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thedays 1 days ago [-]
This article is misleading as it implies that Australian energy retailers must provide every household with 3 hours of free electricity.
This is not the case. From 1 July 2026, Australian energy retailers with more than 1,000 customers must offer at least one energy plan which includes 3 hours of free electricity, capped at 24kWh per day, to residential customers in 3 states - NSW, SE Queensland and South Australia.
https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer
Not all energy plans that the retailers offer have to include 3 hours of free electricity. In practice, most energy plans currently offered don’t include 3 hours of free electricity but some retailers such as Globird are offering more than one energy plan which includes ‘free’ electricity.
The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity.
Australian consumers can choose the retailer and energy plan their home or business is on and can change their plan at any time.
Wait, capped at 24 kWh a day? Our household consumed 8 kWh per day over the past week (gas cooking, no airco). So with a home battery that sinks 10 kWh during those 3 hours you have minimal energy costs?
AnotherGoodName 1 days ago [-]
Quite simply put this is what they ask you to do. To the point that the Australian government will heavily subsidise (30%) home battery installation.
Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course). It’s not hard to achieve this for any competent government. Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is also corrupt and inefficient).
This rollout of cheap solar in Australia is causing power prices during a global energy crisis and a datacenter build out to plummet.
And fwiw i don’t think Australia’s government is perfect. But it should set the bar to other nations of ‘what could be’. You could have falling power prices right now if you enabled a government to encourage what is currently by far the cheapest form of electricity (solar).
tialaramex 1 days ago [-]
The bits of China where most of its people live are pretty mediocre for solar power. Like, Southern France at best, not Australia, not even California.
China is huge, and it does have huge solar farms, but the trouble is now you need a huge power transport infrastructure. Australia can move enough power from a desert where nobody lives to a small city 100 kilometres away on a few ordinary hundred kV pylons and be happy. China has huge cities, 2-3 thousand kilometres from those solar farms so it is building long chains of 1MV pylons which is the same idea but at this incredible scale.
Reason077 1 days ago [-]
> ”Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course).”
China is adding around 10X Australia’s total installed solar power generation every single year. Half of the entire world’s deployed solar is in China.
And while Australia’s solar growth is impressive, it’s worth remembering that it’s only possible because of China. It was Chinese government policy that pushed to develop the huge solar industry that exists today and supplies vast quantities of cheap solar panels to the world.
thedays 23 hours ago [-]
This is true - without Chinese manufacturing of solar cells and panels, solar energy would not be as cheap as it is today.
Equally true is that Chinese manufacturing of solar cells is only partly possible because of Australian solar research and development. In 1983, a research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), invented the PERC silicon solar cell. This design fundamentally improved solar cell efficiency to capture sunlight more effectively and reduce electronic losses. Over several decades of refinement, the UNSW team continued to set global efficiency records, pushing cell efficiency from 18% in 1984 up to 25% by the early 2000s.
The solar research group at UNSW trained over 120 PhD students who went on to establish solar manufacturing, particularly in China.
benmanns 22 hours ago [-]
Thank goodness for globalized economies.
jeffybefffy519 6 hours ago [-]
And our solar market regulator is corrupt AF, its just a giant money spinner for battery and solar makers/installer.
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
> Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course)
This is a remarkable stat that's the opposite of what I expected, but I suppose China is (a) starting from a lower base and (b) much, much larger in absolute population. Australia's population would fit in Chongqing.
AnotherGoodName 1 days ago [-]
Chinas solar rollout is absolutely pathetic. Netherlands is a close second to Australia in case anyone wants to argue latitude or population density alone is a cause. Germany’s up there too. In fact on a per capita basis China’s way down the list.
Where people get misled on China’s rollout is total generation (since it’s a huge fraction of the worlds population) and the fact that they do large centralised rollouts rather than enabling rooftop solar. So they have some of the biggest solar farms. Rooftop solar is the way the countries that have shot past china have mostly achieved results - remove barriers to installation and grid connection and suddenly every citizen is invested in it since it saves them money. It’s the classic efficiency win from a massively motivated population vs a central bureaucracy. China’s showing everyone how NOT to enable solar.
seanmcdirmid 1 days ago [-]
How would rooftop solar even work in China, especially in Chinese cities? Is the assumption that SFHs or at least row homes are as common in China as they are in other countries?
insane_dreamer 1 days ago [-]
SFH's are rare in China outside the villages; big cities are all high-rises (in Beijing, and I believe other large cities, it's illegal to build SFH's within the city limits, though the few remaining "hutongs" are exempted for historical reasons)
seanmcdirmid 23 hours ago [-]
Yes, I think most of us know that, so I find the statement to be confusing that China is behind on personal solar. Of course they are! It is never going to be much of a thing as urbanization continues to accelerate, because people just don't live in those kinds of houses where you have your own roof to put solar panels on. You are much more likely to see community solar instead, or solar plants (along with wind farms) in western china sending energy to eastern china via transmission lines. And you better bet that in rural china the 农民 are using whatever free electricity they can get (I've seen water wheels in the weirdest of places).
When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water. Well, I could tell when they turned on the central heating plants for the winter because I finally had hot water showers again.
insane_dreamer 20 hours ago [-]
> When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water
was that recently? I lived there from 2011-2017 and solar power was virtually unheard of, much less powering any buildings. But yeah, China is that kind of place that the city decides when you get heating in your apartment (Nov 15 IIRC, so early Nov could be _really_ cold inside; we wore our coats).
seanmcdirmid 17 hours ago [-]
That was way back in 2008! Solar has been in China for a long time, but they were using it directly to warm the water, not via photovalic panels (which is why the results were so bad).
insane_dreamer 5 hours ago [-]
well, whatdoyouknow, maybe our apartment's water was indeed heated by solar and I just had no idea :)
1 days ago [-]
seanmcdirmid 1 days ago [-]
China’s problem is geography and density: they have plenty of ideal land for solar in the west, but people largely live in the east in tall apartment blocks in cities that are often cloudy. They build lines to send the power east, but can only build so much capacity per year while the problem is pretty big.
I reckon more Australians live in SFHs than apartment blocks (so have roofs where personal solar makes sense), and the major cities get more son than eastern Chinese cities do.
kiproping 1 days ago [-]
Why is China's government corrupt? specifically when it comes to solar? Are they not accused of the opposite, overdoing solar? Help me understand your critique.
AnotherGoodName 1 days ago [-]
The have hardly any solar per capita compared to Australia. They are occasionally held up as an example by misguided westerners as if what they’ve achieved is an example of good policy on solar when it’s utterly dwarfed on a per capita basis by countries like Australia.
lenkite 10 hours ago [-]
For every single person alive in Australia, there >52 alive in China. So comparing solar per capita to Australia is a useless metric.
zardo 1 days ago [-]
They also have hardly any GDP per capita compared to Australia.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
That doesn't actually mean anything though. It's a measurement several layers abstracted from the thing that matters, which is how many panels they can build and deploy.
dmoy 1 days ago [-]
And the geography (especially in the more populated areas) is like 60-70% mountains and hills and shit. Australia has significantly more flat land for easy solar builds, with 1/50th the population.
anakaine 23 hours ago [-]
Australia tends to do far more rooftop solar than it does solar farming, so the requirement for flat land is really.more a requirement for houses not to be in valleys surrounded by mountains.
marcosdumay 1 days ago [-]
Apparently, Australia has ~3x times rollout of solar than china, what is mostly caused by a much higher per capita consumption in Australia, both countries having basically the same share of electricity generated from renewables.
China is adding 10 Australias worth of new solar generation every single year (315 GW of new solar installed just in 2025 alone). Half of all the entire world’s solar is deployed in China.
marcosdumay 1 days ago [-]
Chona also has about 50 times more people, what makes the per-capita numbers work like what is in my comment.
Reason077 24 hours ago [-]
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cavisne 16 hours ago [-]
Australia has a fake residential electricity market, until this year they had to directly offset electricity bills.
This year is the only year that prices have gone down.
twelvedogs 17 hours ago [-]
you're providing a chunk of storage for excess power for free
i know a guy who bought an arseload of batteries and buys and sells off the grid to make a moderate amount of money. he says it's not really paying back the time spent but he does it because he finds it interesting to optimise
throwthrow7766 24 hours ago [-]
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budsniffer952 1 days ago [-]
>Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is also corrupt and inefficient).
So countries are only behind Australia because of corruption? And the US is only behind because of Trump, specifically?
Man, must be nice to have such a basic view of the world; everything so sinpmy explained.
DFHippie 1 days ago [-]
The US is paying developers billions of dollars to scrap renewable energy projects. This is Trump policy. We're in a league of our own for sure.
It's not all Trump, of course. It's also the people who put him in office twice, the folks who block upgrading the grid, etc. etc.
tialaramex 1 days ago [-]
Trump hates specifically wind turbines (or "windmills" as he insists on calling them). Which isn't to say his administration is friendly to solar projects, but the stuff which makes Trump visibly angry is the wind turbines. The fact this works and is free power is very annoying for a man who insists they can't work and shouldn't be used.
So yeah, Trump doesn't help, but in respect specifically of Solar you'd likely see pretty similar policies from many US regimes, including mainstream Democrats.
tahoeskibum 1 days ago [-]
Texas is beating California by a large margin when it comes to solar due to bureaucratic red tape and "environmental" review in California along with monopolistic utility companies, which have successfully lobbied against solar by removing net metering and adding in extra solar connection charges.
ZeroGravitas 1 days ago [-]
Texas generates a lot more power than California.
The generate more grid solar, more wind, more gas and more coal than other states.
They're still #2 to California when you include distributed solar though.
s1artibartfast 22 hours ago [-]
That isnt an point for california because distributed solar is an economically inefficient solution.
It is only attractive in California due to a combination absurd electricity prices from State sanctioned monopolies and red tape preventing grid development.
ZeroGravitas 14 hours ago [-]
Coal is economically inefficient compared with distributed solar.
Nuclear is broadly on par in cost.
The health impact costs of running existing coal plants in Texas are higher than the cost of installing new rooftop solar. That's ignoring carbon costs, which could be the same again.
And that's at Texas install costs. While low for America they are double Australian costs mostly due to poor permitting regulations and lack of competition.
This artificially makes the gap between utility and rooftop solar wider.
So you're being weirdly specific in your desire for economic efficiency.
s1artibartfast 12 hours ago [-]
What is oddly specific about it?
We should cut red tape and permitting processes to enable low cost green energy from the cheapest sources.
The California model is one of the last states should look to as an example of how to run an energy market and roll out solar.
ralferoo 1 days ago [-]
From what I can tell, Trump mostly doesn't like them because you can see some from his vanity golf course in Scotland. He has absolutely zero interest in the significant benefits they provide, he only cares about the fact he can see them from "his" land.
I remember when the first ones started appearing in the UK over 30 years ago and people were quick to complain about how ugly they looked. But actually, over time I think most people accept them now, and personally I think they're pretty cool. Most of the UK ones are actually off shore now - you can just about see them from the coast, but they're just small specks on the horizon at that distance. I think the biggest concern people have with them now is the belief that lots of birds get killed by them, but the reality is that actually many more birds die every year from flying into windows than get hit by turbine blades.
murderfs 24 hours ago [-]
You're right, China should stop selling solar panels to Australia and deploy them internally.
anakaine 23 hours ago [-]
They have been mass deploying solar and battery. They also realise that they can make profit from export markets because internal supply capacity exceeds internal demand.
reyoz 1 days ago [-]
This is what I am doing. 42 kWh battery, 6 kW solar and fully electrified house, 2x EVs. I am able to charge cars at work and so in the depths of winter I am able to run the house by charging during the 3 hour window. There have been just a couple of cold (~2-4 degC) days when the battery was depleted 1-2 hours before the window starts.
As the weather warms and we get more solar exposure we will easily be in excess. We get a very small export rate with a bonus for no energy consumption during peak evening hours which can offset the fixed daily charge.
There are a lot of gotchas that you need to be aware of. 42 kWh is nominal capacity not the actual usable capacity. House load, max grid import and export capacity, max inverter capacity, AC or DC coupled panels, battery charging profile, battery temp are all factors in how much you can charge in the window. For example I have max 15 kW grid draw, with a 10 kW inverter that can charge the battery. I can put in max ~30 kWh into the battery, so I also run other loads in the house to use the other 5 kW capacity. If I go over 5 kW house load the battery charge is clipped to maintain grid import limit.
throwaway2037 1 days ago [-]
> I am able to charge cars at work
Nice perk! Does you know who pays for the electricty? Is this "virtue signalling" by the company or landlord... or a subsidy from the local/state/national gov't? To be clear, I am not making any value judgement about providing free charging for EVs. It seems like good gov't policy to promote the adoption of EVs.
freshpots 1 days ago [-]
It costs $5-$10 for the electricity to charge a car using level 2 charging. It is a trivial "perk" for an employee that costs an order of magnitude more per hour of work.
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
Never mind that, the cost of an urban parking space is considerable.
While that's an extreme, I would expect the cost of any urban parking space with a low speed charger to be dominated by the land, then the charger one-off install price, and thereafter electricity use is a pretty trivial cost.
Not trivial if they a bunch of chargers. I work for the state in California and we have chargers at work but are charged for them around $.29/kWh which is cheaper than Tesla I think.
ggreer 1 days ago [-]
Are they fast DC chargers or level 2 chargers? If it's the former, then that is cheap. If it's latter, then that is some expensive electricity.
I'm in Washington where electricity is cheaper, so 29 cents per kWh is not much cheaper than Tesla's superchargers. The closest one to me is 31 cents in the middle of the day and goes as low as 20 cents per kWh at night. I pay 8 cents per kWh at home, which is where I charge (at much slower speeds) unless I'm on a road trip.
throwaway2037 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I was thinking the same. If you look on Google Maps, California has some epic large parking lots next to office complexes. If you had 100+ "free" EV chargers that could add up pretty fast with California's expensive daytime electricity prices.
yen223 20 hours ago [-]
Often think about how the most expensive part of driving in Sydney, especially in an EV, is parking.
insane_dreamer 1 days ago [-]
it costs me ~$5 to charge my car overnight at home (level-2) thanks to a residential electricity plan that offers very cheap night/weekend rates in exchange for more expensive rates at peak hours
yandie 1 days ago [-]
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reyoz 1 days ago [-]
We have a company fleet which is being slowly converted to EV where possible in line with company net zero policy so there is good charging infrastructure that is extended to all employees. We also have other initiatives such as solar and biogas generation.
bahmboo 1 days ago [-]
throwaway account and "virtue signalling" plus a dig at so called subsidies. Oh and "no value judgement" except for the value judgement. You are not helpful here.
throwaway2037 1 days ago [-]
Fair point: I work in an industry that checks social media before job offers, so it is not possible to have a public Internal persona. If you look at my profile, you will see that I have been here many here with a modest amount of "Internet points".
sjsdaiuasgdia 1 days ago [-]
> Is this "virtue signalling"
> I am not making any value judgement
Calling something "virtue signalling" is a value judgement.
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
It’s a pretty nasty insult wrapped up in friendly-sounding language.
som 1 days ago [-]
Forget 3hrs free. We lived in the tropics in Australia with a ~6kW system and often had negative quarterly invoices (i.e. got paid by our retailer) ... esp. in winter months. Aircon, pool, appliances all electric. At the very least the pool pump ran free all year round.
Edit: should add, that's straight solar no battery
throwaway2037 1 days ago [-]
> often had negative quarterly invoices (i.e. got paid by our retailer) ... esp. in winter months
"[I]n winter months"? My stupid northern hemisphere brain did a double take; I needed to remind myself that Christmas (December) is summer!
cutterl6 1 days ago [-]
Winter is the cold one down here too mate
cmoski 1 days ago [-]
It's got nothing to do with the hemisphere.
Most likely the aircon is running less in winter so they don't use as much power. There is not much of a winter in the tropics.
som 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry should have been clearer, in winter there's no aircon (but also no heating, it's 20-25 deg c) and the pool pump runs approx 50%
pluralmonad 1 days ago [-]
What are some direct solar appliances or equipment you've found that you like?
1 days ago [-]
testing22321 1 days ago [-]
We live in a deep valley where it snows a ton in Canada, and with 7.2kw of panels and no battery we only get a bill in winter. For the entire year our power bill is $500, and we have heat pump heat, and disconnected the natural gas.
We just got a very high efficiency wood stove, I expect we will now have no electricity bill each year.
Tuna-Fish 1 days ago [-]
The Australian grid presently curtails ~7-18% of production every single day between 11:00 and 14:00.
I believe that incentivizing people to acquire batteries is precisely the purpose of the policy. It's good for the grid for there to be a lot of storage at the edges. As I understand it, the 24kWh cap is subject to annual review, with it being reduced/the policy being soft phased out once curtailment is no longer necessary.
markvdb 22 hours ago [-]
The core of the EU system is much more elegant. It sets a day-ahead production price per 15 minutes at auction. In EU countries with reasonable distribution cost, dynamic rates are a quite popular way to shift consumption to when cheap electricity is abundant.
upsuper 21 hours ago [-]
Australia has that as well, the wholesale market changes price every 5 minutes, but it is a big ask for average consumers to follow that price and shift power usage in real time.
RossBencina 16 hours ago [-]
> it is a big ask for average consumers to follow that price and shift power usage in real time.
I could imagine appliances that take that into account. e.g. an airconditioner that works harder during the cheaper periods. I wonder whether any retailers pass through the 5 minute pricing variation? Should be easy enough to monitor the price and adjust my AC via the infra red remote protocol.
canpan 1 days ago [-]
Just for reference our fully electric household (including cooking, water and aircon). Highest usage this month on a very hot day was 25kWh.
(Disclaimer: I am not in Australia. Already cover most of it with roof solar. No battery yet)
manarth 8 hours ago [-]
Given that energy prices are negative during this period (because of surplus solar which needs to be drained into a load to keep the grid balanced) – this is effectively consumers providing "free" balancing-services to the grid.
With sufficient take-up and consumers funding the cost of battery storage, this could replace an amount of commercial balancing services and reduce the overall cost of grid-management.
thedays 1 days ago [-]
Yes - the regulated offer is capped at 24 kWh per day but some retailers such as Globird and CovaU are offering plans which include up to 50 kWh per day of ‘free’ electricity. With a large enough battery and inverter you could just end up paying daily supply charges of $1.65-2.20 per day.
rsanek 1 days ago [-]
Critically, that cost excludes the amortized amount the batteries will be over that period. And if you're cycling them every day like this, they're not going to last more than 15~20 years.
wolrah 1 days ago [-]
> And if you're cycling them every day like this, they're not going to last more than 15~20 years.
You can't make a blanket statement like that because it depends on a lot of variables about their specific battery system and power needs. If you have just enough battery to get through a normal day so you're running them top to bottom every day then sure, those are likely to have a relatively short life. If you've set up your system with extra capacity to support extended total grid outages and/or bad weather now your normal days might only be cycling from 80% down to 60% and back. Of course battery chemistry is also relevant, and a home battery system doesn't need to care about energy density or peak charge/discharge rates in the same way an EV might.
On top of all that, now that we're over 15 years in to mass-produced EVs we've learned that our battery life expectations were generally pessimistic. As long as the batteries are kept within a reasonable temperature range and not otherwise abused they tend to be in pretty good condition even this far in to their expected service life. Home energy storage systems are a lot easier on batteries than automotive use so as a general rule they should last even longer even with similar cycle counts.
adrianN 1 days ago [-]
Cycling 50kWh of batteries daily seems like a very unusual level of consumption.
Schwolop 15 hours ago [-]
I'm in Australia, with Globird, and have their 3hrs free plus they pay $1 on days I don't use any grid power between the 6-8pm peak, and another $1.50 if I send them back 10kWh of the energy I was given for free during the day, during that peak. In winter, with bugger-all solar (maybe 5kWh generation if I'm lucky) I pull 10kW/hr into a 40kWh battery for those 3hrs each and every day, while also running the heating as high as possible to gain some thermal battery effect too. That 30kWh of battery charge is used up by late evening or middle of the night by fully-electric heating (RCAC split systems and a large ducted RCAC system), so the battery goes down to 5% where I stop using it except in the case of grid failure, and back up to ~75% each day. The idea that no one uses more than 24kWh of electricity each day is absurd - not only will I pull 30kWh to charge a battery, I'll also pull another ~30 or so just to keep warm. My house could easily use 100kWh per day if we heated it to a pleasant level instead of a warm-enough level.
The main problem, as Australians are no doubt aware, is that our houses are large and poorly insulated. I've done everything sensible already (ceiling + floor insulation, draft sealing, honeycomb blinds, etc) except paying $100,000 to double-glaze all windows, and it still feels like a tent.
Despite all this ranting, electricity is now effectively free in summer for me, and ~$5-8 per day in winter. Pre-battery it was in the ballpark of $10-25 per day. The battery should have a payback period of 4 years, but was heavily subsidized by the government. Due to how I'm charging and discharging it so regularly, I'm expected it might only have a 10yr lifetime.
AndrewDavis 20 hours ago [-]
While I can't speak for other states (though I'd be surprised if they were different), power bills in Victoria are split into supply and usage. Eg each day costs 90c, then 30c per kw/h.
So you could eliminate the usage costs, but not the supply charge.
The whole reason for this is Australia's power grid is a market, where suppliers put in bids for how much they can produce, and at what price. And AEMO then selects the cheapest way to meet demand (paying the marginal price), but also expects residential rooftop solar a given.
As a result we often have an excess of power driving wholesale pricing into the negatives.
The free power is a way to increase usage at times when we're most likely to have negative pricing, and encourage use of high energy appliances like dishwashers etc to be run during that period to reduce demand the rest of the time.
rulesilol 1 days ago [-]
I pay about 38c per kilowatt plus $1.70 per day for the connection fee. So by that maths, you'd save 8×0.38=$3.04 per day. A 10kWh battery is in the ballpark of $4000. So it'll take about 4 years to break even.
Then you'd just have to pay the connection fee, which seem to be increasing every year.
Panzer04 1 days ago [-]
The connection fee would also rise with less energy consumption/free electricity to amortize the fixed costs of the power grid.
markvdb 22 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily. At least in Flanders (northern ~half of Belgium), this was shifted onto consumers by making them pay for peak quarter consumption. Using more than 2.5kW for 15 minutes in a row on average means you pay a lot more for your fixed grid cost.
upsuper 21 hours ago [-]
Australian grids are already talking about removing all per-kWh tariff and shift all the cost to fixed supply fee. The government rejected it probably because it doesn't make them look good, and it makes poor people pay more. But it's probably just time before that comes.
gib444 1 days ago [-]
> $1.70 per day for the connection fee
A sneaky tax that keeps rising. In the UK it pays for failed energy companies, people defaulting on their energy bills, energy bill subsidies... and supposedly for grid upgrades lol
It's risen far above inflation (responding to a sibling comment)
treis 1 days ago [-]
This is even worse for gas. Most months I pay more in sales tax on the fees than I do for the gas.
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
>which seem to be increasing every year.
In general inflation is increasing everywhere so not completely unexpected. Also solar/battery powered networks are shaped differently than ones only powered by prime movers. The edges become thicker as power becomes generated at the edge.
beAbU 1 days ago [-]
An ev charging at 7kw will consume 21 of the 24kWh. Now, if you don't drive massive distances every day then this might not be the best deal, but I can see how this might be worth it for someone commuting 200km a day for example. Taxi drivers, and the like will also probably benefit.
Bockit 1 days ago [-]
Also, many energy retailers increased the daily 'connection service fee' to compensate. My dad's daily fee went up an extra 55c~, or +$200/year.
giantg2 1 days ago [-]
"The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity."
Free energy is too good to be true, even if you aren't a physicist.
deckar01 18 hours ago [-]
I thought there was so much excess solar generation that even the utility company couldn’t store it all. There is a perverse incentive to dump the excess power to prevent the price from going negative and prop up demand for their generation services. There are lots of examples in economics where it is more cost effective to destroy a worthless product than to give it away. When the government subsidized the generation infrastructure and some of that power is generated by residential solar, it makes sense to step in force the utilities to behave in the people’s best interest.
amelius 1 days ago [-]
> The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity.
Ok, then why not take one plan with retailer A, and another plan with retailer B?
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
Does anywhere in the world let you have multiple electricity plans on the same meter at the same time?
amelius 1 days ago [-]
I'm now thinking of a scheme involving neighbors and isolation transformers.
gfxfan 1 days ago [-]
The trick is to switch often, b/c of tricks like ”first X free”.
pfortuny 1 days ago [-]
Unbelievable: I read the title and the only thought I got was that households get 3h free energy in Australia.
inkyoto 1 days ago [-]
Moreover, apartment dwelling residential customers connected to embedded networks (many new apartment blocks in NSW, Victoria and Queensland) are not eligible for the Solar Share Offer because under section 6(3)(c), a consumer supplied through an embedded network is already excluded from the Commonwealth Electricity Retail Code’s definition of a «small customer».
The government won't address this particular perverse situation with the embedded networks until the 2027–28 DMO period.
jiggawatts 1 days ago [-]
I love being ripped off because I'm renting, so instead of having a direct relationship with my service providers, they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager who I'm sure in no shape way or form receives a kick-back.
So I'm stuck with an energy provider that is too incompetent to figure out how to bill me correctly, but puts a markup on what I'd pay as a home owner, and I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!
No IPv6, no gigabit Internet, no free solar electricity.
BLKNSLVR 1 days ago [-]
What is the limiting factor in getting NBN? Getting fiber to the premises is that hard part, and that's already done.
jiggawatts 22 hours ago [-]
The contract that the building manager signed.
BLKNSLVR 19 hours ago [-]
So how do you get Internet? Is it provided as a shared wifi service for the building or something, like in a hotel? (so the building manager is essentially running a mini-ISP re-selling a single NBN service?)
HTP!
jiggawatts 15 hours ago [-]
Fibre to the apartment, but it is only “lit up” by a non-NBN provider.
tialaramex 1 days ago [-]
These are things where policy is set by government and so could be moved by your elected representatives. If you already have a preferred flavour of representative, try to get them to want to do this. If you don't, here's an issue that could make you prefer one over another, make sure they know that.
inkyoto 1 days ago [-]
No, technically it can't. An individual writing to an MP is rarely sufficient by itself.
Australia’s embedded network landscape is a peculiarly intricate tangle of nuance, complexity and regulatory optimism. Note that the embedded networks are distinctly unique and different from retail utility providers.
Please bear with my lengthy explanation for a few rather long moments.
Embedded networks are private distribution systems sitting behind a single connection to the public grid (shopping malls, apartment blocks, retirement villages, camp and caravan sites etc). They all have, effectively, a single wire going into the site.
Originally, they were designed for incidental on-selling by site managers, and they are a regulatory exception allowing the operator to on-sell electricity and other services without becoming a fully authorised energy retailer or licenced distributor. The embedded networks typically bundle: 1) electricity, 2) centralised hot water, 3) cold water, 4) gas, 5) heating / cooling (air-conditioning) and 6) fibre to the premises (sometimes, not always). All those things are governed by separate statutes.
In theory as well as occasionally in practice, they should be cheaper for consumers because they are able to negotiate lower wholesale rates from the upstream supplier and because the customer churn is non-existent (the customer is locked into the network and has nowhere to go). In some cases, that is indeed true, but because the current legislation explicitly excludes the embedded networks from the government reporting, many embedded network operators have resorted to the insidious exploitation of their customers, and the government is clueless because the operators' imposed pricing is opaque.
Natiaonally, Australia does not have a single federal embedded-network statute. The principal framework is a cooperative national scheme comprising 7 government bodies (Australian Energy Market Commission, AER, Australian Energy Market Operator, National Electricity Law and Rules, National Energy Retail Law and Rules, Australian Consumer Law and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).
At the state level – so far – only Victoria has largely banned new embedded networks, with the remaining states either participating or not participating in the National Energy Customer Framework. Overall, NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and the national regulators are tightening the rules but they still have a way to go.
For a reform such as embedded-network regulation, the path looks closer to:
An MP may understand: «Residents in apartment towers are getting poor outcomes». They are highly unlikely to understand: a) market settlement arrangements, b) metering identifiers, c) distribution-loss factors, d) retailer-of-last-resort frameworks, e) exemption classes, f) embedded-network-manager functions, or g)interactions between state strata law and national electricity law.
Unsurprisingly and consequently, politicians become heavily dependent on: a) departmental advice, b) regulator advice, c) industry submissions, d) consultant reports, and e) lobby groups.
The people who understand the system – and especially those one who know how to work the system to their benefit – therefore acquire disproportionate influence over how the system evolves. That does not necessarily imply corruption, it is a structural feature of technical governance. Customers, however, refer to it as «rent seeking», even if they own an apartment.
Despite all that, elected representatives still do remain one of the few machineries capable of changing the underlying legal framework. The deeper issue is that modern regulatory states are neither pure democracies nor pure technocracies – they are hybrids. Formal authority remains democratic, but practical power is distributed among elected officials, bureaucracies, regulators, courts, industry participants, consultants, lobbyists and organised interest groups.
I have recently gone down the rabbit hole of the embedded networks and learned a bewildering number of things hence the fulmination.
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
Jeesh, these embedded networks sounds like something that was once a good idea to serve more marginalized customers, but has drifted into revenue generation because of a change in information available to those providing it.
throwaway2037 1 days ago [-]
Ok, this post has to be a Top 10 HN of all time for me. Massively informative. Thank you. +9000
Plus, extra Internet points for using this Unicode char that I didn't know about: ↝
jiggawatts 12 hours ago [-]
I knew the situation was bad, but I didn't know it was this bad. What an illuminating comment indeed!
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
Single customers having these issues don't really have any power to convince representatives. Historically, the only real way to enact change in this way is to have thousands of people contacting their representatives about it.
tialaramex 1 days ago [-]
Unless I misunderstood them, this is a common problem so there's no reason that wouldn't happen though.
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
If it's a common problem then change will happen without you. A difference of one is no difference at all.
throwaway2037 1 days ago [-]
> I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!
Woah, this is crazy. Personally, I have read so much about the Aussie NBN (The Australian National Broadband Network) [1]. (Dear nerds: If you don't know about it, I highly recommend you read about it!) I am utterly jealous that you lot pulled it off! (Not perfect, but pretty damn good.) Can you share more details about why the building does not have high quality NBN connections? The whole dream sold to nerds about NBN was basically 1Gbit fibre for everyone in a big/mid-sized city (and suburbs) and "decent" Internet (100MBit+) for everyone else in the bush.
> […] why the building does not have high quality NBN connections?
Because their place of residence is connected to an embedded network that has eschewed the NBN Co and chosen to connect to a private fibre operator who sits outside the NBN. They probably also pay more compared to NBN for the same speed.
Not every embedded network supplies fibre, but some do, and that appears to be the case in their situation.
By the way, NBN has recently upgraded the network to 2Gbps, with 10 Gbps having been trialled but no availability date set as of yet.
Nursie 1 days ago [-]
At least part of the story is a cautionary tale about electing the LNP. The NBN was originally going to be as you describe, but then Tony Abbot came along, under instruction from his pal Rupert Murdoch, and threw a major spanner in the works.
He decided it was waaaaay too expensive and big-governmenty to do that and besides, Uncle Rupert had a satellite tv business to defend, we don't want him to have to compete with the likes of Netflix now do we? So he told Australia that it was too much money for a "glorified video delivery service" and that 25Mbit was enough for anyone for the foreseeable, and threw out the original plans.
The plan was downgraded to "Fibre in some places, we'll reuse copper where possible". This ended up taking longer and costing more than the original plan, delivered worse service, and we're only now getting towards where we should have been under the first plan. A lot of the work has had to be repeated due to the initial poor rollout and then needing to upgrade as that 25Mbit started looking woefully inadequate. Just last year a further $5 billion was pledged to replace more FTTN/Copper with FTTP.
It's still more expensive than other markets I'm aware of, a lot of people who aren't far from cities and major towns are on wireless connections (theoretical 400Mbit, actual ~150), and the real bush "Sky Muster" system tops at 100/5 (actual ~55-83) and is having its lunch eaten by starlink.
tl;dr the Liberal (conservative) party got in and fucked it up.
inkyoto 1 days ago [-]
> […] they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager […]
The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation of wiring, air-conditioning, gas, hot water, and sometimes the internet – usually for free – and that happens before the strata comes into the picture. The strata is left with no choice but to inherit a fixed-term contract (typically 3-5 years), after which it can switch to… another embedded network.
The builders accept offers from embedded networks because it reduces their overall costs.
The NSW government has enacted the first tranche of regulations for embedded networks from the 1st of July this year, with the embedded networks price caps being introduced in early 2027 (that is the promise, anyway). If you live in NSW, IPART is the government body in charge of the regulation, and it is accepting submissions until the end of this month. Prepare and make your own submission whilst you can, as I have done.
nikcub 1 days ago [-]
> The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation
I got into a dispute with my embedded provider because of a bad meter and came to discover through friends and family in the construction industry as well as speaking to a former sales person in the industry that there is a lot of additional corruption in the process with straight up payments being made to win installs with developers.
When it came time to switch providers in our building, strata was promised electric vehicle chargers as part of signing a new deal with a new provider. They never delivered because they found an escape clause because of fire safety approval.
We're now locked in for years (again) and they've already increased rates once in the first year.
Nobody in the entire chain works in the interests of residents or owners. It's a completely broken system and a thorn in the side of otherwise advanced and progressive Australian energy policy. It needs to be abolished ASAP.
I still pay more for my single apartment living alone in electricity than what family and friends do in full large homes with air conditioning, 4-6 residents, heated pools, etc. It's astonishing.
inkyoto 1 days ago [-]
«Mates rates» is a big problem in Australia, indeed. At best, it is collusion, but typically it is corruption.
I have recently gone through the entire chain of complaints, the ombudsman including, and I have gained plenty of insight into how insidious the current scheme is.
NSW has set out to do something about it, with price caps being introduced in 2027. If you live in NSW, make your submission to the regulator (IPART) ASAP – submissions are closing at the end of July.
throwthrow7766 24 hours ago [-]
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BLKNSLVR 2 days ago [-]
Edited to add: Clarification required in the title that the free energy is only between 11am and 2pm
Very interested to see how this turns out. Ultimately we want the transition to benefit both consumers and producers / distributors (the industry). The problem from the rapid uptake of solar in Australia has been an over-supply during this 10/11am to 2/3pm period. If that over-supply is suitably encouraged to be soaked up then hopefully consumers can reduce their power bills whilst the industry has less effort in managing the oversupply and less stress on infrastructure.
It's also about time that those who lack the means or situation to have solar panels of their own can get some advantage, in a 'herd immunity' kind of way.
I'm in the privileged position to have had solar panels for over a decade, and now have a battery as well, and it was very obvious to me at the time that, in regards to solar, it cost money to save money, so if you couldn't afford it then the savings are inaccessible.
This change hopefully helps those who need it, at least somewhat.
stubish 1 days ago [-]
The change certainly brings in some weirdness too.
For instance, I'm looking at a new hot water system. Economically speaking, I'm better off buying an oversized tank using resistive heating that I only need to heat once per day. The grid provides free power and I buy a cheaper appliance. But environmentally it sucks, as more solar needs to be rolled out to cover the additional non-peak usage (guess about 6x the power usage of a smaller tank with heatpump).
penteract 1 days ago [-]
To check I understand you: the smaller tank with heatpump would consume less energy outside the time window in which energy is free than the large tank with resistive heating, but has a higher capital cost which would outweigh the amount saved on energy?
If that's right, it's not obvious to me that building a suitably sized solar panel is environmentally worse than building a heat pump.
stubish 1 days ago [-]
The smaller tank with heatpump will consume a lot less energy than the larger tank with resistive heat.
Economically to me, the larger tank is cheaper, because the appliance is cheaper, and I never pay for the power it uses.
Environmentally, yes, it is not obvious. The large tank requires many more solar panels to power it but no battery. The small tank and heatpump needs much less solar but battery for nighttime use.
But it is weird, because for decades heat pump tech has been pushed as the environmental choice and there are still a number of government subsidies to invest in heat pump hot water systems. And maybe that no longer makes sense, with the money saved buying cheaper and less efficient devices spent on more solar deployments.
hnaccount_rng 1 days ago [-]
But it’s also environmentally better for you to take the resistive heating thing. As long as you never need to heat it up outside of the noon-window that’s strictly positive. Because the “additional” solar panels will be necessary anyways to cover the night/late evening usage. The optimal buildout will always have superfluous energy at noon. That’s fine. We just need to get over the whole “energy costs anything” thing. That’s only true if you need to spend fuel to generate it
stubish 18 hours ago [-]
But it not entirely true. While renewables can cover well over 100% of daytime usage on most days in summer in my region, we are down to about 40% during winter. We need lots more solar panels and wind turbines and enough battery to get us through energy droughts, and installation and maintenance has economic and environmental costs. Much less than other forms of generation, but costs nonetheless. If everyone stops caring how much power they draw because it is 'free', the problem of supplying enough sustainable generation becomes harder and takes longer. The extra generation capacity needed is paid for by consumers in the form of connection fees and/or tax payers.
Panzer04 1 days ago [-]
The magic of market pricing means people will figure out the best solution and optimise towards that.
Hot water heater tanks are easily one of the most obviously good applications of noon excess energy, and resistive heating elements might as well be free.
pornel 22 hours ago [-]
I get that it makes less efficient resistive heating more economical, but the tank size seems like a red herring. If you go for a heat pump you can have a larger tank anyway, and heat it during the solar peak too.
A larger tank will allow you to store water at a lower temperature (instead of hotter water to be diluted). Smaller delta makes heat pump more efficient and heat loss slower.
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
Surprised they’re putting everyone on same timeslot. Would have expected some staggering to be helpful
defrost 1 days ago [-]
From elsewhere:
this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
so NSW and South Australia will be staggered in real time as they are in different time zones.
As for everybody in the same time zone .. they are all seeing the same sun angle at noon (more or less) and all sharing the same over supply of power from all the grid connected solar power rooftops and farms. It's free surplus power during that time frame.
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
Yeah i get that they're all seeing similar but you'd still want to align this new demand with the output curve in some form of approximated pattern. Plus also prevent the sharp spike you'd get from everyone turning on their stuff at a coordinated hour. You're gonna have a bunch of stuff on timers all hit this at the same time. That makes life hard for the people balancing the grid's supply & demand.
Bit like in the UK they had issues with everyone watching popular TV shows and then turning on the kettle after in a perfectly syncronized timing across the country
aragilar 1 days ago [-]
There's too much available power then (curtailment/negative prices are fairly common now on sunny days), and not enough during the evenings, so it's an incentive for those who don't have/can't get batteries (e.g. renters) to shift their habits. It also can be spun as a cost-of-living action.
pydry 1 days ago [-]
I find it amusing that back when solar and wind were niche and expensive the coal + oil lobby would lobby for "let the free market decide what to build".
When solar + wind plunged in price they stopped saying it.
Now that the market has driven down the price of solar, wind and storage, market based mechanisms have become ideal for solving the problem of what to do with surplus electricity.
Still describes the current state of affairs perfectly. I'd love to see them on snowy 2 today.
entrope 1 days ago [-]
> I'd love to see them on snowy 2 today.
I can only imagine the comment warnings on that segment considering that, sadly, John Clarke passed away nine years ago.
csours 1 days ago [-]
He was towed outside the environment. (I think he would laugh at this)
mchusma 2 days ago [-]
Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.
jeeeb 2 days ago [-]
Grid scale batteries and household batteries are being widely deployed.
Not to mention more than 200k new household batteries installed in 2025 (out of roughly 10 million households).
michaelt 2 days ago [-]
I think it's less a question of batteries being economical, and more a question of the relative economics of batteries vs solar panels.
After all, if the highest demand is between 16:30 and 19:00 you could use batteries to store power at 12:00 and sell it at 18:00 - or in famously sunny Australia you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand.
If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.
(Also, from a politican's perspective, making batteries highly economical is how you get batteries built. And an awful lot of pro-environment policies involve raising taxes, banning things and creating new chores; it's nice to have some green policy announcements that actually benefit voters in the short term.)
perilunar 1 days ago [-]
> you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand
No you could not. For half the year the sun has set by 18:00.
sevenseacat 1 days ago [-]
I mean in the dead of winter, yes. For six months of the year? Definitely not.
perilunar 1 days ago [-]
Definitely so. Unless you are on the equator, the sun is up for less than 12 hours a day from the autumnal equinox to the spring equinox. The sun will set before 18:00 local solar time. So apart from funkiness with time zones and summer time (which extends a couple of weeks past the autumnal equinox in Aus), yes, roughly half the year.
tialaramex 1 days ago [-]
You're not crazy in the broad sweep of your idea, but actually because the sun isn't a point of light you're also not strictly correct, for example in Singapore the day is always more than 12 hours long.
perilunar 1 days ago [-]
Singapore is close to the equator (1°17′N) — the days are roughly 12 hours long all year. No, it's not exact. They vary from +3 to +12 minutes. It's close enough (<2% error).
It's not entirely due to the apparent size of the sun — refraction due to the atmosphere has a slightly greater effect.
(Singapore is also in the 'wrong' timezone. The sun sets around 7 pm every day, giving it effectively permanent daylight saving time.)
But regardless, Australia is not near the equator. The timezones are mostly ok. In most of the country (for most of the population anyway) the sun sets before 18:00 for roughly half the year. No amount of solar is going to power the evening peak demand without storage.
danmaz74 2 days ago [-]
You won't get 12% return if your panels generate electricity which is only paid between 18 and 19, because there is already overcapacity between 16:30 and 18.
marcosdumay 1 days ago [-]
If you build enough solar that the output at 18:00 matches the demand, it will not have the same ROI as if you are using batteries.
throwaway2037 1 days ago [-]
> If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.
Sorry, normally I hate this follow-up on HN, but can you share a source? I tried to Google for sources, but there is a pretty wild range of ROI in different countries/regions. My point: Ideally, can you provide personal/anecdotal experience, or something that is specific to a country or region?
EDIT
I forgot to say: I like your idea of intraday arbitrage using batteries! It is a very cool idea. Surely, this could be well modeled to know your expected ROI before investment/build-out.
josephcooney 2 days ago [-]
One of my co-workers (I'm Australian) has 500 kilowatt-hours of storage at home...which is wild. Much more common is the 10-20 kilowatt-hours of domestic storage for a house.
jondwillis 2 days ago [-]
What is their fire suppression setup like??? Granted I guess they could be doing pumped hydro storage lol
defrost 2 days ago [-]
If they're in a rural / industrial area setting it could quite literally be a fire break around the battery area (bare dirt and no overhanging trees).
Fire control in Australia is first and foremost about limiting spread - the bush in Australia goes off if it catches hard.
Yeah, he is in a rural area. The batteries are off in a metal shed away from everything else.
sire-vc 20 hours ago [-]
'Is a thing' - obviously, stalled due to red tape. As an immigrant to Australia I am repeatedly amazed at how long anything involving the the government takes.
BLKNSLVR 2 days ago [-]
More details please, do they have a website that explains their setup?
Are they a hoarder of old car batteries and the like?
josephcooney 13 hours ago [-]
I think they bought a whole bunch of batteries of some kind from China. I don't ask too many questions...which is I think how they like it.
protocolture 1 days ago [-]
My dad buys lead acids written off from storm damage to solar systems (The whole system gets replaced under insurance even if the batteries are just a bit worn) and then sells them to preppers in the middle of nowhere. For a while he had above 300KW/h of storage, basically completely off grid with few shutdowns. It was kind of nuts. His house did burn down, but it was arson.
fnordian_slip 1 days ago [-]
Does he have a saltwater aquarium, or any other hobby that can make use of it? If not, I can highly recommend that he get into it, if he's into that kind of overkill :)
dzhiurgis 2 days ago [-]
That's ~8 used EV batteries. Each cost less than 10k, maybe 6-8k AUD.
If you know your way around high voltage DC, got a tractor and appropriate emulator - not exactly difficult or super expensive to pull off.
Granted it's pretty uncommon setup as grid batteries themselves are pretty cheap too and used EV battery is simply too large for home user, too much hassle, liability, etc to save like $2-3k.
Walf 2 days ago [-]
They are, but they still take time to build, and loans to finance.
Well, i can only be cheaper to shift demand to high production hours then building a battery. Especially as you don’t only need an inverter for the battery but also the charger or MPPT to suck up the peak solar power which is only lasts for about 3 hours. So you can save building a lot of excess batteries
jofzar 1 days ago [-]
> but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical
They are super economical in Australia and the government even offers discounts and interest free loan of 15k to buy them.
ghiculescu 1 days ago [-]
They are super economical… which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?
stubish 1 days ago [-]
The more households that buy them, the less peak power generation is needed and less large scale battery deployments. If the ROI of a household battery was just 4%, you are better off economically paying higher power bills and sticking that money in an index fund. But if subsidies increase that ROI, more people buy batteries. The money the government contributes hopefully ends up less than they would need to spend on large scale battery deployments or on legacy power generation to power peak usage times. It also has the side effect of getting more citizens (literally) invested in sustainable power usage, and people get more interested in insulating their homes, buying more efficient appliances, moving away from gas etc.
chii 1 days ago [-]
> which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?
the gov't also offers interest free (but inflation indexed) loans to tertiary education.
Just because there's a subsidy, doesn't mean the tax payer is paying a price for inefficiency. The policy itself needs to be individually examined to determine whether it's an efficient use of funds, not simply that it's a subsidy (time frame needs to be taken into account too).
ghiculescu 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, and nobody would describe Australian tertiary education as "super economical".
embedding-shape 1 days ago [-]
Is it so out of the ordinary that a government tries to help people save money or what's the question? Sounds like you've only had the American experience in life unfortunately.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless.
Meanwhile the government doesn't have any of its own money, so it can't really give you something that was yours to begin with, all it can do is take it from you and then give it back with strings attached. How is that helping you? Instead of subsidizing something you can make up your own mind about whether you want, they should just lower your taxes by the amount of the subsidy and let you use your money for that or something else at your choice.
embedding-shape 1 days ago [-]
> If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless.
Spoken as someone who never been poor. There is definitely a ton of stuff people with money can do to save more money, that is completely out of reach for the people who would actually benefit from those savings the most. Subsidies is quite literally about reaching these folks that others tend to forget about.
> all it can do is take it from you and then give it back with strings attached. How is that helping you?
Compared to "take it from you and not give it back to you", it's definitely helping people who have less money. Not sure how this needs explaining.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> Spoken as someone who never been poor. There is definitely a ton of stuff people with money can do to save more money, that is completely out of reach for the people who would actually benefit from those savings the most. Subsidies is quite literally about reaching these folks that others tend to forget about.
Except that there is no additional money, its just your own money but now there are strings.
On top of that, that still isn't necessary for things that save a non-trivial amount of money, because that's what loans are for. If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
> Compared to "take it from you and not give it back to you", it's definitely helping people who have less money. Not sure how this needs explaining.
Why would anybody want that either, instead of just not taking it from you to begin with?
Loans for non-trivially profitable investments don't require government interest subsidies.
yorwba 1 days ago [-]
The recipient doesn't necessarily know ahead of time how profitable the investment will be. Risk aversion will cause them to avoid investments that are profitable in expectation if they believe the chance of ending up worse off is too high. By offering interest-free loans, the government can pool that risk so that individual loan recipients hesitate less to make the positive-expectation investment.
AnthonyMouse 40 minutes ago [-]
> The recipient doesn't necessarily know ahead of time how profitable the investment will be.
Neither does the government.
> Risk aversion will cause them to avoid investments that are profitable in expectation if they believe the chance of ending up worse off is too high.
Risk aversion works both ways. The risk of not making the investment is that electricity prices in the evening get too high and then you have to pay them. If you install the batteries then you have a known fixed loan payment. If you don't you have an unpredictable variable electric bill. Which one triggers more risk aversion?
> By offering interest-free loans, the government can pool that risk
Risk pools don't work for correlated risk. The primary financial risk is that too many people install batteries -- which subsidies make more likely -- causing the price differential between various times of day to become too small to justify the investment. And that can happen even with interest subsidies. So then you have the government expending tax money to not just cause the people who would have installed them anyway to end up underwater, but to increase the number of such people.
thaumasiotes 1 days ago [-]
Well...
>>> If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
This depends on whether you'll pay back the loan. Just because paying the loan back saves you $50 / month forever starting immediately doesn't mean you'll do it. You might be the kind of person who takes out a loan, spends all your money on something else, and lets the bills go unpaid.
If you aren't that kind of person, you probably do have some accumulated capital.
But if you are, just the fact that the loan is hugely profitable and you should be able to pay it back - if you were a completely different person - doesn't mean you'll be able to get the loan. You shouldn't be able to get the loan, because you won't pay it back.
AnthonyMouse 39 minutes ago [-]
> You shouldn't be able to get the loan, because you won't pay it back.
In which case you shouldn't be able to get the loan regardless of an interest subsidy, because you won't pay it back.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
... for purchases from "approved" "accredited" suppliers[]. AKA the interest differential is regressive tax to funnel money to favored suppliers. Notice there's no option for the poor to simply install it themselves, which would save them more money than an interest free loan, but wouldn't funnel money to rich government approved install contractors.
And there's your grift. As soon as the home owner wants to allocate the "profit" of install to themselves, it is a swift kick in the ass but that will go to our buddies, and thank you very much for your taxes.
> Except that there is no additional money, its just your own money but now there are strings.
I understand what you mean, and yeah, "it's just your money", but also, it really isn't. Poor people have to pay taxes, no way around it, getting them back as subsidies is still better for them than not getting it back at all. The choice isn't "Keep the money or have subsidies", the choice is "The money goes to other stuff or get subsidies".
> On top of that, that still isn't necessary for things that save a non-trivial amount of money, because that's what loans are for. If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
Are those interest-free or managed by for-profit entities? Because "loans" are vastly different things compared to subsidies, but I'm guessing you already knew this.
> Why would anybody want that either, instead of just not taking it from you to begin with?
Because "not taking it from you to begin with" isn't a practical and realistic alternative, that's not how the world, and especially taxes and government works...
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> The choice isn't "Keep the money or have subsidies", the choice is "The money goes to other stuff or get subsidies".
That's the false dichotomy that happens in a broken government, but then why hold that out as something desirable?
> Are those interest-free or managed by for-profit entities?
Is the larger amount of mortgage or car loan debt they have to carry when they pay the extra money in tax?
> Because "not taking it from you to begin with" isn't a practical and realistic alternative, that's not how the world, and especially taxes and government works...
Your argument seems to be that lowering taxes on ordinary people is impossible?
embedding-shape 1 days ago [-]
> That's the false dichotomy that happens in a broken government, but then why hold that out as something desirable?
Personally I see it as stuff that happens in countries where the government care about the well-being of all, not just a select few (usually the ones with the most money). It's desirable that society improves, lots of that happens because of tax money. Subsidies usually means re-allocating funds, not raising taxes, although that might happen over time. Still, increasing taxes isn't inherently bad, especially when used for good. But I also know this is a somewhat controversial point of view in many hyper-capitalistic societies.
> Your argument seems to be that lowering taxes on ordinary people is impossible?
Yeah sure, I'm also clearly arguing for murdering children. Fun discussion, hope you'll enjoy the rest of your Tuesday :)
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
I'm honestly having trouble comprehending what your position is supposed to be here. It really seems to be that using the money to lower taxes on ordinary people rather than providing them with subsidies is a thing that could never happen. As if the prospect that their taxes could be lower than they are now, rather than only the same or higher, is something you can't even imagine.
pqtyw 1 days ago [-]
Well off people do not allocate capital in a way that's socially or economically (on a national level) optimal. So the government has to do that for them (even if those who the majority of taxes personally benefit less from that than if they were allowed to keep that money).
I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. After all there are hardly any personal incentives for individuals to invest into infrastructure, education or healthcare of people who can't afford it and plenty of other areas even if that's what allowed them to accumulate a significant proportion of not the overwhelming majority of their wealth over the long term.
AnthonyMouse 29 minutes ago [-]
> Well off people do not allocate capital in a way that's socially or economically (on a national level) optimal. So the government has to do that for them (even if those who the majority of taxes personally benefit less from that than if they were allowed to keep that money).
But we're talking about a government subsidy for something people do have a personal incentive to invest in.
On top of that, the misalignment of incentives applies even more to government officials, who have perverse incentives to enrich cronies, make inefficient transfers to special interests in a specific range of "not currently voting for them but close enough to the line to be worth paying off" at the expense of the public at large, or just not care about getting a given thing right because their position is being secured by something unrelated.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
If there's hardly any individual desire, as you say, to fund the development of the poor then taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people (even if only roughly a majority or their representatives).
Given that most taxation done with the the advertised goal of helping the poor in Australia does happen with popular assent of individuals, I would theorize your position is false and that people do have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor -- for profit, humanitarian / charitable reasons, and a variety of other considerations.
pqtyw 1 days ago [-]
> have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor
I never said that wasn't the case but historically that "some" was never sufficient. On average people are rational and selfish to a larger extent than they are altruistic.
> taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people
Well the whole concept of an organized society falls apart if individuals can personally freely chose which laws to obey and which taxes to pay. You have to have a balance based on a reasonable consensus, otherwise you end up with totalitarianism or anarchy (and in that case the people who have the means and resources to do that will establish alternative power structures and will end up subjugating those who do not AND also outcompete those how have the means but are unwilling to do the same).
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
No, I'm not talking about picking and choosing for a voted tax. I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor. Clearly under anything remotely resembling the Australian representation of what they claim their representative democracy is, the majority of people already decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure.
It can't simultaneously be true that most don't want to help the poor at their own cost while also the tax has been legitimized by the majority wanting to help the poor at their own cost. Only individuals or representatives elected by individuals can vote and if their incentive was to not help the poor then they'd vote not to and that would be that.
pqtyw 1 days ago [-]
> I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor.
Or people have a tendence to perceive a system where everyone is required to pay their "fair share" as more just and are more willing to (often begrudgingly) participate in it. If the system was fully voluntary the average contribution would be significantly lower that it is now. Also a significant proportion might feel they benefit from this system more than they pay into it (or are risk averse and prefer having the safety net even if they contribute more than they benefit)
> decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure
Well I'm generally vaguely incentivized to help the poor and develop infrastructure. Would I be willing to voluntary give up 40% of my income to do that rather than a significantly lower proportion? No, of course not. When it comes to infrastructure I'd be willing to pay very little or nothing at all if I know my neighbour isn't contributing anything. I don't think the average person would behave particularly differently than me.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
I can tell you you're absolutely wrong about the average person. I live in a place with no public infrastructure (I'm talking about, not even public roads, and not some rich HOA, a ~poor unorganized community without any infrastructure association) which has allowed me to view how average people react when there is no taxation based infrastructure. When it breaks, the neighbors help. I help maintain the roads for my poor neighbor. My other neighbor helped fix my water line when it broke. Sometimes I take my heavy equipment and donate labor to prepare for storms, etc. The infrastructure is literally donation based. We get it done for a tiny fraction of what the tax based system cost and everyone is far better off, even if the amount donated is less than what the taxes would be and some people "cheat" the system.
It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbor also pays, otherwise they can get fucked. This is very bizarre thinking. The people in my basically ancap-dystopia neighborhood don't even behave in this sadistic way. It honestly sounds more like a manufactured "gotcha" to win an argument than a way someone would think.
In reality the fraction people that would vote to tax themselves, are more than willing to donate in the case they don't get the tax, your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor just because some other guy didn't help too is relatively rare and not indicative of the mindset of most people who are voting to help the poor. I honestly think that most anyone who would vote for the tax, does not act that way when dropped in a neighborhood like mine, and you probably would not either.
pqtyw 8 hours ago [-]
> It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbour also pays, otherwise they can get fucked
You are seeing all of this in a very, very black and white way. It's about how much the average person is willing (or forced to) to contribute in either system especially when you try to scale it up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Libertarianism is an utopian ideology not particularly different to Communism in the sense that both are incompatible with human nature.
I mean there is simply no empirical evidence this approach scales beyond small high trust (usually homogeneous) communities. Tragedy of the commons is a thing.
> your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor
That's extremely reductive... and you are making this way too personal than it should be ; )
pqtyw 1 days ago [-]
Well that would apply to a lot of thing governments spend money on. I think the idea is that governments are better at allocating capital in certain cases (obviously one might disagree with that) than the people/companies who generate the most tax revenue. I mean on an individual level even if solar batteries are profitable people who have sufficient disposable income might chose to invest it into the US stock market (if it still offers better returns) amongst other things than into something that benefits the Australian economy or society.
abecedarius 1 days ago [-]
To target the "poor people need more money" problem, the most direct answer is give them money. If someone's answer is a variety of politically-allocated narrow subsidies, you should wonder what interest they're really aiming to satisfy.
When you get money, you can choose to spend it on what's worth the most to you. Thus "strings attached" on the opposite.
budsniffer952 1 days ago [-]
That's a strange definition of "subsidy".
throw0101a 1 days ago [-]
> If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless.
…assuming people are good at math.
And given that most people probably don't have a bunch of cash just sitting there doing nothing, they will have to take out a loan and most folks probably don't like going into debt even though 'the math says' it's a good ROI.
The idea that 'ROI good, therefore people will do it' is the 'spherical cow' of economics. In reality there are all sorts of other motivations for human economic actions:
To be clear, this doesn't change the price floor for ROI calculations. A non "approved" contractor or DIY job non-subsidized is well cheaper than a piddly few percent interest rate arbitrage to a pre-approved list. This does nothing beyond let some rich contractors regressively allocate money from taxpayers to themselves by artificially appearing a bit less of a premium to the alternatives.
It looks more like to me some installers saw their industry was becoming commoditized and the government got together with them to figure out how to grift taxpayers into making the more connected ones command a premium while simultaneously being better positioned to eat the lunch of the small middle class "guy and a truck" who does cash jobs for cheap but has no resources to become "accredited" on a subsidization list.
BeeOnRope 1 days ago [-]
It can work when the marginal cost of new capacity is high, compared to existing capacity.
E.g., if the marginal cost of supporting 1 kW of new capacity may be X, while the current averaged cost of 1 kW provided to existing customers may be Y, with Y < X.
The customer will calculate their ROI on a battery purchase based on the cost Y of kW to them, which may be poor (4%), while on the government level of the ROI may is closer to that implied by the cost X (say 10%). However, the government cannot easily pass on the "marginal cost" to customers as there is no specific kWh which is that marginal one across all customers.
In this case a subsidy directly picks out customers who can reduce their demand by buying a battery (e.g., a subsidy which raises the ROI to somewhere between 4% and 10%).
master-lincoln 1 days ago [-]
Think about people who could not afford the initial investment. It's beneficial for society here if the government redistributes wealth for the benefit of all.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> Think about people who could not afford the initial investment.
This is what loans and installment plans are for, the payments for which come out of the savings on the utility bill.
> It's beneficial for society here if the government redistributes wealth for the benefit of all.
Which has nothing to do with batteries. If you want to do that then provide them with a refundable tax credit that allows for a negative tax rate in cases where that's deemed desirable.
And even that doesn't apply to the majority of people who are currently paying a non-negative amount of tax. Why attach strings to the money going to a middle class homeowner who should have just been allowed to keep that portion of their own salary?
actionfromafar 1 days ago [-]
Why should they? In my mind it's all a coordination problem. Sometimes loans work better, sometimes subsidies work better.
Neither loans nor subsidies are dirty words IMHO.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> In my mind it's all a coordination problem.
But that's the point. It isn't. Electricity costs more in the evening than during the day and there is a technology that can profitably be used to arbitrage the difference. There is no coordination problem at all, people have the direct individual incentive to buy the technology, on credit if necessary, without any form of government subsidy or involvement whatsoever.
actionfromafar 1 days ago [-]
That cow is looking too spherical for my tastes. Credit is another thing which is highly intertwined with goverment involvement.
AnthonyMouse 27 minutes ago [-]
Which has what to do with whether there is a coordination problem in this specific case?
1 days ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
EliRivers 1 days ago [-]
"If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless."
Yet people frequently don't. This assertion and reality disagree.
rswail 1 days ago [-]
Because the individualized incentives do not take into account the community benefits.
The money saved is distributed across the community, for both those that directly benefit and those that can't (eg renters, apartments etc). The general benefit is of greater value than the individual savings.
Your attitude that somehow taxation is theft is a very silly Ayn Randian Objectivism outgrowth that has never been true, even in the most "free" US states.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> Because the individualized incentives do not take into account the community benefits.
Only if the utility company is pricing things incorrectly.
If the price of electricity is ~free during the day and expensive in the evening then the individualized incentives for installing a battery line right up.
> Your attitude that somehow taxation is theft is a very silly Ayn Randian Objectivism outgrowth that has never been true, even in the most "free" US states.
Whether it's theft or not doesn't change the arithmetic. When you're paying them the money they're paying you, it was your money to begin with.
TheOtherHobbes 1 days ago [-]
Think of it as a giant corporate tax break, but for the little people.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> Think of it as a giant corporate tax break
So the thing everyone correctly maligns because it's generally some form of corruption or inefficiency?
Panzer04 1 days ago [-]
Yes, the government subsidies for home batteries specifically are a very poorly targeted handout. Unfortunately splashy policies like this are classic vote buying measures, even if economically they don't make much sense
- home batteries cost more
- homeowners buying batteries are already pretty well off on average
- a large portion of the population (renters) is excluded from the policy.
- prices are falling anyway so the subsidy is just a waste of tax dollars, arguably
- grid scale batteries are more cost effective and benefit everyone via cheap prices broadly, instead of specific homeowners.
Etc. but pork barreling be pork barreling.
vitro 1 days ago [-]
I know people who would purchase solar panels and batteries, but they do not have enough capital to do so.
aianus 1 days ago [-]
In Australia? The houses are like 30x-100x more expensive than a battery, how would this be possible?
liamkinne 1 days ago [-]
The government loan changes the calculus. Allows for short term thinking and a long term benefit.
TheOtherHobbes 1 days ago [-]
Yes. People can't always afford super economical things when the initial cost is high and the pay-off takes a while, but is easily worth it in the end.
xbmcuser 1 days ago [-]
Yeah this is why a lot of people were thinking that the Australian opposition asking for spending $40-50 billions for nuclear that would come online in 20-30 years and to keep using coal and gas till then were being stupid.
I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.
xbmcuser 1 days ago [-]
I am talking about the $30 billion that the opposition was making up. My point was that even those made up numbers for nuclear were still more expensive than installing solar and batteries.
ZeroGravitas 1 days ago [-]
It's not stupid if they are paid off by the people selling the coal and gas.
It's just a treasonous level of corruption.
Voters opting to be extorted like this would have been stupid.
rswail 1 days ago [-]
They are, and they are being rapidly rolled out and the "post sunset" spikes are rapidly being flattened by both grid storage and "behind the meter" home batteries.
christina97 1 days ago [-]
One issue with grid scale batteries is that the solar is predominantly generated in the suburbs, but the grid wasn’t built for a huge “generator” in the suburbs. It requires retrofitting the grid for this huge excess. It would be better to instead store it in the suburbs in household batteries (which they are also building out like crazy).
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
Maybe they just don't work? Otherwise someone's leaving tons of money on the table. Which implies nobody is.
3stacks 2 days ago [-]
They've already burned at least $15bn on that disastrous Snowy Hydro "battery" project... Could've just rolled out consumer batteries on a large scale instead.
simondotau 2 days ago [-]
At current battery project prices, matching Snowy 2.0’s roughly 350 GWh of energy storage capacity with Tesla Megapacks would cost around AUD $218 billion [0] and require Tesla’s entire global Megapack production capacity redirected to a single client for five years.
$15 billion is far more than Snowy 2.0 should have cost. But it remains substantially cheaper than any lithium-ion battery build for bulk storage. Storage on this scale is essential in a post-coal electricity grid, and batteries are not (yet) plausible substitutes for bulk storage.
[0] This assumes linear scaling. In reality, placing an order like this would grossly distort supply and demand on many levels. Thus the cost would ultimately be superlinear.
ZeroGravitas 1 days ago [-]
Snowy 2.0 has major limitations on what it can supply, the headline number is very misleading.
And the comparison shouldn't be to batteries alone, but solar/wind and batteries. The former can be used directly and fill the batteries repeatedly on a timeline that is predictable.
It provides no extra value for the electricity to be stored long term if for the same money you can generate and store it short term.
Your reply — and especially the attached article — misunderstand the reality of operating a grid at scale.
Responding to you:
Solar and wind are just as relevant to pumped hydro, which is really just a different kind of battery. The real question is how much short-duration storage is needed from chemical batteries and how much long-duration storage is needed from pumped hydro. Chemical batteries are essential for grid stabilisation, frequency control, and intra-hour balancing. They're necessary, but not sufficient.
Pumped hydro provides something that no economically realistic combination of batteries, solar, and wind can yet deliver at scale: enough stored energy to contribute towards grid stability through consecutive overcast, low-wind days. The main alternative is to build and maintain gas-fired peaking plants for occasional backup, which is both costly and keeps us dependent on fossil fuels.
Responding to the article:
While there are credible doubts about the value of Snowy 2.0, the article does not establish its headline claim that batteries are a cheaper system-level alternative. Most critically, it doesn't acknowledge the role of pumped hydro as an insurance asset. The point of insurance isn't to be cost effective in normal times, it's to be cost effective against the risk-adjusted consequences of grid destabilisation.
It is true that under normal conditions, Snowy Hydro would have little incentive to discharge fully because doing so could depress market prices. That is why capacity contracts, underwriting arrangements and reliability options exist. We know that strategic storage has substantial social value that its owner cannot fully capture through energy arbitrage. This is a common problem for reliability assets: their success can destroy the scarcity rents needed to finance them. Hence contracts.
ZeroGravitas 13 hours ago [-]
We want to eliminate fossil fuels and lower costs as quickly as possible.
Vague claims that some alternative like nuclear or Snowy 2.0 will somehow make that last 1% of fossil easier to eliminate are both dubious and irrelevant if their construction uses money that could have easily eliminated 1% of fossil fuel every year for decades.
And once we get close to that last few percent of fossil gas in the electric system it would be better for costs and climate to focus on electrifying industry and homes with cheap electricity anyway.
simondotau 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
angry_octet 1 days ago [-]
Yes Snowy 2.0 just won't have enough water for many of the years in out future.
fragmede 2 days ago [-]
Yeah the battery storage story has to acknowledge the fact that global production capacity simply isn't actually high enough to deliver that many batteries so we need alternative solutions to the problem as well.
asdefghyk 2 days ago [-]
From Australlian ABC news...
The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from \(\$12\) billion to as high as \(\$42\) billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission). Originally announced in 2017 with a $2 billion price tag, the project has faced massive scale and logistical blowouts. The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from $12 billion to as high as $42 billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission).
That said , hydro systems have a LONG LIFESPAN - 100 YEARS ?
Batteries need to be replaced every X years.
So the ecomiomics of the comparisoan would need to be calculated ...
robin_reala 2 days ago [-]
Dinorwig[1] was opened in 1984, and is looking at a £1B refurbishment shortly for “at least another 25 years” lifespan.[2]
All the complexity has been in geotechnical issues, pockets of mud, sinkholes, then ultra hard rock, then loose shale, damage in blasting operations, needing to pump liquid nitrogen into the rock to deal with subterranean water flow, soluble limestone etc etc.
One of the scariest industrial deaths you can imagine: cutting into a pocket of shale and the TBM and crew just vanishing into the maw of the Midgard serpent and the whole tunnel filling.
That was exactly the point of the project though - it was designed by the conservative side of politics in our country to try and crowd out investment in batteries and other renewables while taking enough time to build to keep coal plants operating longer in the meantime.
It didn't work at all for that though - we had a lot of private investment in large-scale batteries anyway, because the cost came down quickly just as most people (apart from the conservatives) expected. Then the other side of Government got in and put a subsidy scheme to get hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, which has been multiple times better bang-for-buck than the Snowy 2.0 scheme, as well as taking far shorter a time. At the same time coal plants are shutting down as expected because they are increasingly unreliable given their old ages.
Snowy 2.0 be an expensive stranded asset basically, it will work and be somewhat useful but extremely uneconomical so basically relying on the cost being written off - if it had to recoup any investment then it couldn't run because it'd never be able to sell the power for high enough.
Scoundreller 2 days ago [-]
You can do similar math with building above ground oil storage tank capacity aaaaaand giving everyone free gas cans.
And you can get out every drop. And it’s always ready to go. Do need to cycle your inventory.
Fire departments probably wouldn’t be happy about it.
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
Affordability is always relative. Australia can't afford that much battery storage, it has to spend $368bn on nuclear submarines. /s
(did you mean 20kwh per user, or 20GW overall?)
angry_octet 1 days ago [-]
The submarines will be in port so much of the time, we may as well hook up their nukes to power the grid.
reyoz 1 days ago [-]
Many retailers have been offering this for ~6 months already. Very popular with home battery owners (which have taken off over the last 9 months thanks to subsidies), so much so that the effect of people turning on loads is suspected as the reason for an increasing dip in grid frequency at 11 am [1].
24 kWh free for the three hours seems like a reasonable amount anyway.
abrookewood 1 days ago [-]
With 3 hours of free power, a 15kW inverter and a 42kWh battery, I could almost do away with my solar panels and just survive of free grid power. I do have a 15kW solar panel set up, but I get very little from selling anything back to the grid.
discordance 1 days ago [-]
I have a 12 kW inverter (single phase) and 48 kWh battery. In Australia, 9 months of the year my 16 kW of solar fills the battery and covers all needs including cooking, heating and charging the EV.
In winter, I’ve been using Ovo’s 3 hours free for about a year now and that ensures the battery is filled up daily. My electricity bill returns a credit every month since I got the battery a year ago.
abrookewood 17 hours ago [-]
Pretty much what I am doing exactly, bar the credit. We don't have gas in my area, throw in a pool, kids who love air con, way too many computers and we burn through a lot of power.
robbiep 1 days ago [-]
I was trying to understand how to do this, and I formed the opinion that most of the battery providers don’t really allow the degree of ‘on/off’ or ‘charge/discharge’ customisation as might be necessary to make this work? Or was I fooled by the packaged products that are aiming to turn me and my battery and panels into a residential power plant at the whim of the energy company?
stubish 1 days ago [-]
The most popular batteries provide all the customization you need and more. Soo many features... it is exhausting. Even 'AI' modes trying to predict usage and solar generation using weather forecasts and top up from the grid at cheap rates if it thinks the power will probably be needed. A battery like Sigenergy's you can setup on a time based charging schedule (most popular for the free power plans), or have it pull Amber's live wholesale rates and put it into AI mode to avoid using their SmartShift VPP, or just hand over the keys to a VPP provider and let them drive.
abrookewood 17 hours ago [-]
Ours is a FoxES or something and the included app is pretty straight forward. You can easily set it to ALWAYS pull from the grid during specific times and it will (along with the solar), charge the battery to capacity during that time.
discordance 1 days ago [-]
You can set your own timing schedule and choose self-consumption or to sell back to the grid. Joining a VPP is optional.
stubish 1 days ago [-]
Yes. With the 'free' power plans, you are better off not installing solar and investing the savings in a larger battery.
hsb3 1 days ago [-]
Grid power is already cheap. Making things free actually makes people use more power. Its called the rebound effect.
tihsllub 1 days ago [-]
There is a 24KWh/day fair use
a10c 1 days ago [-]
First world problems but my Australian retail plan already offers a free period between 11am-2pm without any usage cap, so now with this policy introduction i'm worried my provider will introduce such a cap under the guise of 'its what the government says we can do'.
throwaway2037 1 days ago [-]
> without any usage cap
<sarcasm>
At the risk of Reddit-style mass downvoting, I strongly encourage you to borrow Oracle-level of debt (billions of USD) and build a Tesla Megapack battery "farm" and immediately begin mining Bitcoin. Of course, the battery "farm" will conveniently only be activated during these special hours. The only forseeable risk to ROI for this project would be AT&T- or Comcast-style of "double top secret" limitations over the "without any usage cap" clause.
</sacasm>
gravelc 1 days ago [-]
I've been on a GloBird plan with 3 free hours for a while. Works out very well as I have a 20 KWH battery and solar. Costs about $15 a month to run the house inc. cooking, heating/cooling, hot water, and charging my PHEV. To make the best of these sorts of plans you need to be home during that period and/or have a decent battery/inverter.
thatsit 6 hours ago [-]
Australia is in fact primed to
go all-in on all-electric. They have an hyperabundance of solar and wind (+land where it can be installed) and have the purchasing power to buy cheap panels and electric cars from China. Even the mining industry is going electric as it is plainly cheaper to operate mining trucks on solar PV. They couldn’t care less about that strait of hormuz disaster.
Energy to cheap to meter at last!
leonidasrup 2 days ago [-]
Dynamic pricing and deployment of digital smart meters should by mandatory in all electric grids dominated by renewables. Large electric consumers are already buying electricity at dynamic prices, small consumers should have the same incentives to shift the demand to day hours.
Gigachad 2 days ago [-]
I'm so on board for this. It would be kind of fun to wire all my appliances in to home assistant to have the dishwasher / dryer / etc all run during the free hours.
I imagine eventually we might end up with some thermal storage where during peak renewable production you heat/freeze a large tank of water and then utilize it to heat/cool your house for the rest of the day. A large tank of water is much cheaper than battery storage.
lopis 1 days ago [-]
I don't have smart washers, but I did build a smart ESP32-based [0] zigbee numerical display. Then I use Home Assistant to send the current electricity price to that display when the price changes, and send a notification to all users' phones when electricity is cheap (< 0.05€/kWh) or expensive (> 0.15€/kWh). This helps me plan my laundry and dish washing, which are the only energy intensive appliances I have. I also try to avoid cooking complex meals in the stove+oven.
Storing energy in hot water is common is sunny regions, for example Turkey.
Some large cold storage facilities in Germany are trying to optimize electric demand to use cheap peak day electricity. But they have to observe limitations in range of temperatures and capacity of cooling devices.
Or plug them into a UPS that charges when it's free but you can run them whenever.
Gigachad 1 days ago [-]
Batteries are massively more expensive. Thats why the utility companies are just giving consumers free power over building their own grid scale batteries.
A tank of water is cheap, it’s just not possible to distribute hot water over the grid. But it’s very realistic to store it locally and use for heating and cooling. Which is the bulk of power usage anyway.
fragmede 1 days ago [-]
There are never designs coming into the market that support only, say, the fridge, and have the software to be time of day use metering aware, that won't totally break the bank.
jay_kyburz 1 days ago [-]
Many of us with solar already do this manually, we run the appliances once the sun is up. Even the hotwater heater is programmed to only heat during the middle of the game.
I've been daydreaming about the tank of water idea as well, but the amount of panels you would need on the roof would be crazy.
rswail 1 days ago [-]
Victoria has had smart meters for two decades. The rollout started in 2006 and was basically complete a decade later.
The other states are aiming for a 100% rollout by 2030.
didgetmaster 22 hours ago [-]
Renewable power tends to be sporadic. When the wind is blowing or the sun is shining brightly, they produce a lot of cheap power.
People think the solution is to build huge battery packs to store all that excess power during peak periods and drain them down during off-peak times.
That is certainly a solution, even if it is an expensive one. Perhaps a cheaper one is to get everyone to consume the power while it is being produced. Running air conditioners at full blast. Washing clothes and dishes. Charging electric vehicles. There are many things that can be shifted to those peak times, if the incentives are there.
ukd1 22 hours ago [-]
This won't work. Just do air-conditioning whilst power is being produced? LOL, you know it's hot in someplaces outside of that?
didgetmaster 22 hours ago [-]
I didn't say only do air conditioning during the peak times. You can definitely adjust the AC so that it runs on full during the peak times and cools things down a few degrees below ideal, then back it off and allow the temperature to rise a few degrees once electricity becomes more expensive.
Again, if the incentives are there, people will adjust.
thelastgallon 2 days ago [-]
Ideally, they should pay the EV owners because electricity price goes negative. The EV owners are spending their own money to create a scalable on-demand storage infrastructure. This saves CapEx/OpEx of BESS and also eliminates peaker natural gas plants. EV owners should be paid once for allowing storage, and paid again for using the power to supply back to the grid (V2G).
stubish 1 days ago [-]
The EVs with V2G are just big batteries, nothing special. You certainly can charge your battery on the free power and sell it back during peak periods, and people are doing just that today. Just mostly using their 50 kWh household batteries rather than their EVs though, because V2G is still mostly science fiction unless you buy one of the few models of car that actually support it and have a compatible charger and inverter.
thelastgallon 10 hours ago [-]
For V2G, its a simple feature that enables a car to participate and make money in the energy ecosystem. Govts have to standardize it for cars, just like mandating usb-c.
aetherspawn 1 days ago [-]
We already get free power between 0am and 6am, so with free power between 11am and 2pm we’ll have a whopping 9 hours of free power to charge our car and heat our water storage.
BLKNSLVR 1 days ago [-]
What plan and what provider to get free power from midnight to 6am?
I'm in a plan that gets me $0.08/kWh during those hours, and I'm planning to switch to one that's just over half that, but I haven't come across any free power in that time span.
aetherspawn 21 hours ago [-]
I’m with Powershop currently, but it was a hard toss-up between Powershop and Ovo. Sorry you’re right, it’s not “free” with Powershop (4.99 cents per kWhr), but it’s cheap enough that it’s basically free compared to the cost of living and what we were spending before.
BLKNSLVR 19 hours ago [-]
I'm on AGL and looking to change to the Ovo 4.7 cents per kWh (midnight to 6am) plan. The per day supply cost is higher as are some of the other rates, but overall should still save me roughly $20 a month - by my calculations.
aetherspawn 17 hours ago [-]
For me, Powershop day rate was only 32 cents or so, which made it cheaper overall. We have solar but we use the induction a lot in the evening, so not having a separate higher “on peak” pricing helped us save.
berofeev 1 days ago [-]
I actually built a calculator around this to help someone figure out if they would save money by switching to 3 hour free plan.
Related to this article, I recently saw this video on YouTube:
"I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes" [1]
It is wild how cheap are solar panels now. Really, bonkers cheap. A huge rooftop solar panel costs less than 100 USD. From everything that I read/see/watch, most of the cost associated with solar panel arrays is the labour required for installation. (No hate on those folks -- they are skilled labour!)
Australia, excluding Western Australia as we are on a separate electricity grid.
bruce511 2 days ago [-]
From the article; this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
So yeah, not universal yet. But the precedent means it's moving in that direction. If WA homes end up producing lots of solar at midday then this opens the door there as well.
rswail 1 days ago [-]
It applies in Victoria as well.
Victoria deregulated its market before NSW/SA/Qld.
All of the eastern states (SA/QLD/NSW/VIC/Tas) are part of a single market, with interconnects and wholesale prices set every 5 minutes.
Victoria has its own "default offer" and regulator of the retail market, which is also offering similar "free power" hours.
WA could be part of the NEM with some HVDC across the Nullabor, not sure if it would be economically worthwhile though.
nikcub 1 days ago [-]
> WA could be part of the NEM with some HVDC across the Nullabor, not sure if it would be economically worthwhile though.
Part of the motive of moving the WEM to 5 minute intervals was to eventually leave this option open.
The largest renewable project in the world is being planned in this area[0] so it's feasible that it all may be connected one day
Hope HVDC really takes off, having a power network that has solar feed covering 3 timezones as well as multiple latitudes adds to the national solar harvest and grid resiliency.
nutjob2 1 days ago [-]
WA will be in 2027.
CalRobert 2 days ago [-]
Incidentally the Netherlands has this too, at least with some providers (Budget Energy for one). I get free electric from 12:00 to 17:00 on weekends.
ctenb 2 days ago [-]
Link? I never heard of this and I'm very interested
yurishimo 1 days ago [-]
You might check the rates on Tibber as well. A lot of companies that offer a "free" usage period tend to just move the cost around. If you're comfortable taking the risks associated with a wholesale supplier, then you can likely save a ton of money without even changing your consumption habits.
During this past month with the heatwave, my electricity bill was only about €50 despite running airco all day most days. I have 6 solar panels on my roof for reference (was 3k installed I believe). If I was willing to turn off the A/C at night, I could have easily cut the bill in half since most of the billed usage was between 18-21:00.
There's also the electricity transport costs. We're talking about the pure electricity cost here.
silon42 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, I guess this is covered by "grid charge" which keeps going up with more solar.
lopis 6 hours ago [-]
Without getting into whether the price is fair, there's not much that can be done there. Lots of solar users are using the grid without paying otherwise, and there's a real grid cost.
CalRobert 1 days ago [-]
Well, sure, but that goes without saying?
consumer451 1 days ago [-]
I am curious what interesting opportunities free power for a short time opens up.
I know crypto mining in TX can operate like this, but that's boring.
Desalination and carbon capture are both energy restricted, that sounds a lot more interesting. However, the deployed equipment has to be cheap if you only have 3hrs per day of free power, right?
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
Seems like a good idea. Slightly tweaked consumer behavior can achieve what would take a hell of a lot of batteries
asdefghyk 1 days ago [-]
It actually alludes to a significant problem.
Solar generation is realitely cheap, much more storage is needed.
Storage (overnight and also for several days) is challenging - one reason being its more expensive. Then there is the new transmission lines needed.
NothingAboutAny 1 days ago [-]
it's much much more expensive, people like to repeat the line that solar is the cheapest form of energy while hand-waving away batteries and grid upgrades required.
I did the napkin math a while back but a battery bank for 10's of thousands of homes for 48 hours costed as much (more?) than just building a nuclear power plant.
defrost 1 days ago [-]
The Australian scientific body, the CSIRO, did an extensive report on the full life costs of various energy strategies and concluded that nuclear made little to no economic sense in Australia.
Perhaps had they used a napkin they would have agreed with you.
roenxi 1 days ago [-]
The CSIRO aren't the group who have to cost, pay for, take on the financial risk of or be operationally involved in running a nuclear power plant. Their opinions are welcome but not in any way final. The Chinese might easily be willing to come in and build something as their industry matures, for example, at costs not currently anticipated.
The more pressing issue is the Australian government is a coven of luddites who have taken a bold and consistent stance against any form of advanced industrial progress taking root in Australia whatever and have identified nuclear power as high technology that therefore must be categorically banned. Leaving the whole question an academic one and leaving the CSIRO the only group taking an interest.
NothingAboutAny 1 days ago [-]
The CSIRO renewables plan factors in only 2-4 hours of battery capacity (way less, with some already built) with the rest of the backup coming from existing pumped hydro and an existing Natural Gas plant.
one of the reasons nuclear looked worse in the report is that they would have to actually build a nuclear power plant.
it might not make direct sense to build nuclear given what already physically exists, but apples to apples it's not quite as clear.
chrisandchris 1 days ago [-]
I think not everything that makes (purely) financially sense does make economically sense. There's much more to it that just money (e.g. where do you get the uran from for the next 30 years?).
sarmasamosarma 1 days ago [-]
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bob1029 2 days ago [-]
I miss having Griddy in Texas. Direct access to the wholesale market is probably not good for the lower end of the consumer segment, but for people with some functional marbles it can make a big difference on the demand side of the grid.
I feel like they had to kill griddy before all the powerwall solutions started showing up. We simply cannot empower the peasants with both things at once. The ability to store energy makes access to wholesale prices substantially more effective.
I'll never forget the days where we would get push notifications about negative prices. I'd throw the dryer and oven on every time to try and unwind the meter a bit.
The requirement is to accept time of use TOU variant charging and if you cannot shift enough load into 3 hours you may pay more overall for power in other times of day.
Demand shifting is good. Do not mistake this as free energy, it very much depends. Many people still don't have TOU meters and many people won't successfully move load into the window.
Fixed line costs are rising massively. Electricity should be significantly cheaper but the economics here favour incumbents and people like John Quiggin arguing for renationalisation are drowned out.
nutjob2 1 days ago [-]
Or buy a subsidized battery to store the free power and use it whenever you like.
ggm 1 days ago [-]
Yes, that's also being done. A critique I have seen is that this is empowering the rich to get richer. Renters are less likely to be able to adopt these strategies.
stubish 1 days ago [-]
The rich certainly benefit more, like anything where an investment needs to be made (I expect the new plans will be like the existing 'free' power plans and be a poor choice without a battery). In this case, the poor still benefit a little bit as it should drive down peak period prices and the cost of fixed rate plans.
drew870mitchell 1 days ago [-]
Electric battery storage is a better option, but also your home is a very leaky battery storage for conditioned air. At my last place i got a plan that was nearly free on overnights and ran the HVAC all night, turning it off during the peak period. This was in the worst part of summer when the overnight lows were 80F or above so natural ventilation couldn't help much.
1 days ago [-]
ralfd 1 days ago [-]
> No solar panels required. No need to own your home. You just need a smart meter and to opt in through your retailer to have access to free daytime electricity. The scheme is called the Solar Sharer Offer.
What is then the incentive to install (or repair/maintenance) solar panels?
thinkcontext 1 days ago [-]
That's the point, the grid operator does not want more solar. They have an excess of solar available during those 3 hours that would otherwise go to waste and not enough later in the day.
It’s very cool to see what happens where there are simply so many residential solar installs. Power price goes negative during peak sunshine hours so they just give it away.
Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
oliyoung 2 days ago [-]
As an Australian, the lack of anxiety and guilt you get when you're using 10-12 hours of air conditioning in the middle of summer and not paying for a cent of it because your solar panels are covering is worth more than anything
dhotson 2 days ago [-]
Yeah totally, nice to be able to put the AC/heater on "for free". I even got a negative power bill once!
In my specific case, I barely use much power so home solar covers basically all of the usage, my bill is dominated by the daily charge, so the usage component is practically irrelevant to me.
1 days ago [-]
AtlasBarfed 2 days ago [-]
Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world?
Yes, grid scale deployments are cheaper, but I'm generally guessing a lot of the grid scale solar deployments do not price in the grid infrastructure adaptation costs, and I'm not even talking about grid storage.
Consumer rooftop solar is fundamentally democratic: it reduces reliance on centralized institutions for power delivery, Make society a lot more resilient in bad weather and other emergency situations, insulates everyday people from wild variations and petroleum and other consumable energy availability.
Combined with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, it would enable electrification of 80 and 90% of daily driving without grid infrastructure costs.
brabel 2 days ago [-]
> Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world?
Here in Sweden nearly all of the electricity bill you pay is concentrated on the winter months when there is literally zero sunshine. Even then solar is popular here. I calculated that installing solar would take around 10 years or more to pay for itself, but I have very little hope to stay in the same house all that time so for me it seemed like a bad investment.
That said, if you live in places where it’s sunny most of the time even in winter, like Australia, then solar is absolutely great, just don’t assume most places are like that.
ghiculescu 1 days ago [-]
10 year ROI is what I got quoted on a solar setup. I live in Queensland. It’s very sunny here.
brabel 1 days ago [-]
Wow your current electricity must be really expensive... or your solar setup is?? Also the calculation was done by the company selling it, I'm pretty sure that was far too optimistic.
jazoom 1 days ago [-]
That actually sounds pessimistic to me. My ROI for 18kW solar plus 42kWh battery will be under 3 years.
- Expensive electricity
- Government subsidy for solar and battery
- Much sunshine
- 3 hours free charging daily
Nearly $5000 yearly bill gone. $14000 installation cost post rebate.
brabel 1 days ago [-]
With a calculation like that I'd buy solar in a heart beat!
But as I said, my main concern is my winter bill, which I know by asking people who own solar in the region, is almost the same with solar since there's no sun at all (it's not that it's cloudy, it's that the entire day duration is like 4 hours - under which you barely feel any sun heat and in practice the solar output is exactly zero on the worst month and near zero for 4 or so months). Hence the very long ROI here, but I agree that for Queensland, 10 years would be a bit too long if you dimension the solar array properly.
grey-area 2 days ago [-]
You should still feel some guilt for the heat pollution your air conditioning causes for those outside your house, esp. in an urban area.
lnsru 2 days ago [-]
Can you please elaborate more on pollution from air conditioning equipment and heat pumps. I was thinking they are closed systems.
grey-area 2 days ago [-]
Sorry autocorrect changed heat pollution to ‘what pollution’, I’ve fixed that now.
There is some impact on others, particularly those without ac.
CalRobert 2 days ago [-]
If you’re using rooftop solar then presumably the net heat generated by your aircon is the same as the amount your roof is no longer absorbing. Otherwise you just described a perpetual motion machine?
grey-area 1 days ago [-]
I imagine that absorption by the roof or panels is around the same - however the aircon moves heat from inside to outside, so you are moving heat outside for other people to deal with. In an isolated house it makes little difference. If every building has aircon in a city it does impact outside temperatures and adds to the heat island effect.
CalRobert 1 days ago [-]
Right, but energy that would have heated the roof goes towards powering the aircon (which likely is on the roof itself), which then emits the same amount of heat, no?
Say a roof is absorbing 10000 watts. You install solar panels that absorb 2000 watts, used to power an airco. You now have your roof absorbing 8000 watts (released as heat) and ann airco absorbing (using) 2000 watts (also released as heat). Am I wrong? Seems like a conservation of energy problem. And you get a cooler roof so less airco demand too!
grey-area 1 days ago [-]
No the solar panels do not absorb only infrared or even mostly infrared.
CalRobert 24 hours ago [-]
OK, but I don't see how that addresses what I was getting at?
As a thought experiment, imagine you attach a heater to the solar panels (maybe it's a sunny day in winter). Do you get free energy for heat?
grey-area 14 hours ago [-]
Nobody said there was free energy, but heat is not the only energy available. Here if you like in your analogy visible light is turned to outside heat and inside cool. But it’s simpler just to think about the heat inside the house - heat is being transferred from inside to outside.
CalRobert 1 days ago [-]
Ah, unless you refer to shifting the release of heat from inside to outside earlier in the day?
brabel 2 days ago [-]
In a country like Australia where building density is extremely low that’s a negligible problem?!
grey-area 1 days ago [-]
Sure if building density is low in your area and you have no nearby neighbours it probably doesn’t matter, you’d just be heating your surroundings a little.
yurishimo 1 days ago [-]
Or, we could lobby politicians to actually improve the lives of their constituents by making climate control appliances so affordable and ubiquitous that it's no longer an issue and we can stop accidental deaths attributed to heat. More green spaces can also help mitigate the impact.
The reality is that a lot of old western europe was built for a climate that no longer exists. Houses are built to prioritize holding on to heat and rebuilding entire cities is definitely not possible if we're already bickering so much about adding heat pumps.
Yes, heat pumps may create a rise in temperatures in cities, but there are other things we can do as a society to also lower temperatures as to create a net-neutral impact.
grey-area 1 days ago [-]
Schemes like the Paris central cooling one are interesting here - there are other possible solutions in cities too.
And sure yes combined with other measures AC can be a net good.
oliyoung 20 hours ago [-]
that's inconsequential to keeping my family cool on the third 43c degree day in a week
CalRobert 2 days ago [-]
This is heat that would have escaped the house anyway
grey-area 1 days ago [-]
No, air conditioning units generate heat (that is how they cool!) and do contribute to local warming. Without AC the house reaches equilibrium with outside. With AC the house is cooled and that heat has to go somewhere.
scheeseman486 1 days ago [-]
They don't generate heat in the sense that heat is generated from nothing. If the AC is being powered by solar, then the energy that is powering the heat pump has already hit the earth and has become part of that system. The energy that would otherwise have hit the roofing and been radiated is more focused around the radiators, but as soon as that dissipates into the air the difference to the local climate isn't any different.
If the roof was white and reflective then a lot more of that light would be reflected, but most roofing isn't.
Your logic isn't really compatible with the laws of thermodynamics.
grey-area 1 days ago [-]
Solar energy is not just infrared, and infrared is not what is used by PV solar. So not it’s not equivalent and anyway doesn’t in any way impact the extra heating effect of a new heat source on the ground.
Instead of generate heat you could say they move heat if you like, from inside to outside.
scheeseman486 20 hours ago [-]
All absorbed light gets turned into heat, infrared or otherwise (I'm not sure why you brought up IR?); solar panels catch some of that spectrum. I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make here, particularly given the second paragraph seems to contradict the first; "extra heating effect" (from where does this "extra" come from?) vs "you could say they move heat if you like" which yeah, not really about what I like, that's just how physics works, can't get any more fundamental than the law of conservation of energy.
You said that AC/heat pumps "generate" heat and if they were powered by fossil fuels, in an roundabout way they do. But if they're driven by solar, there's no long-trapped energy being expelled and therefore no "extra" energy added to the system beyond what the sun is providing.
grey-area 13 hours ago [-]
Not all light is absorbed and turned to heat, much is reflected, for PV some turned to electricity.
I think we can agree energy is conserved. Extra heating effect OUTSIDE.
AC moves heat from inside to outside, ergo outside is hotter than it would be, this is not complicated.
CalRobert 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, for a time, there is a temperature difference between indoors and outdoors. Air conditioners push heat outside. But they reach equilibrium eventually. (At night, or I suppose in the autumn).
Similarly heat pumps (which is what air conditioning is) also push cold outside when you use them for heat, so the outdoor environment is colder than it would otherwise be, again until equilibrium is reached.
Similarly your refrigerator is cold inside but makes your home warmer.
My point was just that the -net- heat added to the city is zero if you’re using solar.
CalRobert 1 days ago [-]
Right, but assuming conservation of energy holds then the net should stay the same, right? Unless solar panels have lower albedo than the roof they’re sitting on (considering how many roofs are flat black tar that seems unlikely…)
dhotson 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, it's been great to see the uptake of rooftop solar in Australia.
One downside is that large scale solar projects aren't profitable any more. It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech, that they aren't getting a good payoff.
The good news is that co-located solar and battery projects are still profitable, but capital costs are higher and payback period of batteries aren't as good.
rswail 1 days ago [-]
Co-located PV/BESS or Wind/BESS is the best grid solution anyway. The REZs with transmission infrastructure (subsidized by government) will also add to the return.
The good thing is that even with over a decade of conservative government trying to kill it, renewables are now commercially the only choice for Australia and we will benefit from the rapid advances in storage as well.
Grid level plants are starting to also incorporate synthetic condensers and other FCAS services to make our grid more resilient and reliable, even as our clapped out coal plants move closer to shut down.
Leherenn 1 days ago [-]
What makes large scale solar no longer profitable? Distribution costs have outpaced the efficiency gains of the large scale installation?
dhotson 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, it's tricky because basically all solar arrays (rooftop and utility) all come online at more-or-less the same time so there's a huge influx of supply which drives the price down.
You can get a sense of it if you look at the daily breakdown:
The price goes negative around 2pm most days, in which case, as a solar only operator you're losing money to generate power, so quite often there's curtailment.
And then at 6pm, the sun is down so solar-only operators can't capitalise on the opportunity.
So unfortunately it's just a very limited opportunity to make a profit on your investment each day. More demand during the peak generation time would help!
DANmode 1 days ago [-]
> It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech
In the US, these people are known as speculators riding on government subsidy or grant, often shadily awarded - and anyone who couldn’t see consumer panel and consumer power-storage tech hooting its inflection point simply didn’t have a good grasp on the technology.
All important factors for investors.
thinkcontext 1 days ago [-]
"Free" electricity is an indication that the economics are out of balance. If the power provider isn't getting paid for those 3 hours, it means they'll need to be paid more at other times. It also means the grid needs to spend more on storage and less on new solar. Its cool if you have the ability to load shift but in general it means costs go up.
Abimelex 1 days ago [-]
That sounds great at first, but just imaging having dynamic price contracts, like tibber, that also forward you the negative prices while still maintaining very low grid fees.
tiew9Vii 1 days ago [-]
Free isn't free.
Coinciding with this, suppliers put daily connection charges up.
nikcub 1 days ago [-]
It kinda is since wholesale energy prices are often negative in these markets during the day
abanana 1 days ago [-]
That's the theory. Others in this thread are reporting the reality.
In practice, any profit-making enterprise will not want to miss out on the income they were previously getting, so will find other times and charges to load it onto. Also, they know some people will specifically choose an energy plan that seems to give them something free, so it's easy to take advantage by increasing the prices they pay less attention to.
DANmode 1 days ago [-]
As far as line-items on an invoice are concerned, power always seemed egregiously overpriced, and the infrastructure costs seemed wildly understated.
So, maybe this is a correction?
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
Damn, we need this in Spain. Market prices go negative basically every daytime, but consumer prices stay exactly the same...
TheChaplain 1 days ago [-]
They could just sidestep it, by making the electricity free but the transport or cable use more expensive, no?
rswail 1 days ago [-]
That's what is happening, the daily supply charge has been bumped up as well as the $/kWh during the other periods.
But it will still have the desired effect of shifting usage patterns, especially for people with rooftop solar and/or batteries and/or EVs.
We have a very large penetration of rooftop solar (due to government subsidies) and now home batteries as well.
There's definitely been a shift in the market "after sunset" when the coal "baseload" and gas peakers used to make their money.
The batteries are flattening out those spikes dramatically.
N_Lens 1 days ago [-]
How’s that privatisation working out for Australian electric grids?
thelastgallon 2 days ago [-]
Australia should deploy vertical solar massively. Adds a few more hours of production.
asdefghyk 2 days ago [-]
Its because they have NO economical way to store it to sell for night time usage.
stubish 1 days ago [-]
The new plans are mostly to charge the hundreds of thousands of household batteries that have been installed over the last few years, which are an economical way to store energy for night time usage (ROI about 8% over 20 years, probably more with the new plans).
1 days ago [-]
flgb 2 days ago [-]
Not really.
The fundamental costs and margin requirements in the system haven't changed.
This is a government-mandated electricity plan (a default market offer) that competitive electricity retailers are now required to offer. Those retailers still have network costs, environmental costs, energy costs, and administration costs to recover, and so prices at other times of day necessarily go up.
Some consumers may be better off on this plan (generally at the expense of other consumers), and some will be worse off.
It's good politics and only so-so policy.
rappatic 1 days ago [-]
Translation: “you will just pay more for electricity at other times of day”
gfxfan 1 days ago [-]
And the total will go up, measured statistically due to increased complexity but also due to any work this change will incur.
jay_kyburz 1 days ago [-]
This will kill new household solar instillation.
The payback time was already well in excess of 10 years, but now that power is free during the day, you can't count those hours as helping pay down your investment. Payback time will be 30 + years at least. You are much better just enjoying your neighbors solar rather than paying for your own.
(Feed-in is about 3c now I think. Was 12c when many people bought their panels.)
Note: My state 100% renewable energy so reduction of carbon footprint has not bearing on my solar decisions.
This also feels like a fairly heavy handed way to encourage investments in batteries. But in the famous words of George W, "can't fool me again". As soon as there are too many batteries and the grid companies are not making enough money, they will introduce fees to have the batteries, or increase connection fees.
perilunar 1 days ago [-]
If the connection fees get too high, people will disconnect. Then they’ll probably ban it.
abstractspoon 2 days ago [-]
When it's hardly needed!
worthless-trash 1 days ago [-]
40c outside during summer in these times.. yeah.. hardly needed.
hahahaa 1 days ago [-]
You need a battery to take advantage: then you may as well use a direct to market option like Amber. Which benefits grid stability too. 3 hrs without a battery is useless in Australia. As you generally use electricity for heating/cooling and need it longer than that esp. cooling.
worthless-trash 1 days ago [-]
I assure you first hand, you can turn on the heater (during winter) or airconditioner without battery and take advantage of this.
You can wash your clothes during this time to take advantage on this.
You can cook on the electric stove during this time to take advantage of this.
No battery is required to do this. I can't connect your logic to my reality.
hahahaa 14 hours ago [-]
It is the extra $/kwh you pay out of those 3 hours subsidizing the free time that will be the issue. So you need to order a large round during happy hour and make those beers last. Somewhat possible by overcooling or overheating but you need a battery ideally.
1 days ago [-]
andrewstuart 2 days ago [-]
Some parts of Australia.
Not Victoria which has bankrupted itself building roads and railways it cannot afford.
rswail 1 days ago [-]
Bullshit.
Victoria's default offer will include the same offer from October [1].
Victoria has a separate regulator because it deregulated its electricity grid before the other states.
In response to your nonsense about Victoria somehow being bankrupt.
tw1984 2 days ago [-]
basically they give you a few hours free electricity in exchange for significantly higher electricity prices for the rest of the day.
basically a free IQ test.
bruce511 2 days ago [-]
Can you elaborate on the higher elec prices for the benefit of those of us not in Aus? Is that because of the smart meter requirement?
kaelwd 2 days ago [-]
Before: 25c/kwh all day
After: 30c/kwh most of the day, 0c from 11-2
It's still worth it if you have a lot of load you can shift to the middle of the day (like a pool heater or battery), but for most 9-5 workers you just end up paying more at the times you're actually home.
Smart meters are free, most people already have one.
bruce511 2 days ago [-]
Ahh, so the 30c rate is locked in for everyone? So they've basically price-shifted the elec so it follows production cost better?
Even if you're not home I'm thinking there are a number of ways to make use of the free elec. Hot water geyser seems like the obvious first candidate.
I'd also think heating (in winter), cooling in summer. Even if you're not there in those times, the effects will be evident for many hours after.
For those who have programmable washer/dryers or dishwashers it's also good. Even ovens on occasion.
I get that not everyone is best placed to take advantage of this, but equally improvements don't have to be an "everyone or no one" option.
kaelwd 1 days ago [-]
No it's optional, the retailers just have to offer it.
strken 2 days ago [-]
I thought most Australians had different pricing for peak/off-peak. I'm paying 39c/kWh for peak (3pm to 9pm) and 20c/kWh for off-peak (9pm to 3pm the next day).
stubish 1 days ago [-]
Flat rate plans are still popular and the best choice if you can't shift your power usage out of peak times.
kaelwd 1 days ago [-]
Yeah just a simplified example, I pay 33/16/10 peak/off-peak/midday.
AtlasBarfed 2 days ago [-]
Get a battery
kaelwd 2 days ago [-]
45% of us either rent or live in apartments.
moooo99 24 hours ago [-]
I know, this doesn't really address the core issue, but is stuff like balcony solar legal in Australia?
Here in Germany, it is absolutely massive and an increasing number of people run their balcony solar with batteries that just feed into a regular Schuko Plug. It only allows to feed in 800W at a time, but there are workarounds for that as well
bruce511 2 days ago [-]
Sure, a battery isn't available to everyone. But I is available for many.
One would have to do the math, cost of battery versus 24kw free daily. But clearly for lots of people the math will work.
A side effect of policies like this is effectively getting people to invest capital to time-shift elec usage. That's good policy. Reducing the peaks in consumption solves other problems.
tw1984 1 days ago [-]
> A side effect of policies like this is effectively getting people to invest capital to time-shift elec usage.
this means you don't have a functioning government/political system.
ZeroGravitas 1 days ago [-]
The utilities don't really want to sell you the cheap solar. They'd rather write op-eds about how too much solar is flooding the grid and beg for more money to invest in the grid elements they can make money from.
The government is having to force them to reflect the abundance of cheap, clean energy at these times in at least one of their tariff offerings.
They can bend the rules slightly by adding other daily charges or limitations and upping the price at other times to reduce uptake and move us all slightly further from the global optimum but maximize their profits.
gridmatters 1 days ago [-]
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aaron695 1 days ago [-]
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protocolture 2 days ago [-]
The fine print is interesting, theres a cap, fair use provisions and it requires a smart meter. Smart meters are still a bit contentious.
Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.
defrost 2 days ago [-]
To be fair, in a modern Maslow’s Aussie Hierarchy of Needs energy is a foundational Physiological Need, whereas energy for crypto mining is a luxury item best placed out past the outhouse of the main pyramid.
nharada 2 days ago [-]
A 24 kWh cap per day seems very reasonable. Drawing 8 kW is quite a lot.
DamonHD 2 days ago [-]
My home is in London UK and is relatively small and efficient, but 8kWh may be higher than our peak demand ever over more than 20 years in this house...
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
UK appliances cap out at 13A, or 3.1kW. Electric cookers may be on higher current wiring, but seem to be rated at 3kW max anyway.
I think the only way most people could get to 8kW continuous without an EV would be to turn on their electric oven, grill, and all spots on their electric hob. And the kettle.
Symbiote 1 days ago [-]
My Danish electricity supplier lets me download my smart meter records since 2022.
It's by hour, and the highest times are probably when I was cooking with both the oven and the hob, and perhaps had the washing machine running too. The highest hour used 2.9kWh.
Plenty of cheap (e.g. rental) homes in the UK have crappy electric shows, which are usually rated at 6-8kW — but rarely used for a whole hour.
Animats 2 days ago [-]
It's not enough to charge a car fully.
skeledrew 1 days ago [-]
Then charge the car partially.
kaelwd 2 days ago [-]
How often do you discharge a car fully?
tialaramex 1 days ago [-]
I think this is another of those weird "Electricity as fuel" metaphors where non-owners don't understand that an EV, like their phone, isn't a thing you specifically "fill up" like you would a petrol car.
1 days ago [-]
worthless-trash 2 days ago [-]
> Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.
I imagine that this is not the target audience.
protocolture 2 days ago [-]
Its a time honored Australian tradition to review new government programs and absolutely milk them dry.
rswail 1 days ago [-]
Victoria has had smart meters rolled out for over a decade.
The rest of the states in the NEM are aiming for 2030 to complete their rollouts.
Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.
protocolture 21 hours ago [-]
>Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.
Eh I sit on the fence on this one. Take your pick as to who is going to abuse the data. Corps or the government to taste.
Consider this very proposal, incentives to use power at certain times are good. But that incentive structure could instead be very anti consumer. Higher prices when we need electricity would be a horrid state of affairs when rents have doubled in 5 years and a lot of people are barely holding on.
rswail 12 hours ago [-]
Smart meters don't make things better or worse, they are technology that enables better time-of-use metering than the century of multiple meters for peak vs off-peak consumption, as well as making meter reading/billing cheaper.
They enable new services like feed-in tariffs and incorporation of V2G and VPP infrastructure.
Rents have not doubled in 5 years.
Rental inflation peaked at ~8% and is now below 4% pa.
This is not the case. From 1 July 2026, Australian energy retailers with more than 1,000 customers must offer at least one energy plan which includes 3 hours of free electricity, capped at 24kWh per day, to residential customers in 3 states - NSW, SE Queensland and South Australia. https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer
Not all energy plans that the retailers offer have to include 3 hours of free electricity. In practice, most energy plans currently offered don’t include 3 hours of free electricity but some retailers such as Globird are offering more than one energy plan which includes ‘free’ electricity.
The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity.
Australian consumers can choose the retailer and energy plan their home or business is on and can change their plan at any time.
This page on the Energy Consumers Australia website has more details about the Solar Sharer Offer and a similar Victorian Government scheme which starts on 1 October. https://energyconsumersaustralia.com.au/news/solar-sharer-of...
Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course). It’s not hard to achieve this for any competent government. Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is also corrupt and inefficient).
This rollout of cheap solar in Australia is causing power prices during a global energy crisis and a datacenter build out to plummet.
And fwiw i don’t think Australia’s government is perfect. But it should set the bar to other nations of ‘what could be’. You could have falling power prices right now if you enabled a government to encourage what is currently by far the cheapest form of electricity (solar).
China is huge, and it does have huge solar farms, but the trouble is now you need a huge power transport infrastructure. Australia can move enough power from a desert where nobody lives to a small city 100 kilometres away on a few ordinary hundred kV pylons and be happy. China has huge cities, 2-3 thousand kilometres from those solar farms so it is building long chains of 1MV pylons which is the same idea but at this incredible scale.
China is adding around 10X Australia’s total installed solar power generation every single year. Half of the entire world’s deployed solar is in China.
And while Australia’s solar growth is impressive, it’s worth remembering that it’s only possible because of China. It was Chinese government policy that pushed to develop the huge solar industry that exists today and supplies vast quantities of cheap solar panels to the world.
Equally true is that Chinese manufacturing of solar cells is only partly possible because of Australian solar research and development. In 1983, a research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), invented the PERC silicon solar cell. This design fundamentally improved solar cell efficiency to capture sunlight more effectively and reduce electronic losses. Over several decades of refinement, the UNSW team continued to set global efficiency records, pushing cell efficiency from 18% in 1984 up to 25% by the early 2000s.
Today, PERC technology is the cheapest way to generate electricity using solar cells and is utilised in over 90% of solar panels manufactured globally. https://theconversation.com/how-an-aussie-invention-could-so...
The solar research group at UNSW trained over 120 PhD students who went on to establish solar manufacturing, particularly in China.
This is a remarkable stat that's the opposite of what I expected, but I suppose China is (a) starting from a lower base and (b) much, much larger in absolute population. Australia's population would fit in Chongqing.
Where people get misled on China’s rollout is total generation (since it’s a huge fraction of the worlds population) and the fact that they do large centralised rollouts rather than enabling rooftop solar. So they have some of the biggest solar farms. Rooftop solar is the way the countries that have shot past china have mostly achieved results - remove barriers to installation and grid connection and suddenly every citizen is invested in it since it saves them money. It’s the classic efficiency win from a massively motivated population vs a central bureaucracy. China’s showing everyone how NOT to enable solar.
When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water. Well, I could tell when they turned on the central heating plants for the winter because I finally had hot water showers again.
was that recently? I lived there from 2011-2017 and solar power was virtually unheard of, much less powering any buildings. But yeah, China is that kind of place that the city decides when you get heating in your apartment (Nov 15 IIRC, so early Nov could be _really_ cold inside; we wore our coats).
I reckon more Australians live in SFHs than apartment blocks (so have roofs where personal solar makes sense), and the major cities get more son than eastern Chinese cities do.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...
This year is the only year that prices have gone down.
i know a guy who bought an arseload of batteries and buys and sells off the grid to make a moderate amount of money. he says it's not really paying back the time spent but he does it because he finds it interesting to optimise
So countries are only behind Australia because of corruption? And the US is only behind because of Trump, specifically?
Man, must be nice to have such a basic view of the world; everything so sinpmy explained.
It's not all Trump, of course. It's also the people who put him in office twice, the folks who block upgrading the grid, etc. etc.
So yeah, Trump doesn't help, but in respect specifically of Solar you'd likely see pretty similar policies from many US regimes, including mainstream Democrats.
The generate more grid solar, more wind, more gas and more coal than other states.
They're still #2 to California when you include distributed solar though.
It is only attractive in California due to a combination absurd electricity prices from State sanctioned monopolies and red tape preventing grid development.
Nuclear is broadly on par in cost.
The health impact costs of running existing coal plants in Texas are higher than the cost of installing new rooftop solar. That's ignoring carbon costs, which could be the same again.
And that's at Texas install costs. While low for America they are double Australian costs mostly due to poor permitting regulations and lack of competition.
This artificially makes the gap between utility and rooftop solar wider.
So you're being weirdly specific in your desire for economic efficiency.
We should cut red tape and permitting processes to enable low cost green energy from the cheapest sources.
The California model is one of the last states should look to as an example of how to run an energy market and roll out solar.
I remember when the first ones started appearing in the UK over 30 years ago and people were quick to complain about how ugly they looked. But actually, over time I think most people accept them now, and personally I think they're pretty cool. Most of the UK ones are actually off shore now - you can just about see them from the coast, but they're just small specks on the horizon at that distance. I think the biggest concern people have with them now is the belief that lots of birds get killed by them, but the reality is that actually many more birds die every year from flying into windows than get hit by turbine blades.
As the weather warms and we get more solar exposure we will easily be in excess. We get a very small export rate with a bonus for no energy consumption during peak evening hours which can offset the fixed daily charge.
There are a lot of gotchas that you need to be aware of. 42 kWh is nominal capacity not the actual usable capacity. House load, max grid import and export capacity, max inverter capacity, AC or DC coupled panels, battery charging profile, battery temp are all factors in how much you can charge in the window. For example I have max 15 kW grid draw, with a 10 kW inverter that can charge the battery. I can put in max ~30 kWh into the battery, so I also run other loads in the house to use the other 5 kW capacity. If I go over 5 kW house load the battery charge is clipped to maintain grid import limit.
Here's a £50k London parking space: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/136662200#/?channel=R...
While that's an extreme, I would expect the cost of any urban parking space with a low speed charger to be dominated by the land, then the charger one-off install price, and thereafter electricity use is a pretty trivial cost.
Sydney will also charge you 3,000 $AUS annually for central parking spaces: https://www.revenue.nsw.gov.au/taxes-duties-levies-royalties...
I'm in Washington where electricity is cheaper, so 29 cents per kWh is not much cheaper than Tesla's superchargers. The closest one to me is 31 cents in the middle of the day and goes as low as 20 cents per kWh at night. I pay 8 cents per kWh at home, which is where I charge (at much slower speeds) unless I'm on a road trip.
> I am not making any value judgement
Calling something "virtue signalling" is a value judgement.
Edit: should add, that's straight solar no battery
Most likely the aircon is running less in winter so they don't use as much power. There is not much of a winter in the tropics.
We just got a very high efficiency wood stove, I expect we will now have no electricity bill each year.
I believe that incentivizing people to acquire batteries is precisely the purpose of the policy. It's good for the grid for there to be a lot of storage at the edges. As I understand it, the 24kWh cap is subject to annual review, with it being reduced/the policy being soft phased out once curtailment is no longer necessary.
I could imagine appliances that take that into account. e.g. an airconditioner that works harder during the cheaper periods. I wonder whether any retailers pass through the 5 minute pricing variation? Should be easy enough to monitor the price and adjust my AC via the infra red remote protocol.
With sufficient take-up and consumers funding the cost of battery storage, this could replace an amount of commercial balancing services and reduce the overall cost of grid-management.
You can't make a blanket statement like that because it depends on a lot of variables about their specific battery system and power needs. If you have just enough battery to get through a normal day so you're running them top to bottom every day then sure, those are likely to have a relatively short life. If you've set up your system with extra capacity to support extended total grid outages and/or bad weather now your normal days might only be cycling from 80% down to 60% and back. Of course battery chemistry is also relevant, and a home battery system doesn't need to care about energy density or peak charge/discharge rates in the same way an EV might.
On top of all that, now that we're over 15 years in to mass-produced EVs we've learned that our battery life expectations were generally pessimistic. As long as the batteries are kept within a reasonable temperature range and not otherwise abused they tend to be in pretty good condition even this far in to their expected service life. Home energy storage systems are a lot easier on batteries than automotive use so as a general rule they should last even longer even with similar cycle counts.
The main problem, as Australians are no doubt aware, is that our houses are large and poorly insulated. I've done everything sensible already (ceiling + floor insulation, draft sealing, honeycomb blinds, etc) except paying $100,000 to double-glaze all windows, and it still feels like a tent.
Despite all this ranting, electricity is now effectively free in summer for me, and ~$5-8 per day in winter. Pre-battery it was in the ballpark of $10-25 per day. The battery should have a payback period of 4 years, but was heavily subsidized by the government. Due to how I'm charging and discharging it so regularly, I'm expected it might only have a 10yr lifetime.
So you could eliminate the usage costs, but not the supply charge.
The whole reason for this is Australia's power grid is a market, where suppliers put in bids for how much they can produce, and at what price. And AEMO then selects the cheapest way to meet demand (paying the marginal price), but also expects residential rooftop solar a given.
As a result we often have an excess of power driving wholesale pricing into the negatives.
The free power is a way to increase usage at times when we're most likely to have negative pricing, and encourage use of high energy appliances like dishwashers etc to be run during that period to reduce demand the rest of the time.
A sneaky tax that keeps rising. In the UK it pays for failed energy companies, people defaulting on their energy bills, energy bill subsidies... and supposedly for grid upgrades lol
It's risen far above inflation (responding to a sibling comment)
In general inflation is increasing everywhere so not completely unexpected. Also solar/battery powered networks are shaped differently than ones only powered by prime movers. The edges become thicker as power becomes generated at the edge.
Free energy is too good to be true, even if you aren't a physicist.
Ok, then why not take one plan with retailer A, and another plan with retailer B?
The government won't address this particular perverse situation with the embedded networks until the 2027–28 DMO period.
So I'm stuck with an energy provider that is too incompetent to figure out how to bill me correctly, but puts a markup on what I'd pay as a home owner, and I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!
No IPv6, no gigabit Internet, no free solar electricity.
HTP!
Australia’s embedded network landscape is a peculiarly intricate tangle of nuance, complexity and regulatory optimism. Note that the embedded networks are distinctly unique and different from retail utility providers.
Please bear with my lengthy explanation for a few rather long moments.
Embedded networks are private distribution systems sitting behind a single connection to the public grid (shopping malls, apartment blocks, retirement villages, camp and caravan sites etc). They all have, effectively, a single wire going into the site.
Originally, they were designed for incidental on-selling by site managers, and they are a regulatory exception allowing the operator to on-sell electricity and other services without becoming a fully authorised energy retailer or licenced distributor. The embedded networks typically bundle: 1) electricity, 2) centralised hot water, 3) cold water, 4) gas, 5) heating / cooling (air-conditioning) and 6) fibre to the premises (sometimes, not always). All those things are governed by separate statutes.
In theory as well as occasionally in practice, they should be cheaper for consumers because they are able to negotiate lower wholesale rates from the upstream supplier and because the customer churn is non-existent (the customer is locked into the network and has nowhere to go). In some cases, that is indeed true, but because the current legislation explicitly excludes the embedded networks from the government reporting, many embedded network operators have resorted to the insidious exploitation of their customers, and the government is clueless because the operators' imposed pricing is opaque.
Natiaonally, Australia does not have a single federal embedded-network statute. The principal framework is a cooperative national scheme comprising 7 government bodies (Australian Energy Market Commission, AER, Australian Energy Market Operator, National Electricity Law and Rules, National Energy Retail Law and Rules, Australian Consumer Law and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).
At the state level – so far – only Victoria has largely banned new embedded networks, with the remaining states either participating or not participating in the National Energy Customer Framework. Overall, NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and the national regulators are tightening the rules but they still have a way to go.
For a reform such as embedded-network regulation, the path looks closer to:
An MP may understand: «Residents in apartment towers are getting poor outcomes». They are highly unlikely to understand: a) market settlement arrangements, b) metering identifiers, c) distribution-loss factors, d) retailer-of-last-resort frameworks, e) exemption classes, f) embedded-network-manager functions, or g)interactions between state strata law and national electricity law.Unsurprisingly and consequently, politicians become heavily dependent on: a) departmental advice, b) regulator advice, c) industry submissions, d) consultant reports, and e) lobby groups.
The people who understand the system – and especially those one who know how to work the system to their benefit – therefore acquire disproportionate influence over how the system evolves. That does not necessarily imply corruption, it is a structural feature of technical governance. Customers, however, refer to it as «rent seeking», even if they own an apartment.
Despite all that, elected representatives still do remain one of the few machineries capable of changing the underlying legal framework. The deeper issue is that modern regulatory states are neither pure democracies nor pure technocracies – they are hybrids. Formal authority remains democratic, but practical power is distributed among elected officials, bureaucracies, regulators, courts, industry participants, consultants, lobbyists and organised interest groups.
I have recently gone down the rabbit hole of the embedded networks and learned a bewildering number of things hence the fulmination.
Plus, extra Internet points for using this Unicode char that I didn't know about: ↝
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
Because their place of residence is connected to an embedded network that has eschewed the NBN Co and chosen to connect to a private fibre operator who sits outside the NBN. They probably also pay more compared to NBN for the same speed.
Not every embedded network supplies fibre, but some do, and that appears to be the case in their situation.
By the way, NBN has recently upgraded the network to 2Gbps, with 10 Gbps having been trialled but no availability date set as of yet.
He decided it was waaaaay too expensive and big-governmenty to do that and besides, Uncle Rupert had a satellite tv business to defend, we don't want him to have to compete with the likes of Netflix now do we? So he told Australia that it was too much money for a "glorified video delivery service" and that 25Mbit was enough for anyone for the foreseeable, and threw out the original plans.
The plan was downgraded to "Fibre in some places, we'll reuse copper where possible". This ended up taking longer and costing more than the original plan, delivered worse service, and we're only now getting towards where we should have been under the first plan. A lot of the work has had to be repeated due to the initial poor rollout and then needing to upgrade as that 25Mbit started looking woefully inadequate. Just last year a further $5 billion was pledged to replace more FTTN/Copper with FTTP.
It's still more expensive than other markets I'm aware of, a lot of people who aren't far from cities and major towns are on wireless connections (theoretical 400Mbit, actual ~150), and the real bush "Sky Muster" system tops at 100/5 (actual ~55-83) and is having its lunch eaten by starlink.
tl;dr the Liberal (conservative) party got in and fucked it up.
The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation of wiring, air-conditioning, gas, hot water, and sometimes the internet – usually for free – and that happens before the strata comes into the picture. The strata is left with no choice but to inherit a fixed-term contract (typically 3-5 years), after which it can switch to… another embedded network.
The builders accept offers from embedded networks because it reduces their overall costs.
The NSW government has enacted the first tranche of regulations for embedded networks from the 1st of July this year, with the embedded networks price caps being introduced in early 2027 (that is the promise, anyway). If you live in NSW, IPART is the government body in charge of the regulation, and it is accepting submissions until the end of this month. Prepare and make your own submission whilst you can, as I have done.
I got into a dispute with my embedded provider because of a bad meter and came to discover through friends and family in the construction industry as well as speaking to a former sales person in the industry that there is a lot of additional corruption in the process with straight up payments being made to win installs with developers.
When it came time to switch providers in our building, strata was promised electric vehicle chargers as part of signing a new deal with a new provider. They never delivered because they found an escape clause because of fire safety approval.
We're now locked in for years (again) and they've already increased rates once in the first year.
Nobody in the entire chain works in the interests of residents or owners. It's a completely broken system and a thorn in the side of otherwise advanced and progressive Australian energy policy. It needs to be abolished ASAP.
I still pay more for my single apartment living alone in electricity than what family and friends do in full large homes with air conditioning, 4-6 residents, heated pools, etc. It's astonishing.
I have recently gone through the entire chain of complaints, the ombudsman including, and I have gained plenty of insight into how insidious the current scheme is.
NSW has set out to do something about it, with price caps being introduced in 2027. If you live in NSW, make your submission to the regulator (IPART) ASAP – submissions are closing at the end of July.
Very interested to see how this turns out. Ultimately we want the transition to benefit both consumers and producers / distributors (the industry). The problem from the rapid uptake of solar in Australia has been an over-supply during this 10/11am to 2/3pm period. If that over-supply is suitably encouraged to be soaked up then hopefully consumers can reduce their power bills whilst the industry has less effort in managing the oversupply and less stress on infrastructure.
It's also about time that those who lack the means or situation to have solar panels of their own can get some advantage, in a 'herd immunity' kind of way.
I'm in the privileged position to have had solar panels for over a decade, and now have a battery as well, and it was very obvious to me at the time that, in regards to solar, it cost money to save money, so if you couldn't afford it then the savings are inaccessible.
This change hopefully helps those who need it, at least somewhat.
For instance, I'm looking at a new hot water system. Economically speaking, I'm better off buying an oversized tank using resistive heating that I only need to heat once per day. The grid provides free power and I buy a cheaper appliance. But environmentally it sucks, as more solar needs to be rolled out to cover the additional non-peak usage (guess about 6x the power usage of a smaller tank with heatpump).
If that's right, it's not obvious to me that building a suitably sized solar panel is environmentally worse than building a heat pump.
Economically to me, the larger tank is cheaper, because the appliance is cheaper, and I never pay for the power it uses.
Environmentally, yes, it is not obvious. The large tank requires many more solar panels to power it but no battery. The small tank and heatpump needs much less solar but battery for nighttime use.
But it is weird, because for decades heat pump tech has been pushed as the environmental choice and there are still a number of government subsidies to invest in heat pump hot water systems. And maybe that no longer makes sense, with the money saved buying cheaper and less efficient devices spent on more solar deployments.
Hot water heater tanks are easily one of the most obviously good applications of noon excess energy, and resistive heating elements might as well be free.
As for everybody in the same time zone .. they are all seeing the same sun angle at noon (more or less) and all sharing the same over supply of power from all the grid connected solar power rooftops and farms. It's free surplus power during that time frame.
Bit like in the UK they had issues with everyone watching popular TV shows and then turning on the kettle after in a perfectly syncronized timing across the country
When solar + wind plunged in price they stopped saying it.
Now that the market has driven down the price of solar, wind and storage, market based mechanisms have become ideal for solving the problem of what to do with surplus electricity.
Clarke and Dawe - The Energy Market Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELaBzj7cn14
I can only imagine the comment warnings on that segment considering that, sadly, John Clarke passed away nine years ago.
Australia is the third largest market in the world for grid scale batteries, and has the highest per-capita capacity in the world; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/10/21/australia-becomes-wor...
Not to mention more than 200k new household batteries installed in 2025 (out of roughly 10 million households).
After all, if the highest demand is between 16:30 and 19:00 you could use batteries to store power at 12:00 and sell it at 18:00 - or in famously sunny Australia you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand.
If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.
(Also, from a politican's perspective, making batteries highly economical is how you get batteries built. And an awful lot of pro-environment policies involve raising taxes, banning things and creating new chores; it's nice to have some green policy announcements that actually benefit voters in the short term.)
No you could not. For half the year the sun has set by 18:00.
It's not entirely due to the apparent size of the sun — refraction due to the atmosphere has a slightly greater effect.
(Singapore is also in the 'wrong' timezone. The sun sets around 7 pm every day, giving it effectively permanent daylight saving time.)
But regardless, Australia is not near the equator. The timezones are mostly ok. In most of the country (for most of the population anyway) the sun sets before 18:00 for roughly half the year. No amount of solar is going to power the evening peak demand without storage.
EDIT
I forgot to say: I like your idea of intraday arbitrage using batteries! It is a very cool idea. Surely, this could be well modeled to know your expected ROI before investment/build-out.
Fire control in Australia is first and foremost about limiting spread - the bush in Australia goes off if it catches hard.
"Mini" pumped hydro is a thing here (in places): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-01/australian-first-mini...
Are they a hoarder of old car batteries and the like?
If you know your way around high voltage DC, got a tractor and appropriate emulator - not exactly difficult or super expensive to pull off.
Granted it's pretty uncommon setup as grid batteries themselves are pretty cheap too and used EV battery is simply too large for home user, too much hassle, liability, etc to save like $2-3k.
Here are two of SA's (which has the most renewable generation): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://web.archive.org/web/20220523164905/https://www.elect...
They are super economical in Australia and the government even offers discounts and interest free loan of 15k to buy them.
the gov't also offers interest free (but inflation indexed) loans to tertiary education.
Just because there's a subsidy, doesn't mean the tax payer is paying a price for inefficiency. The policy itself needs to be individually examined to determine whether it's an efficient use of funds, not simply that it's a subsidy (time frame needs to be taken into account too).
Meanwhile the government doesn't have any of its own money, so it can't really give you something that was yours to begin with, all it can do is take it from you and then give it back with strings attached. How is that helping you? Instead of subsidizing something you can make up your own mind about whether you want, they should just lower your taxes by the amount of the subsidy and let you use your money for that or something else at your choice.
Spoken as someone who never been poor. There is definitely a ton of stuff people with money can do to save more money, that is completely out of reach for the people who would actually benefit from those savings the most. Subsidies is quite literally about reaching these folks that others tend to forget about.
> all it can do is take it from you and then give it back with strings attached. How is that helping you?
Compared to "take it from you and not give it back to you", it's definitely helping people who have less money. Not sure how this needs explaining.
Except that there is no additional money, its just your own money but now there are strings.
On top of that, that still isn't necessary for things that save a non-trivial amount of money, because that's what loans are for. If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
> Compared to "take it from you and not give it back to you", it's definitely helping people who have less money. Not sure how this needs explaining.
Why would anybody want that either, instead of just not taking it from you to begin with?
Upthread: "interest free loan of 15k" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48904009
Neither does the government.
> Risk aversion will cause them to avoid investments that are profitable in expectation if they believe the chance of ending up worse off is too high.
Risk aversion works both ways. The risk of not making the investment is that electricity prices in the evening get too high and then you have to pay them. If you install the batteries then you have a known fixed loan payment. If you don't you have an unpredictable variable electric bill. Which one triggers more risk aversion?
> By offering interest-free loans, the government can pool that risk
Risk pools don't work for correlated risk. The primary financial risk is that too many people install batteries -- which subsidies make more likely -- causing the price differential between various times of day to become too small to justify the investment. And that can happen even with interest subsidies. So then you have the government expending tax money to not just cause the people who would have installed them anyway to end up underwater, but to increase the number of such people.
>>> If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
This depends on whether you'll pay back the loan. Just because paying the loan back saves you $50 / month forever starting immediately doesn't mean you'll do it. You might be the kind of person who takes out a loan, spends all your money on something else, and lets the bills go unpaid.
If you aren't that kind of person, you probably do have some accumulated capital.
But if you are, just the fact that the loan is hugely profitable and you should be able to pay it back - if you were a completely different person - doesn't mean you'll be able to get the loan. You shouldn't be able to get the loan, because you won't pay it back.
In which case you shouldn't be able to get the loan regardless of an interest subsidy, because you won't pay it back.
And there's your grift. As soon as the home owner wants to allocate the "profit" of install to themselves, it is a swift kick in the ass but that will go to our buddies, and thank you very much for your taxes.
[] https://www.energy.nsw.gov.au/households/grants-rebates/home...
I understand what you mean, and yeah, "it's just your money", but also, it really isn't. Poor people have to pay taxes, no way around it, getting them back as subsidies is still better for them than not getting it back at all. The choice isn't "Keep the money or have subsidies", the choice is "The money goes to other stuff or get subsidies".
> On top of that, that still isn't necessary for things that save a non-trivial amount of money, because that's what loans are for. If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
Are those interest-free or managed by for-profit entities? Because "loans" are vastly different things compared to subsidies, but I'm guessing you already knew this.
> Why would anybody want that either, instead of just not taking it from you to begin with?
Because "not taking it from you to begin with" isn't a practical and realistic alternative, that's not how the world, and especially taxes and government works...
That's the false dichotomy that happens in a broken government, but then why hold that out as something desirable?
> Are those interest-free or managed by for-profit entities?
Is the larger amount of mortgage or car loan debt they have to carry when they pay the extra money in tax?
> Because "not taking it from you to begin with" isn't a practical and realistic alternative, that's not how the world, and especially taxes and government works...
Your argument seems to be that lowering taxes on ordinary people is impossible?
Personally I see it as stuff that happens in countries where the government care about the well-being of all, not just a select few (usually the ones with the most money). It's desirable that society improves, lots of that happens because of tax money. Subsidies usually means re-allocating funds, not raising taxes, although that might happen over time. Still, increasing taxes isn't inherently bad, especially when used for good. But I also know this is a somewhat controversial point of view in many hyper-capitalistic societies.
> Your argument seems to be that lowering taxes on ordinary people is impossible?
Yeah sure, I'm also clearly arguing for murdering children. Fun discussion, hope you'll enjoy the rest of your Tuesday :)
I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. After all there are hardly any personal incentives for individuals to invest into infrastructure, education or healthcare of people who can't afford it and plenty of other areas even if that's what allowed them to accumulate a significant proportion of not the overwhelming majority of their wealth over the long term.
But we're talking about a government subsidy for something people do have a personal incentive to invest in.
On top of that, the misalignment of incentives applies even more to government officials, who have perverse incentives to enrich cronies, make inefficient transfers to special interests in a specific range of "not currently voting for them but close enough to the line to be worth paying off" at the expense of the public at large, or just not care about getting a given thing right because their position is being secured by something unrelated.
Given that most taxation done with the the advertised goal of helping the poor in Australia does happen with popular assent of individuals, I would theorize your position is false and that people do have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor -- for profit, humanitarian / charitable reasons, and a variety of other considerations.
I never said that wasn't the case but historically that "some" was never sufficient. On average people are rational and selfish to a larger extent than they are altruistic.
> taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people
Well the whole concept of an organized society falls apart if individuals can personally freely chose which laws to obey and which taxes to pay. You have to have a balance based on a reasonable consensus, otherwise you end up with totalitarianism or anarchy (and in that case the people who have the means and resources to do that will establish alternative power structures and will end up subjugating those who do not AND also outcompete those how have the means but are unwilling to do the same).
It can't simultaneously be true that most don't want to help the poor at their own cost while also the tax has been legitimized by the majority wanting to help the poor at their own cost. Only individuals or representatives elected by individuals can vote and if their incentive was to not help the poor then they'd vote not to and that would be that.
Or people have a tendence to perceive a system where everyone is required to pay their "fair share" as more just and are more willing to (often begrudgingly) participate in it. If the system was fully voluntary the average contribution would be significantly lower that it is now. Also a significant proportion might feel they benefit from this system more than they pay into it (or are risk averse and prefer having the safety net even if they contribute more than they benefit)
> decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure
Well I'm generally vaguely incentivized to help the poor and develop infrastructure. Would I be willing to voluntary give up 40% of my income to do that rather than a significantly lower proportion? No, of course not. When it comes to infrastructure I'd be willing to pay very little or nothing at all if I know my neighbour isn't contributing anything. I don't think the average person would behave particularly differently than me.
It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbor also pays, otherwise they can get fucked. This is very bizarre thinking. The people in my basically ancap-dystopia neighborhood don't even behave in this sadistic way. It honestly sounds more like a manufactured "gotcha" to win an argument than a way someone would think.
In reality the fraction people that would vote to tax themselves, are more than willing to donate in the case they don't get the tax, your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor just because some other guy didn't help too is relatively rare and not indicative of the mindset of most people who are voting to help the poor. I honestly think that most anyone who would vote for the tax, does not act that way when dropped in a neighborhood like mine, and you probably would not either.
You are seeing all of this in a very, very black and white way. It's about how much the average person is willing (or forced to) to contribute in either system especially when you try to scale it up to hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Libertarianism is an utopian ideology not particularly different to Communism in the sense that both are incompatible with human nature.
I mean there is simply no empirical evidence this approach scales beyond small high trust (usually homogeneous) communities. Tragedy of the commons is a thing.
> your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor
That's extremely reductive... and you are making this way too personal than it should be ; )
When you get money, you can choose to spend it on what's worth the most to you. Thus "strings attached" on the opposite.
…assuming people are good at math.
And given that most people probably don't have a bunch of cash just sitting there doing nothing, they will have to take out a loan and most folks probably don't like going into debt even though 'the math says' it's a good ROI.
The idea that 'ROI good, therefore people will do it' is the 'spherical cow' of economics. In reality there are all sorts of other motivations for human economic actions:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
It looks more like to me some installers saw their industry was becoming commoditized and the government got together with them to figure out how to grift taxpayers into making the more connected ones command a premium while simultaneously being better positioned to eat the lunch of the small middle class "guy and a truck" who does cash jobs for cheap but has no resources to become "accredited" on a subsidization list.
E.g., if the marginal cost of supporting 1 kW of new capacity may be X, while the current averaged cost of 1 kW provided to existing customers may be Y, with Y < X.
The customer will calculate their ROI on a battery purchase based on the cost Y of kW to them, which may be poor (4%), while on the government level of the ROI may is closer to that implied by the cost X (say 10%). However, the government cannot easily pass on the "marginal cost" to customers as there is no specific kWh which is that marginal one across all customers.
In this case a subsidy directly picks out customers who can reduce their demand by buying a battery (e.g., a subsidy which raises the ROI to somewhere between 4% and 10%).
This is what loans and installment plans are for, the payments for which come out of the savings on the utility bill.
> It's beneficial for society here if the government redistributes wealth for the benefit of all.
Which has nothing to do with batteries. If you want to do that then provide them with a refundable tax credit that allows for a negative tax rate in cases where that's deemed desirable.
And even that doesn't apply to the majority of people who are currently paying a non-negative amount of tax. Why attach strings to the money going to a middle class homeowner who should have just been allowed to keep that portion of their own salary?
Neither loans nor subsidies are dirty words IMHO.
But that's the point. It isn't. Electricity costs more in the evening than during the day and there is a technology that can profitably be used to arbitrage the difference. There is no coordination problem at all, people have the direct individual incentive to buy the technology, on credit if necessary, without any form of government subsidy or involvement whatsoever.
Yet people frequently don't. This assertion and reality disagree.
The money saved is distributed across the community, for both those that directly benefit and those that can't (eg renters, apartments etc). The general benefit is of greater value than the individual savings.
Your attitude that somehow taxation is theft is a very silly Ayn Randian Objectivism outgrowth that has never been true, even in the most "free" US states.
Only if the utility company is pricing things incorrectly.
If the price of electricity is ~free during the day and expensive in the evening then the individualized incentives for installing a battery line right up.
> Your attitude that somehow taxation is theft is a very silly Ayn Randian Objectivism outgrowth that has never been true, even in the most "free" US states.
Whether it's theft or not doesn't change the arithmetic. When you're paying them the money they're paying you, it was your money to begin with.
So the thing everyone correctly maligns because it's generally some form of corruption or inefficiency?
- home batteries cost more
- homeowners buying batteries are already pretty well off on average
- a large portion of the population (renters) is excluded from the policy.
- prices are falling anyway so the subsidy is just a waste of tax dollars, arguably
- grid scale batteries are more cost effective and benefit everyone via cheap prices broadly, instead of specific homeowners.
Etc. but pork barreling be pork barreling.
I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.
It's just a treasonous level of corruption.
Voters opting to be extorted like this would have been stupid.
$15 billion is far more than Snowy 2.0 should have cost. But it remains substantially cheaper than any lithium-ion battery build for bulk storage. Storage on this scale is essential in a post-coal electricity grid, and batteries are not (yet) plausible substitutes for bulk storage.
[0] This assumes linear scaling. In reality, placing an order like this would grossly distort supply and demand on many levels. Thus the cost would ultimately be superlinear.
And the comparison shouldn't be to batteries alone, but solar/wind and batteries. The former can be used directly and fill the batteries repeatedly on a timeline that is predictable.
It provides no extra value for the electricity to be stored long term if for the same money you can generate and store it short term.
Article on the various restrictions on Snowy 2.0:
https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-cost-blowouts-might-be...
Responding to you:
Solar and wind are just as relevant to pumped hydro, which is really just a different kind of battery. The real question is how much short-duration storage is needed from chemical batteries and how much long-duration storage is needed from pumped hydro. Chemical batteries are essential for grid stabilisation, frequency control, and intra-hour balancing. They're necessary, but not sufficient.
Pumped hydro provides something that no economically realistic combination of batteries, solar, and wind can yet deliver at scale: enough stored energy to contribute towards grid stability through consecutive overcast, low-wind days. The main alternative is to build and maintain gas-fired peaking plants for occasional backup, which is both costly and keeps us dependent on fossil fuels.
Responding to the article:
While there are credible doubts about the value of Snowy 2.0, the article does not establish its headline claim that batteries are a cheaper system-level alternative. Most critically, it doesn't acknowledge the role of pumped hydro as an insurance asset. The point of insurance isn't to be cost effective in normal times, it's to be cost effective against the risk-adjusted consequences of grid destabilisation.
It is true that under normal conditions, Snowy Hydro would have little incentive to discharge fully because doing so could depress market prices. That is why capacity contracts, underwriting arrangements and reliability options exist. We know that strategic storage has substantial social value that its owner cannot fully capture through energy arbitrage. This is a common problem for reliability assets: their success can destroy the scarcity rents needed to finance them. Hence contracts.
Vague claims that some alternative like nuclear or Snowy 2.0 will somehow make that last 1% of fossil easier to eliminate are both dubious and irrelevant if their construction uses money that could have easily eliminated 1% of fossil fuel every year for decades.
And once we get close to that last few percent of fossil gas in the electric system it would be better for costs and climate to focus on electrifying industry and homes with cheap electricity anyway.
The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from \(\$12\) billion to as high as \(\$42\) billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission). Originally announced in 2017 with a $2 billion price tag, the project has faced massive scale and logistical blowouts. The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from $12 billion to as high as $42 billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission).
That said , hydro systems have a LONG LIFESPAN - 100 YEARS ?
Batteries need to be replaced every X years.
So the ecomiomics of the comparisoan would need to be calculated ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
[2] https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/analysis/re-planting-the-...
One of the scariest industrial deaths you can imagine: cutting into a pocket of shale and the TBM and crew just vanishing into the maw of the Midgard serpent and the whole tunnel filling.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/tunnel-boring-machine...
It didn't work at all for that though - we had a lot of private investment in large-scale batteries anyway, because the cost came down quickly just as most people (apart from the conservatives) expected. Then the other side of Government got in and put a subsidy scheme to get hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, which has been multiple times better bang-for-buck than the Snowy 2.0 scheme, as well as taking far shorter a time. At the same time coal plants are shutting down as expected because they are increasingly unreliable given their old ages.
Snowy 2.0 be an expensive stranded asset basically, it will work and be somewhat useful but extremely uneconomical so basically relying on the cost being written off - if it had to recoup any investment then it couldn't run because it'd never be able to sell the power for high enough.
And you can get out every drop. And it’s always ready to go. Do need to cycle your inventory.
Fire departments probably wouldn’t be happy about it.
(did you mean 20kwh per user, or 20GW overall?)
[1] https://wattclarity.com.au/articles/2026/06/system-frequency...
In winter, I’ve been using Ovo’s 3 hours free for about a year now and that ensures the battery is filled up daily. My electricity bill returns a credit every month since I got the battery a year ago.
At the risk of Reddit-style mass downvoting, I strongly encourage you to borrow Oracle-level of debt (billions of USD) and build a Tesla Megapack battery "farm" and immediately begin mining Bitcoin. Of course, the battery "farm" will conveniently only be activated during these special hours. The only forseeable risk to ROI for this project would be AT&T- or Comcast-style of "double top secret" limitations over the "without any usage cap" clause.
</sacasm>
I imagine eventually we might end up with some thermal storage where during peak renewable production you heat/freeze a large tank of water and then utilize it to heat/cool your house for the rest of the day. A large tank of water is much cheaper than battery storage.
[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010546076391.html
Some large cold storage facilities in Germany are trying to optimize electric demand to use cheap peak day electricity. But they have to observe limitations in range of temperatures and capacity of cooling devices.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/cold-storage-facilities...
" Compared to conventional cold storage systems, renewable energy-driven cold storage demonstrates a 10–35 % reduction in energy losses"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...
A tank of water is cheap, it’s just not possible to distribute hot water over the grid. But it’s very realistic to store it locally and use for heating and cooling. Which is the bulk of power usage anyway.
I've been daydreaming about the tank of water idea as well, but the amount of panels you would need on the roof would be crazy.
The other states are aiming for a 100% rollout by 2030.
People think the solution is to build huge battery packs to store all that excess power during peak periods and drain them down during off-peak times.
That is certainly a solution, even if it is an expensive one. Perhaps a cheaper one is to get everyone to consume the power while it is being produced. Running air conditioners at full blast. Washing clothes and dishes. Charging electric vehicles. There are many things that can be shifted to those peak times, if the incentives are there.
Again, if the incentives are there, people will adjust.
I'm in a plan that gets me $0.08/kWh during those hours, and I'm planning to switch to one that's just over half that, but I haven't come across any free power in that time span.
https://solarsharercalculator.com.au/
It is wild how cheap are solar panels now. Really, bonkers cheap. A huge rooftop solar panel costs less than 100 USD. From everything that I read/see/watch, most of the cost associated with solar panel arrays is the labour required for installation. (No hate on those folks -- they are skilled labour!)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
So yeah, not universal yet. But the precedent means it's moving in that direction. If WA homes end up producing lots of solar at midday then this opens the door there as well.
Victoria deregulated its market before NSW/SA/Qld.
All of the eastern states (SA/QLD/NSW/VIC/Tas) are part of a single market, with interconnects and wholesale prices set every 5 minutes.
Victoria has its own "default offer" and regulator of the retail market, which is also offering similar "free power" hours.
WA could be part of the NEM with some HVDC across the Nullabor, not sure if it would be economically worthwhile though.
Part of the motive of moving the WEM to 5 minute intervals was to eventually leave this option open.
The largest renewable project in the world is being planned in this area[0] so it's feasible that it all may be connected one day
[0] https://wgeh.com.au/overview/
During this past month with the heatwave, my electricity bill was only about €50 despite running airco all day most days. I have 6 solar panels on my roof for reference (was 3k installed I believe). If I was willing to turn off the A/C at night, I could have easily cut the bill in half since most of the billed usage was between 18-21:00.
I know crypto mining in TX can operate like this, but that's boring.
Desalination and carbon capture are both energy restricted, that sounds a lot more interesting. However, the deployed equipment has to be cheap if you only have 3hrs per day of free power, right?
Solar generation is realitely cheap, much more storage is needed. Storage (overnight and also for several days) is challenging - one reason being its more expensive. Then there is the new transmission lines needed.
Perhaps had they used a napkin they would have agreed with you.
The more pressing issue is the Australian government is a coven of luddites who have taken a bold and consistent stance against any form of advanced industrial progress taking root in Australia whatever and have identified nuclear power as high technology that therefore must be categorically banned. Leaving the whole question an academic one and leaving the CSIRO the only group taking an interest.
I feel like they had to kill griddy before all the powerwall solutions started showing up. We simply cannot empower the peasants with both things at once. The ability to store energy makes access to wholesale prices substantially more effective.
I'll never forget the days where we would get push notifications about negative prices. I'd throw the dryer and oven on every time to try and unwind the meter a bit.
Not everything is for everyone. At no point did I feel like I was getting scammed as a customer. I was using them during the winter event.
https://www.amber.com.au/
Demand shifting is good. Do not mistake this as free energy, it very much depends. Many people still don't have TOU meters and many people won't successfully move load into the window.
Fixed line costs are rising massively. Electricity should be significantly cheaper but the economics here favour incumbents and people like John Quiggin arguing for renationalisation are drowned out.
What is then the incentive to install (or repair/maintenance) solar panels?
Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
In my specific case, I barely use much power so home solar covers basically all of the usage, my bill is dominated by the daily charge, so the usage component is practically irrelevant to me.
Yes, grid scale deployments are cheaper, but I'm generally guessing a lot of the grid scale solar deployments do not price in the grid infrastructure adaptation costs, and I'm not even talking about grid storage.
Consumer rooftop solar is fundamentally democratic: it reduces reliance on centralized institutions for power delivery, Make society a lot more resilient in bad weather and other emergency situations, insulates everyday people from wild variations and petroleum and other consumable energy availability.
Combined with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, it would enable electrification of 80 and 90% of daily driving without grid infrastructure costs.
Here in Sweden nearly all of the electricity bill you pay is concentrated on the winter months when there is literally zero sunshine. Even then solar is popular here. I calculated that installing solar would take around 10 years or more to pay for itself, but I have very little hope to stay in the same house all that time so for me it seemed like a bad investment.
That said, if you live in places where it’s sunny most of the time even in winter, like Australia, then solar is absolutely great, just don’t assume most places are like that.
- Expensive electricity
- Government subsidy for solar and battery
- Much sunshine
- 3 hours free charging daily
Nearly $5000 yearly bill gone. $14000 installation cost post rebate.
But as I said, my main concern is my winter bill, which I know by asking people who own solar in the region, is almost the same with solar since there's no sun at all (it's not that it's cloudy, it's that the entire day duration is like 4 hours - under which you barely feel any sun heat and in practice the solar output is exactly zero on the worst month and near zero for 4 or so months). Hence the very long ROI here, but I agree that for Queensland, 10 years would be a bit too long if you dimension the solar array properly.
There is some impact on others, particularly those without ac.
Say a roof is absorbing 10000 watts. You install solar panels that absorb 2000 watts, used to power an airco. You now have your roof absorbing 8000 watts (released as heat) and ann airco absorbing (using) 2000 watts (also released as heat). Am I wrong? Seems like a conservation of energy problem. And you get a cooler roof so less airco demand too!
As a thought experiment, imagine you attach a heater to the solar panels (maybe it's a sunny day in winter). Do you get free energy for heat?
The reality is that a lot of old western europe was built for a climate that no longer exists. Houses are built to prioritize holding on to heat and rebuilding entire cities is definitely not possible if we're already bickering so much about adding heat pumps.
Yes, heat pumps may create a rise in temperatures in cities, but there are other things we can do as a society to also lower temperatures as to create a net-neutral impact.
And sure yes combined with other measures AC can be a net good.
If the roof was white and reflective then a lot more of that light would be reflected, but most roofing isn't.
Your logic isn't really compatible with the laws of thermodynamics.
Instead of generate heat you could say they move heat if you like, from inside to outside.
You said that AC/heat pumps "generate" heat and if they were powered by fossil fuels, in an roundabout way they do. But if they're driven by solar, there's no long-trapped energy being expelled and therefore no "extra" energy added to the system beyond what the sun is providing.
I think we can agree energy is conserved. Extra heating effect OUTSIDE.
AC moves heat from inside to outside, ergo outside is hotter than it would be, this is not complicated.
Similarly heat pumps (which is what air conditioning is) also push cold outside when you use them for heat, so the outdoor environment is colder than it would otherwise be, again until equilibrium is reached.
Similarly your refrigerator is cold inside but makes your home warmer.
My point was just that the -net- heat added to the city is zero if you’re using solar.
One downside is that large scale solar projects aren't profitable any more. It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech, that they aren't getting a good payoff.
The good news is that co-located solar and battery projects are still profitable, but capital costs are higher and payback period of batteries aren't as good.
The good thing is that even with over a decade of conservative government trying to kill it, renewables are now commercially the only choice for Australia and we will benefit from the rapid advances in storage as well.
Grid level plants are starting to also incorporate synthetic condensers and other FCAS services to make our grid more resilient and reliable, even as our clapped out coal plants move closer to shut down.
You can get a sense of it if you look at the daily breakdown:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=1d&...
You can see the demand peaks around 12pm and 6pm.
The price goes negative around 2pm most days, in which case, as a solar only operator you're losing money to generate power, so quite often there's curtailment.
And then at 6pm, the sun is down so solar-only operators can't capitalise on the opportunity.
So unfortunately it's just a very limited opportunity to make a profit on your investment each day. More demand during the peak generation time would help!
In the US, these people are known as speculators riding on government subsidy or grant, often shadily awarded - and anyone who couldn’t see consumer panel and consumer power-storage tech hooting its inflection point simply didn’t have a good grasp on the technology.
All important factors for investors.
Coinciding with this, suppliers put daily connection charges up.
In practice, any profit-making enterprise will not want to miss out on the income they were previously getting, so will find other times and charges to load it onto. Also, they know some people will specifically choose an energy plan that seems to give them something free, so it's easy to take advantage by increasing the prices they pay less attention to.
So, maybe this is a correction?
But it will still have the desired effect of shifting usage patterns, especially for people with rooftop solar and/or batteries and/or EVs.
We have a very large penetration of rooftop solar (due to government subsidies) and now home batteries as well.
There's definitely been a shift in the market "after sunset" when the coal "baseload" and gas peakers used to make their money.
The batteries are flattening out those spikes dramatically.
The fundamental costs and margin requirements in the system haven't changed.
This is a government-mandated electricity plan (a default market offer) that competitive electricity retailers are now required to offer. Those retailers still have network costs, environmental costs, energy costs, and administration costs to recover, and so prices at other times of day necessarily go up.
Some consumers may be better off on this plan (generally at the expense of other consumers), and some will be worse off.
It's good politics and only so-so policy.
The payback time was already well in excess of 10 years, but now that power is free during the day, you can't count those hours as helping pay down your investment. Payback time will be 30 + years at least. You are much better just enjoying your neighbors solar rather than paying for your own.
(Feed-in is about 3c now I think. Was 12c when many people bought their panels.)
Note: My state 100% renewable energy so reduction of carbon footprint has not bearing on my solar decisions.
This also feels like a fairly heavy handed way to encourage investments in batteries. But in the famous words of George W, "can't fool me again". As soon as there are too many batteries and the grid companies are not making enough money, they will introduce fees to have the batteries, or increase connection fees.
You can wash your clothes during this time to take advantage on this.
You can cook on the electric stove during this time to take advantage of this.
No battery is required to do this. I can't connect your logic to my reality.
Not Victoria which has bankrupted itself building roads and railways it cannot afford.
Victoria's default offer will include the same offer from October [1].
Victoria has a separate regulator because it deregulated its electricity grid before the other states.
[1] https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/households/save-energy-and-mon...
basically a free IQ test.
After: 30c/kwh most of the day, 0c from 11-2
It's still worth it if you have a lot of load you can shift to the middle of the day (like a pool heater or battery), but for most 9-5 workers you just end up paying more at the times you're actually home.
Smart meters are free, most people already have one.
Even if you're not home I'm thinking there are a number of ways to make use of the free elec. Hot water geyser seems like the obvious first candidate.
I'd also think heating (in winter), cooling in summer. Even if you're not there in those times, the effects will be evident for many hours after.
For those who have programmable washer/dryers or dishwashers it's also good. Even ovens on occasion.
I get that not everyone is best placed to take advantage of this, but equally improvements don't have to be an "everyone or no one" option.
Here in Germany, it is absolutely massive and an increasing number of people run their balcony solar with batteries that just feed into a regular Schuko Plug. It only allows to feed in 800W at a time, but there are workarounds for that as well
One would have to do the math, cost of battery versus 24kw free daily. But clearly for lots of people the math will work.
A side effect of policies like this is effectively getting people to invest capital to time-shift elec usage. That's good policy. Reducing the peaks in consumption solves other problems.
this means you don't have a functioning government/political system.
The government is having to force them to reflect the abundance of cheap, clean energy at these times in at least one of their tariff offerings.
They can bend the rules slightly by adding other daily charges or limitations and upping the price at other times to reduce uptake and move us all slightly further from the global optimum but maximize their profits.
Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.
I think the only way most people could get to 8kW continuous without an EV would be to turn on their electric oven, grill, and all spots on their electric hob. And the kettle.
It's by hour, and the highest times are probably when I was cooking with both the oven and the hob, and perhaps had the washing machine running too. The highest hour used 2.9kWh.
Plenty of cheap (e.g. rental) homes in the UK have crappy electric shows, which are usually rated at 6-8kW — but rarely used for a whole hour.
I imagine that this is not the target audience.
The rest of the states in the NEM are aiming for 2030 to complete their rollouts.
Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.
Eh I sit on the fence on this one. Take your pick as to who is going to abuse the data. Corps or the government to taste.
Consider this very proposal, incentives to use power at certain times are good. But that incentive structure could instead be very anti consumer. Higher prices when we need electricity would be a horrid state of affairs when rents have doubled in 5 years and a lot of people are barely holding on.
They enable new services like feed-in tariffs and incorporation of V2G and VPP infrastructure.
Rents have not doubled in 5 years.
Rental inflation peaked at ~8% and is now below 4% pa.
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/rent-inflation