In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
e360.yale.edu192 points by speckx 3 hours ago
192 points by speckx 3 hours ago
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.
If you read the article, most of the decline in gas consumption in Australia is from changes in industrial usage. Residential demand is only down by 6% and part of that is likely due to the effective ban on gas in new residential construction which started in 2023 in Victoria. Prior to 2023 residential gas usage was increasing.
A 50% price decline doesn't imply there's 50% less demand for petroleum. If 6% less demand is all the margin consumers need to get their supply, then price can drop quickly. It's all in the margins.
What is the best way to learn more about this, are there any examples? This seems a bit counterintuitive to me.
It would be useful to know if the industrial use is factories replacing their use with other sources (e.g. I have read that food manufacture is switching to electricity in Denmark, although it can be held up waiting for a grid connection if there's a data centre ahead of it).
Or, did they improve their efficiency.
Or, have they closed.
It has a whole section on the impact of power policy though and 15% of power mix to 7% for gas is significant. Coals fall is notable too.
Australia never had much residential gas usage. Mr he very vast majority of residential homes don’t even have gas. No need for a furnace.
Pretty much every house in Victoria had gas, and gas furnaces, winter is cold enough
free trade's amazing, seriously!
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!
...and then the "colonies" figured out how to weaponize it and turn the balance in their favor.
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.
Modern China is a vastly better place to live than China of 60+ years ago. Many countries are nicer places to live, but 1+ Billion people are simply better off making the “exploitation” narrative ridiculous.
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.
Isn't it because the US has a more entrenched "clean beuatiful coal" class of people?
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.
> they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption
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.
What's funny is that Australian-born Rupert Murdoch has been far more effective in the US than in Australia on this front.
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.
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.
In the end you have to replace those panels and nobody in your country now produces them or has the incentive to start producing them unless they not only drop the subsidies but sell well over market value.
In 25 years, those panels will still be producing 80% of their starting value. Imagine what you can do with 25 years of energy independence.
Well it’s about 40 years since the US started getting stupid about foreign trade and things are not going so well here now. Send help.
You have 25 - 50 years. Put your STE people to work. CSIRO is probably a decent org, give them a Manhattan project?
what if you develop manufacturing capabilities during the 30 years lifespan of the panels?
How many solar panels did you buy?
11, and I wish I'd bought 15
I bought 32 and wished I got another 6 for the south west aspect of the house ... but still, producing 11mWh a year in the UK on an east/west aspect, electricity bill for the year (even with all cars in the household being EV's) is negative. Battery makes the difference - load shifting is doing the heavy lifting in the winter.
I hope you’re generating more than 11 milliwatt-hours per year, guessing you meant MWh :)
32*250*1400=11,200,000 watt hours, which makes more sense ;)
Probably depends on what country they live in and whether their government is spending billions of their taxpayer dollars to simply not build renewable energy projects and invest additional billions on top of that in new oil, gas and coal instead.
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.
> Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included).
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.
As I said in another comment,
> 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
I thought the point of this article was they are benefiting from reduced grid costs?
It definitely has led to a lot of 'I'm not an environmentalist but of course i got solar on the roof and a battery!'. eg. https://xkcd.com/3226/
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.
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)
Fair points, but you are glossing over important issues:
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.
1. The subsidy was fixed per kWh at a level that has always been vastly above utility scale BESS. 2. Power usage is flatlining. There is no reason to need transmission upgrades for BESS. Successful projects are colocated at retiring generators, or at existing major grid terminus. 3. Are those benefits worth 4x the price? Noting again, that's 4x the subsidy, not even the actual installed cost which is closer to 8-12x. 4. It would have been cheaper even at just the subsidy rate.
re: Power usage is flatlining...
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...
also ignoring that Australia is building snowy 2 which is the world's largest battery by far, due to be finished in 2027-2028.
Are you really holding up Snowy 2 as a success story? We're past 20bn on Snowy 2 now. Run those numbers against grid scale BESS, on both capacity and peak generation and get back to me - 10 years ago it looked good, now it's not favourable.
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.
Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. This is a big deal.
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.
We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants.
> 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.
No, we do not in fact have the "power pipes". Those "pipes" have capacity limits. Those "pipes" and getting them approved and built in the US is a key limiting factor that throttles... pretty much everything. Yes, it holds up data centers, but also I've heard 'green' energy advocates complaining for decades about how difficult it is to get the permits and approvals to get wind and solar facilities hooked up, they're holding up nuclear plants, they're holding all kinds of things up.
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.
> We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants.
And when they break, many people lose power.
Ukraine's seen some of the benefits of hyper-local generation over centralized production.
A thousand electricians doing 20kWh installations every week-day add up to 5GWh/year.
There are probably more than a thousand electricians in Australia.
There was an article a few years back about how homeowners in Hawaii were buying solar panels to try to get cheaper power.
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.
That doesn’t sound like Hawaii
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
THIS.
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.
Which translates to "the local power company was knowingly using ineficient sources to steal from their clients, until their clients did something about it and forced them be efficient".
> the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
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?"
If you have to pay a connection fee for having the solar panel hooked up to your houses grid, I could see it ending up cheaper to disconnect the panels and sell them back tbh
I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies I've ever seen in this country. The numbers are much worse than you make out. The program has spent more than 2.5bn (the projected figure) and we don't know yet how much. The subsidy was closer to 70% for a typical large battery install. The government's own gen cost report would have put grid storage 1.5x ahead on ROI.
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.
I've tried to be as charitable on both sides. As you note the real subsidy is higher, but the owner contributions are still high, and the projected cost of the program is now closer to 7.5Bn.
It's pure middle-class welfare.
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.
Decentralization might be dollar-inefficient, but brings resiliency and redundancy to the system. The whole internet infrastructure would be probably cheaper with more centralization. Data backups are also ridiculously innefficient dollar-wise.
These systems are not truly redundant in that sense though - as they are intended to be centrally coordinated (the manufacturer provides a web API). So they are potentially vulnerable to e.g cyberwarfare.
Not all inneficiencies are bad. If the cost to build ridiculously redundant systems is low enough, the system overall is more robust to black swan events than any central planner could ever be.
My neighbour has a battery installation because where I live they subsidise both - the panels and the battery. In the event of a power outage he can keep running his house for ~3 days if being somewhat frugal with consumption.
And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.
It makes enough sense in rural areas for a Vermont power company to lease batteries to residential customers. They avoid having to do expensive upgrades that way:
https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-sourc...
Are we a society though? Margaret Thatcher famously said "There's no such thing as society" and a lot of people have been doing their best to make that true.
There's no use pretending. Utility scale has a single political point of failure. Batteries in home do not.
Sort of. While not really mainstream, there are private roads (and long driveways), wells, and a (limited) amount of home-schooling. Not hospitals obviously as that requires specialized training and equipment.
Honestly this seems like a pretty good efficiency multiplier for a distributed vs. centralized solution at that scale!
Cost is never the only factor though. Being energy independent and self-sufficient feels awesome. Also whole house backup rocks, together with a smart app showing and optimizing your energy usage.
Is this not free market capitalism?
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.
No. The modern grid has little relation to capitalism. There is some private ownership, but there are massive government barriers to entry and massive regulation of the system.
That’s great value for money! Even with gas peaked plants that would cost roughly $10 billion in the US. They should massively expand this program.
The subsidy has the effect of prompting the wealthiest consumers to spend around 2.25x the amount of subsidy on battery installations while reducing the load on the grid, lowering prices for all grid users.
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.
There are still advantages to distributed power generation beyond overcoming governance failures—-microgrids lie somewhere in between and can increase resilience in the face of more severe and unpredictable climate events.
Do you have some citation to back those numbers up?
Final numbers are not known yet. The Australian government's own 'Gencost' report put grid vs home based storage at 2x as efficient. In this subsidy program, the ratio of private to public money per a battery is about 1:2 (ie 70% subsidy). It was in my own case. Therefore, we would have had more battery storage if the government had just built grid storage.
Having your own battery + inverter setup dramatically reduces the ability for the grid utility to screw you over.
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.
It says the subsidy is 30%. You just said it's 70% and that it's 50% in the same sentence. Surely you can give one link to something that backs up anything you said.
Everyone in my office paid around 7.5-8.5k AUD for batteries around the 24k mark, so I know this to be the case. I could email you the invoice if you don't believe me xD
You can read up on the subsidy itself too - they basically set a cost per kwhr target based on the few bespoke batteries on the market, before it was flooded with cheaper Chinese options. Because it was based on capacity rather than a percentage discount, this caused the effective discount to be much higher than intended at the outset.
We don't know the final numbers yet - but government has reforecast for 7 billion for the program's duration, which includes a much smaller subsidy continuing until 2030. I expect it will be close to about 5B spent so far.
The program is of course much more complex than can be fit in a HN comment, and it has evolved over time. The simplest answer is the government contributes $252/kWh. Approx. 4x the cost if the government funded a utility scale BESS - noting the installed cost of a home battery is 400-1200$/kWh depending on brand/options etc.
> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?
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.
Yep. Here in Colorado I installed two powerwalls moderately subsidized by the electricity company. It’s not going to save me meaningful amounts of money even in the long term and I would much rather see energy issues solved at a societal level. But our electricity provider is just unable to reliably keep the lights on through winter and wildfire season, I.e. most of the year. Since installing the batteries a couple years ago our home has stayed warm and lit through two multi-day outages when neighbors have had to go stay in a hotel.
Isn't "subsidized by the electricity company" partially fulfilling "at a societal level"?
It is, yeah. The condition of the subsidy is that up to 60 times a year the electricity company can pull the power from our batteries to cover higher demand. When I said "at a societal level" I was more imagining solar farms and grid level storage though.
I find this seeming opposition (not from you or on this thread train) to installation of backup systems to be a bit befuddling. Battery backup systems, solar roofs/panels, &c. all effectively add excess capacity and resilience to our existing infrastructure. Aside from something like worrying about China's continued dominance in the space I don't really understand the hang up folks seem to have.
Plus in some sense the utilities are regulated by the government but they are private companies. If they're getting out-competed in the market by battery backup systems or other alternatives because of poor performance and high cost, fuck em' they can go out of business. We'll (free market democracies) figure it out.
This isn't a federal government issue in the US. Local and state governments dropped the ball here. No one wants to pay what it costs to bury power lines in most locales, and we have a ton of byzantine regulations that make it slow and expensive to add generation capacity.
What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it? How many days will it take? Have fun.
> Who will you call to repair it?
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?
} What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it?
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.
The point is, if it's your home solar system, damages and repairs are your problem to manage. Localized grid outages might be more common, but you don't have to lift a finger or pay anything extra to get them repaired. The utility just does it. And they start working immediately, even in the middle of the night or on weekends.
> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?
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.
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.
It requires large solar overcapacity to compensate for seasonal intermittency. Dedicated seasonal energy storage might be better economically.
Solar overcapacity is really cheap, because panels are really cheap. Dedicated seasonal energy storage technology doesn't even exist right now, much less economically efficient storage technology. The closest thing would be a massive thermal store used for district heating, but only prototypes are starting right now. Industrial scaling and mass deployment? That's a decade+ away at a minimum.
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.
Given the durability of panels, it'd be fascinating to see roof redesigns, and some changes in panel packaging, that standard large rectangles become the basic components of a 30 year roof. Or as siding. I've seen them used vertically on the Southern walls of commercial buildings in Alaska, and they looked great.
Absolutely. Energy has to be baked into every structural element. Either producing energy, or storing energy, or providing insulation, or acting as a transfer medium (heat pump).
Why don't they do this for cars?
I'd imagine the difference between flat and curved, in addition to very different wear patterns, and inability to get your desired color.
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.
As ever, Volts did a really good episode on this:
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.
David Roberts does not have an EE degree and misunderstands anything related to power system operations. Great for positive vibes and LCOE parading tho.
What does "LCOE" stand for?
Levelized cost of electricity. All the costs that go into producing from a given source (capex and opex) divided by the total power generated.
> All the costs that go into producing from a given source (capex and opex) divided by the total power generated
... total energy generated.
Perhaps Low Cost Of Electricity?
I'm not asking for guesses thank you (especially if they turn out to be incorrect).
elaborate
I'm way less skeptical of Roberts than the parent commenter appears to be, but IMO he is more of a policy person than an engineering person. I still find the podcast very useful, with this lens in mind. There are other podcasts that get deeper into the engineering substance, and it's totally ok for different things to have different emphases.
> David Roberts does not have an EE degree
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?
> 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!
You pay a higher daily supply charge and more per kWh outside this window so it's more like free (conditions apply)
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...
Some of that will be electricity usage that otherwise wouldn't happen, but a lot of it will be shifting load from times where electricity is carbon-intensive to produce to times where there is a surplus that would otherwise go to waste
The electricity is "free" because the energy generation is highest at noon (sun is at its zenith), and the population is at the work (low demand for residential electricity). So there is an oversupply of energy at that point. Just like there is an under supply of (solar) electricity at night time when people are using lights, watching tv and eating dinner but the sun isn't shining.
Solar panels don't necessarily get the most power at noon, as it can depend on what angle they're at if they're static (eg on a roof). Ideally you would want it facing the sun in the afternoon (especially if you don't have batteries and are trying to cut into your AC bill) or morning as you'll get more direct sunlight. It would also depend on how far on the horizon the sun is, which will depend on latitude. So peak generation will depend on how much exposure you'll get.
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.
cause they have massive operational issues induced by effectively must-run oversupply that has increased costs for both ratepayers (and sometimes shifted to the taxpayer to hide costs).
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
you're gonna have to expain that to me.
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?
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.
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.
In Australia people do both. We don't have V2G yet, but EVs plugged in at home overnight with L1 charging can get charged by the home battery that was charged up during the day by the PV on the roof.
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.
When I looked into it it didn't make sense to use an EV as a solar battery, the chemistry isn't made for high cycle counts compared to regular home/solar batteries.
You looked wrong. These batteries can do 100,000 charge-discharge cycles while retaining 80% of their capacity.
1. A couple orders of magnitude more people own homes than EVs; 2. EVs already are used as energy storage, but the thing about EVs is people want to use that energy to yknow, drive them.
That's why paying EV owners is th right incentive. All new cars will be EVs. In 20 years, all cars are EVs.
Agreed. V2G is actually one of the best DER strats out there. The EVs are already purchased, the batteries and PCS are already configured for bidirectional flow in most brands. Coordination/visibility problem remains at Dx level, but actually worth the investment.
The issue here is that EVs tend to be charged when the sun is down. When sun is up you tend to be at work or driving. The surplus power is coming from solar.
EVs are parked 95% of the time. If it's parked, it can be charged. Work places also have electricity.
>Work places also have electricity.
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.
but you're assuming that work provides parking. Its not a given, plus whats in it for the drivers?
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.
Workplaces (and other locations) could offer free/reduced-cost charging, with the caveat that V2L is required. They could guarantee that the vehicle will be at a certain charge level at a designated time, and that the vehicle will never go below a threshold (in case an unanticipated trip is required).
Depends. residential fleets v commercial fleets. different behaviours.
Even most residential batts that get plugged in when they get home typically have SOC >40% (depending on jurisidiction).
surely its possible to invent a "plug in road" system, then cars could charge (at least on highways etc) even when driving. I had this thought ages back when EVs first came out, to tackle the problem of long charge times when doing cross country road trips.
You could run a line overhead on pylons and put a pick up on a pole on the cars.
A smaller version of these things: https://sandtoft.org/wp/
You could combine the best of dodgem cars with drone nets by encasing all the highways in electrified wiring.
Some people drive as if they're in dodgem cars as it is.
On today's episode of "HNer's totally realistic and not deluded idea"...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trolleybus_systems_in_...
It already exists and works so, not that crazy
It's much more difficult when the ownership of the vehicles isn't centralized.
I imagine this would make road repair even more common, intensive, and disruptive than it already is?
Australia is also 4,000km wide. A time difference of 2 - 3 hours. This adds a few more hours of Solar with long distance transmission.
As you say, Australia is very big. Big sections of it are also, as a result, empty. The coast-to-coast "long distance transmission" is not in fact a thing in Australia.
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.
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.
[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...
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…
California is also adding a lot of battery storage… but why are electricity prices falling in Australia and not in CA? Are they outpacing us?
"Energy Minister Chris Bowen said that Australia now has more home batteries than the United States, which has a population 12 times larger."
Yes.
This whole thing started because of some power pylons got destroyed and electricity was not restored for about a year right?
Not quite. It was already starting, but the Federal government at the time was very anti RE.
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.
>That was the Hornsby battery
Hornsdale - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
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 ...
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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
Wholesale power is ~37% of the customer bills.
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.
I think you could use more citations.
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.
in other words there's no winning because circular arguments about how things "really" work, plus insisting on and worst-possible-case-outcomes-as-inevitabilities.
right ...