Labor offers solar panels and Tesla batteries for 50,000 South Australia homes
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This time however, it is government, and Housing Trust means it is essentially a captive market. A market who definitely cannot afford solar panels themselves. Maybe by not having a big profit motive this will be more successful? Time is yet to tell.
Also, since the battery has maintained you as an isolated power source, your solar cells can continue to run. In other situations, your solar cannot power your house if you lose grid. So although people think PV makes them resilient under grid loss, thats not how they operate in practice for safety reasons.
The economics of this move feel right: people who cannot self fund into reliable or cheaper power are going to be enabled to benefit, albiet at reduced benefit (no income stream as private owners have) but for a huge community benefit: lots of distributed power, able to make the overall network more resilient.
The opposition federally has been attacking renewable energy in south australia over the failures caused by storms and gas generators. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-16/josh-frydenberg-jay-we...
so the state put a tender to all battery makers to help the state start with startup times to get the gas generators online and help with the extreme prices in high demand times http://theconversation.com/a-month-in-teslas-sa-battery-is-s...
the battery project has been very successful, and now fuelled with revenge and fear of losing state power the state leader is pushing even harder for battery and solar tech in residential areas to stop the cost growth, this will also help alot of renters, and he is directing this as mistrust from the incompetent federal leadership which is primarily funded by the coal industry. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/01/coal-...
South Australia mostly dislikes federal politicians considering they constantly ignore the state and then with AEMO and energy markets just basically cut power to the state and charge them through the nose because they aren't the useful state.
1. Politics
Many of the later reasons stem from this reason. Unfortunately.
The South Australian state government is Labor (leftish), whilst the Australian Federal Government is Liberal (rightish). The Federal Government have been very supportive of coal and talking down renewables aggressively and, sometimes, untruthfully. So I'm not sure whether SA Labor is actually supportive of renewables for renewables / environmental reasons or just as a political point-of-difference, but the end result is pushing renewables pretty hard. I think SA was over 50% powered by renewables in 2017.
References: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-16/jay-weatherill-tirade-...
2. A large coal-powered generator was recently closed down in Port Augusta.
This increased South Australia's dependence upon renewables (solar and wind), gas, and the interconnector from Victoria (neighbouring state).
There was a lot of discussion around this about how it's too big a risk and the State Government needs to step in to prevent its closure. It was revealed that the owner of the plant offered to sell the whole shebang (plant, land, the works) to the South Australian State Government for $1.
Personally, if someone offered it to me for $1 I'd be scared of accidentally hanging myself on all the attached strings. Gives you an idea of what it's worth...
It was shut-down as it could no longer compete with power prices.
Refer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Power_Station_(South_...
3. South Australia had a large system black incident towards the end of 2016.
This was caused by a massive storm that brought down 13 (I think it was 13) pylons carrying the high tension wires feeding various parts of the state.
The conservative media blamed this incident squarely on renewables and the shutting down of the Port Augusta power station. The reality is far more nuanced, including the fact that the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) didn't know about cut-off settings that some of the wind farms had configured. Were these settings different, the wind farms would have actually (likely?) managed to ride the state through the system black event.
These settings have since been updated and standardised, apparently.
4. South Australia relies on the interconnector from Victoria for varying degrees of its power.
I believe they're aiming to minimise reliance on this, and have more local power generation, for which solar and wind are ideal, and storage goes hand-in-hand with that.
5. South Australia has a few gas power stations, but gas is more expensive than coal-powered stations.
Australia did an international deal with Japan for gas trading a few years ago. The way things have turned out, it's cheaper to buy Australian gas from Japan and ship it back here, than to buy it locally. That situation may have been resolved in the last 12 months though.
Gas generators have also been accused of gaming the energy market by shutting down, or refusing to start-up additional units, thus reducing the supply and increasing the spot price.
6. South Australia has some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world. This means there are lots of opportunities for political points scoring.
Being seen 'doing something' is of value, whether it's effective or not. Depends on the spin.
See Gold-plating electricity network: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-18/australian-gold-plated...
My personal experience with, and research into, increasing power prices: http://electricity.atcf.com.au/cost-component-percentage-inc...