Comment by nandomrumber
1 day ago
> This is a generational success story
So long as you ignore the working-poor. Those who live pay check to pay check, can’t afford solar / battery - or are renting so none of that applies to them.
Yeah, they can just get fucked.
What a success!
Yep. Years ago I got sick of listening to people who don't believe in climate change and emission reductions due to tribalism crowing about the solar pv on their holiday house and their incredibly low electricity bills while cost of living keeps going up for lower income families. Everywhere you look anything good is twisted into a wealth transfer. If you are left behind you are never catching up now. Between the housing market and everything else the myth of a classless society has been completely obliterated in a generation.
But isn't the OP article about distributing the benefits to the wider population? Add to that the uptake of batteries GP is mentioning will substantially reduce both the need for back-up power and the cost of transmission that have been driving up electricity prices.
At what cost, and to who?
So you can have three hours of free electricity, while you’re at work, the kids are at school, you’re renting so no battery for you, electricity has already increased 100% and continues to increase, but only once a year, and now you’re being offered something your 10 year old second hand appliances and petrol cars can’t take advantage of.
Forget trickle down economics, it’s deluge-up. From those who can barely afford it to those who barely need it.
Let’s not pretend there isn’t a cost of living crisis in Australia, and electricity prices factor in to everything.
Cheap reliable plentiful electricity is the backbone of an economy. Not sitting down and working out how you can use less power next month.
We should be sitting down trying to work out how we can use more power next month, in order to leverage that power to have a better life, warmer / cooler homes. Starting businesses and not having electricity be the killer.
> So you can have three hours of free electricity, while you’re at work, the kids are at school, you’re renting so no battery for you
Probably not useful for cooking dinner or watching the evening news, but most dishwashers and clothes washers have a delay start option. Your fridge is also working its hardest during the middle of the day.
> and now you’re being offered something your 10 year old second hand appliances and petrol cars can’t take advantage of.
A washer/dryer combo would be useful for delayed start. But as mentioned, delay start has been a common option for a long time now.
> We should be sitting down trying to work out how we can use more power next month, in order to leverage that power to have a better life, warmer / cooler homes. Starting businesses and not having electricity be the killer.
BESS are the deluge up you're asking for. Much of the stress on the grid is that power generation is distributed unevenly. Grid scale battery prices have been crashing stupidly year on year, to the tune of about 20-40%, and those effects are only just starting to hit the consumer market. The uptake curve has been reasonably steady, and at current projections we would have 24 hours of world-wide storage by 2035. Which is nuts!
I think this is sensible policy. It ought to reduce power prices across the board. At the very least, energy companies would have few excuses to hide behind if prices don't become more competitive.
Another sensible policy to help renters would be to force landlords and owners' corps to put timers on their electric hot water systems. It's a kind of energy storage that most people don't consider.
I'm from Australia and my electricity provider has 12pm-2pm free electricity. As other's said, dishwasher and washing machine has delayed/smart start options, so that is free for me. That saves at least 3kWh per day for me, so ~$30 per month. So it really helps with CoL crisis.
And yes, those appliances are (almost) 10 years old.
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That's a weird uninformed take. Both solar and battery are heavily subsidised in Australia if your household income is less than $180k AUD. Average solar 6kW installation with subsidies is ~3k AUD, 30-40kWh chineses batteries are 4-6k AUD after subsidy.
Median full-time salary in AU is ~90k AUD, and we have pretty good minimal wages, so solar panels are affordable to almost every working homeowner.
Every working home owner.
Young people don’t own their own homes, the banks do.
And many young home owners are now suffering mortgage stress, same with renters. That is, 1/3 or more of their income goes to repayments / rent. Double income households, at your AU$90k are paying $760 a week in rent or mortgage repayments.
I recently worked a minimum wage job, and you are guzzling the koolaid something chronic if you think $24.95 is workable with a mortgage, the one necessary car, and all the associated taxes and insurances. Fuck me.
I worked out I’d be only $50 worse off week on the disability pension.
Admittedly I’ve made some stupid decisions in my adult life, but, unsurprisingly, we can’t all be far out on the righthand side of the bell curve. I’m just a dumb blue collar worker.