Comment by jay_kyburz
1 day ago
I haven't look into the details, but It sure feels like a slap in the face to those of us who invested in panels.
I think this is about battery sales for those that can afford it. Fill a battery up for free and use the power during peak hours.
There's currently a significant rebate on batteries in Australia. (Or maybe just Victoria?) So that's definitely one attempted solution. People are getting it for costs paying off in under 5 years.
Not the working-poor. Not renters.
By rebate you mean: a wealth transfer from tax payers to those who need it least, those who can afford a battery, those who aren’t renting.
Not quite. There's an income limit on that rebate. I can't get it.
Not sure what renting has to do with this? Renters in Australia do not install batteries/panels, it's landlord's business.
If landlord has batteries/panels installed, chances are rent would be a bit higher. Renter is free to choose a place with lower energy bills by paying that premium, so these subsidies definitely could benefit the renters.
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I got this email from from our local provider the other day..
"For a limited time only, we're offering a $500 upfront electricity bill credit* with every eligible home battery system (Tesla Powerwall 2 & 3, LG Chem HV, SolarEdge batteries only) purchased through Electrify with ActewAGL and installed by one of our approved installers - plus a further $100 credit* every year for the next five years, so long as you stay connected to our Virtual Power Plant.
Join the thousands of households across across Australia taking advantage of the Cheaper Home Batteries Program. Over 100,000 systems have been installed since July 2025, and with the rebate scheduled to decrease as installations rise, now is the time to act."
> I haven't look into the details, but It sure feels like a slap in the face to those of us who invested in panels.
Sure. But if you live in Australia, you knew that slap was coming. You could almost have said to have signed up for it.
Very early in the piece, the government offered to pay people who installed solar about $0.50 for every kWh you fed into the grid. To be clear, that was far more than the retail price of electricity at the time. It was sunsetted, in 2028 from memory (so if you signed up back then, that sweet subsidy money still flowing strong.) I know a few people who installed 50kW of panels on their houses and sheds purely because of that incentive.
The idea behind the subsidy was to kickstart the solar industry, and it worked. It was always obvious what was going to happen to feed in prices if it did work. Given the price of power is now very close to $0 for 8 hours a day, it's working very, very well. That's how this "free electricity" offer came about.
The same incentives are now happening for batteries. The Australia electricity regulator created a special kind of retailer called a "Virtual Power Plant". It's effectively a collective of battery owning consumers, and the VPP allows them to sell their excess storage into the wholesale market. The government is now subsidising batteries, in the same way they subsidised solar panels. And now, they are looking at offering free power to charge the batteries(!) The result you should be able to get will over a 10% return by installing a battery and joining a VPP. Consequently, there is currently a shortage of battery installers.
That 10% won't last forever of course. It will last for a while, especially in Queensland (where I live) as the conservatives are installing more gas turbines rather than building more renewables. The high price of gas generated power guarantees a good return on my battery investment. I will take great pleasure in sending the gas and coal generators broke by selling when the price is highest (which is a night) and taking their profit.
And fortunately night lasts a long time, and years and years of battery installs to take a real bite out of it. Nevertheless the fun and profit will wind down eventually. When it does I won't be whinging about a receiving slap in the face. I will shrug, be thankful I could have my fun while it lasted, and move on.
The feed in tariff you refer to was 52c in the beginning and was limited to a 5kW inverter. I installed 6.25kW worth of panels with a 5kW inverter in 2011 and haven't paid a single power bill since. There's no slap in the face, sure I have to give up the FIT if I want the battery subsidy but I haven't paid a cent for power in 13 years (beyond initial investment).
In NSW it was limited to 5kW. That wasn't the limit in Queensland. Granted, there is was "only" 44c, but 44c at 30kW isn't something to be sniffed at. The 50kW of panels was to ensure you got that full 30kW for most of the day. You also got the 15c the retailer paid you, so for a while you were easily earning $40k/yr on something that cost of the order of $200k to set up.
What we’re dealing with is successive Australian governments with absolutely no plan for long term energy infrastructure, so they’ve lobbed it over the wall to the residential customer.
Here, you deal with it. No options. It’s solar and batteries rammed down your throat. At your cost. If it doesn’t work out, it’s on us.
No big (reliable base load) energy projects to power industry in to the future, China can do all of that for us.
Equality. Everyone can have nothing.
> No big (reliable base load) energy projects to power industry in to the future
Snowy? https://theconversation.com/white-elephant-hardly-snowy-2-0-...
Snowy aside, households are installing 40kWh batteries now. Add 2 cars V2G that give you an additional 40kWh with impacting the car battery life overly. Across the 12 million Australia houses that adds something of the order of 1 terawatt hours of storage to the grid. It's almost double the total predicted storage (660GWh) Australia will need by 2050 https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/battery-storage-au...
The strategy of "lobbing it over the wall to the residential customer" has already turned Australia households into major suppliers of electricity to the grid. Apparently they don't mind the risk if there is money to be made. Now it looks like the government are hoping household batteries will become major suppliers of storage to the grid. If that is as successful as solar, it will be by any definition a wildly successful strategy for handing the transition away from fossil fuels.
The weird thing is: this was all kicked off by the Howard government. They would be the very conservatives who are railing against renewables now.
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