In short:
Around 75,000 battery storage systems were installed last year, up 47 per cent from 2023.
Current modelling estimates the payback time on a battery system at around eight years for a typical household.
What’s next?
A wide range of experts, including a former RBA deputy governor, are calling for the federal government to introduce household battery subsidies to encourage uptake.
This is suggesting that we use taxpayer funds to offset the installation costs of people who own a house and likely a solar setup already - further reducing their running costs.
But as battery uptake increases, there will be less demand on the grid, so the per kW/h and daily connection fees are going to increase. So any tax paying renter gets to benefit from this by… paying more for their electricity?
To paraphrase Joe Hockey (and the broader Liberal party), I guess “Poor people don’t use much electricity.”
Ooh, to quote that
ball of shithonourable former MP again, maybe they should “Get a good job and buy a house”.Crisis Averted \s
This is where I really really wish we had more takeup on the Neighbourhood Battery Scheme in vic. It’s fucking brilliant. Excess is poured into the batteries from surrounding houses, they can island in the event of a grid failure, it deals with the irregularities in a PV feed in a way that constant-current transformers can’t and it means that the haves make things a little cheaper for the have nots.
Are connection fees going to increase? It’s not like most households with solar + battery storage are going to disconnect, right? And the peak demand will decrease with uptake of solar + battery storage, so households without solar will benefit from lower peak prices.
As the price to remain connected increases and more and more people have batteries, more people will choose to go off grid. It makes the economics even better, so long as you have enough storage.
Lower peak prices will have corresponding higher peak prices.
Part of the reason we have the current extreme lows is because the coal that we currently need cannot be turned off and on easily.
In the long term, when we have sufficient storage to time+geo-shift the required cheap renewables to where they are needed, yes, everyone will benefit.
In the next 10-15 years, I predict massive problems as the existing coal infrastructure is run way past end of life, regardless of our eventual goal being Nuclear or Firmed-Renewables.
The only certainty is that coal is a shambling zombie.
I do predict the connection fee going up, and if enough people disconnect (which they will at a certain price point), I see the connection fee being rolled into people rates like the local bin collection - you’ll pay whether you use it or not, just because it goes past.
Increasing both grid energy and overnight reliability will increase energy prices?
I’m not sure your math is right.
The people that set the price floor currently are the coal burners.
The contracts that they sign with AEMO is why AEMO keeps curtailing the large wind and solar farms, this is why various jurisdictions are getting the ability to stop houses from exporting power.
The maths of supply and demand are tricky when you can literally curtail your competitors supply.