...