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Comment by skew-aberration | Hacker News Reader

The subsidy was closer to 70%, and in my case I was paid the equivalent of about 10 years of free electricity for a battery with a 10-year warranty. In total somewhere around 5-7 billion AUD was paid out (not yet public) - the wholesale market for comparison is around $16B AUD annually. Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included). Given the extreme volatility of power prices, a figure such as '47% decline' should be taken with a grain of salt - but power prices are certainly a bit lower than last year.

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> Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included).

I am generally sympathetic to this POV but I think for solar and batteries actually I end up leaning the other way. Solar PV scales appropriately for home owners unlike wind or indeed any conventional generation and both solar and batteries change how their owners feel about this so that you end up with people who have "skin in the game" in a way they didn't have when it was a BESS install six miles away they saw on TV once and have never thought about since.

As I said in another comment,

> For 2N government dollars, the program gets 3N home battery. Grid is 2x more efficient by their own accounting. Therefore, we could have gotten 4N grid storage. This is not comparable to the home solar programs - which I understand to 'enticed' more private investment. Simply buying votes and lying to the public. I feel for the renters who paid their taxes and never saw a cent.

I'd rather the 50% of Australians who don't own the home they live in had skin in the game! But I do love my 42kwhr battery

I thought the point of this article was they are benefiting from reduced grid costs?

Retail prices have barely fallen - the article makes a cherry-picked statement about falling average prices in Q2 (winter). This is true, but it is a reduction from a historic peak. $140/MWhr -> $74/MWhr. For comparison, the Q1 (summer/autumn) price has been stable at $75/MWHr which is still over 10% ABOVE wholesale price in USA, etc. Essentially, Australian's paid over double the typical winter wholesale prices for a few years during the transition, which has finally paid off. I would need to pull numbers, but I suspect wind is more relevant here than batteries. With more batteries coming, we're still in a period of extreme investment relative to the size of the market, and it will take time to know just how far prices will fall.

How bad was the Q2 peak that prices have fallen from?

> The wholesale 30-minute energy prices exceeded $5,000 per MWh 66 times in the quarter - 19 times in NSW, eight times in Queensland, 15 times in Victoria, 15 times in South Australia and nine times in Tasmania. This compares to 11 high prices in the previous quarter and 19 high prices in the same quarter last year.

https://www.aer.gov.au/news/articles/communications/aer-repo...

But ultimately, I was given $14K cheque from the government. My tax bill is above the national median full-time income. How long would it take my neighbour to see that ROI? If they did get a 50% discount due to the home batteries on their average $1.4k annual power bill it would take 20 years! (and it's silly to say only home batteries have caused this trend - there's a huge amount of renewable investment which is reaping rewards now). Doesn't sound fair to me.

Building grid scale batteries would have reduced the costs further and faster and would have been far more equitable.

PS the policy comes with no obligation that I'm required to export the power I generate -> I could just use it to mine crypto. I do know of one such person who uses theirs to heat a pool.

It definitely has led to a lot of 'I'm not an environmentalist but of course i got solar on the roof and a battery!'. eg. https://xkcd.com/3226/

I suspect in practice putting the money into grid scale storage would have taken a lot longer and been more of a PITA.

For a grid scale battery you have to organise financing, deal with local government and NIMBYs putting obstacles in the way, comply with all the red tape etc. On the other hand anyone that owns a home can finance their own mini solar power plant and battery and skip all that. It's kind of genius even if it's not in theory the most efficient way to do it.

The largest lithium battery grid storage in the world (at the time) was built in South Australia in under 100 days in 2017. It's the equivalent of about 11 thousand of the largest batteries install in the home battery scheme, which take an electrician + apprentice ~1 day on average to install.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve

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