A 50% price decline doesn't imply there's 50% less demand for petroleum. If 6% less demand is all the margin consumers need to get their supply, then price can drop quickly. It's all in the margins.

It would be useful to know if the industrial use is factories replacing their use with other sources (e.g. I have read that food manufacture is switching to electricity in Denmark, although it can be held up waiting for a grid connection if there's a data centre ahead of it).

Or, did they improve their efficiency.

Or, have they closed.

There appears to be some language confusion in the replies. FYI in Australia “gas” refers to natural gas (used in domestic cooking and some power stations), not gasoline for cars (which is called “petrol” here).

It has a whole section on the impact of power policy though and 15% of power mix to 7% for gas is significant. Coals fall is notable too.

Australia never had much residential gas usage. Mr he very vast majority of residential homes don’t even have gas. No need for a furnace.

So energy demand was increasing? Perhaps electric cars?

> Residential demand is only down by 6% and part of that is likely due to the effective ban on gas in new residential construction which started in 2023 in Victoria. Prior to 2023 residential gas usage was increasing.

There's a lot of people who would get gas if only it were available. My house (in NSW), the gas main ends two streets away, they won't connect me unless I paid them some insane amount of money ($100K or whatever) to extend it to us. My father (different part of NSW), his neighbour had gas, but the gas main stopped outside his neighbours house, and it would have cost him thousands to get it extended so he could connect; then his neighbour on the other side paid those thousands, and they extended the gas main right past his front door, and then he could get connected for $500. Anyway, I think the measured demand isn't always the same as the real demand.

Also, there's still a decent chance the Victorian government loses the state election this November–although with Ben Carroll replacing Jacinta Allan, it is less of a sure thing than it was–and the Liberals have already said they will wind back the new gas connection ban.

It has been available from two retailers for several months already. Pricing is such it doesn't make economic sense unless you have a battery due to higher peak and shoulder prices (So get a battery! Even with loan interest payments it pays for itself)

Virtually free, clean, decentralized energy is a far greater advantage than any of those disadvantages. It’s a strategic failure for the US to pass up on China’s solar overproduction and subsidization.

As the saying goes, don’t interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.

Solar panels and batteries aren’t something you use up daily and have to buy constantly.

So, if by creating a dependency you mean they hope you buy again in 20 years, sure, but it’s not petrol style dependency, and those batteries and panels can be recycled locally instead of sent back to China.

Selling under our cost price. Not selling under their cost price. China can destroy western manufactures even while making a profit.

If only western governments invested in saving the planet, then the Chinese would have had some competition. Their monopoly doesn’t seem like a Chinese governance problem and nor does it seem like an issue with the free market. The panels are sold above cost price.. unlike a lot of AI tokens

The answer to that is not punitive tariffs or quotas that just make it more expensive for consumers. States should either raise tariffs a little bit and use the money to fund domestic production, or put a requirement that large foreign exporters have to build X capacity here that can be nationalized in a crisis. Or start an international price war with subsidies of their own.

Which is incredible since it was 70% in fyi 2013/2013

https://ieefa.org/resources/slump-eastern-australia-gas-dema... (See section on power mix which mention coal at the bottom).

We have inflation. Everything is going up, except electricity.

Interestingly, one of the retailers offering free power already in Victoria gives a $1 kick pack if you use no power during the (rather long) peak period. So users with large enough batteries are paying just $0.30 a day connection fee and nothing else. Limits coming in will I think restrict free power to 25kWh/day, so smaller or energy efficient households.

Solar panels were made in China. The reason that solar panels are so cheap there is that the state has bankrolled these companies to produce them at a massive scale.

This only makes sense way downstream of massive subsidies, not the least of which is China determining at a federal level that they wanted to produce an obscene amount of solar panels.

And now it's complicated because the ideal move would just be to say "thank you" and buy all the cheap panels and batteries, but that hollows out your own industry.

There were significant state subsidies and regulation changes to encourage home battery installation. That's a lot less "free trade" driven than the GP post indicates. Is that still capitalism being an excellent system?

When is true dynamic pricing being prevented??

a $3,000 battery subsidy is the opposite of free trade.

AUD$6k (just under USD$4k) after rebate installed with inverter for the 10kwh Fox-ESS listed here https://www.solarchoice.net.au/solar-batteries/is-home-batte...

Fwiw the reason the ~$6k price point is common in that list is because the rebate is 30% up to $3k including install+inverter. So that's the price point everyone's trying to aim for. You could get smaller systems but may as well maximize that rebate.

Australia's average daily household usage is 15kwh. So 10kwh works well in a country that doesn't need significant night time heating, just daytime (when powers cheap) air conditioning.

To a degree, this is Australia in this case, no? Resources are extracted from Australia, exported to China, turned into high value goods and sold back to them. In this case, it's exactly what OP is happy about!

In theory it sounds like a great deal for the imperial center, but the system also requires high tariffs on all goods produced outside the empire to preserve the privileged mercantile relationships. If the same goods are cheaper imported from a different part of the world, then consumers would pay more despite all the self-important optics of being the "dominant" colonial power and presumably benefiting from the exploitation of their clients.

This helped produce the huge "imperial preference" controversy within the Conservative party in the late 1800s and contributed to the rise of the Liberals. Hardliners like Joseph Chamberlain refused to bend on external tariffs, so disaffected Tories like Winston Churchill defected in advocacy of free trade/cheaper goods being more important than blindly "pro-Empire" economics that were no longer competitive in the global market.

Yes, everyone is always telling me how great colonialism was for the locals.

...and then the "colonies" figured out how to weaponize it and turn the balance in their favor.

Or, not quite: the workers are being exploited just like they were during the colonial period. But at least now their rulers have power over our rulers that they didn't have before. So they get to be happy about that as they make novelty items out of toxic plastic for Temu.

Yes, because utilities get a fixed rate of profit from grid expenses; but generation costs of electricity are not tied to their profits.

Instead, highly distributed generation, and in particular distributed storage, drastically reduce grid costs. If a house is providing electricity for itself, and feeding back ok to the grid to also power the neighbor, it skips a ton of transmission infrastructure and costs.

And since all grid components must be sized for the peak usage, rather than average usage, and since storage shaves off peaks, distributed battery storage greatly reduces the need for more grid capacity.

(Side note, even though grid costs are $~0.30/kWh and generation is ~$0.10 in California, that $0.10/kWh is still a large fraction higher than in most of the US)

Interestingly, with the new free power periods in Australia, it is now better economically to not install solar panels and instead spend the cost saving on a larger battery. Solar has become so popular in my region that periods where the grid pays more than 0 for power when the sun is shining are a statistical anomaly. My solar panels will now never pay for themselves, pissing away their power to the grid for free, but my battery will pay for itself sooner.

> distribution costs stemming form wildfire risks

They have a wildfire risk solution, they just cut power like a GFCI. This is cheap.

> they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption

They put up plenty.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22146...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2024/o...

As with climate change, there comes a point where the propaganda just stops working becuase it's impossible to contest.

> What is even more amazing is how many of Australia's politicians have been in the pocket of coal barons and yet they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption.

More than 80% of coal mined in Australia is exported. So reduction of coal consumption internal to Australia has only a limited impact on Australia's coal industry.

Long-term, adoption of green power in emerging markets and developing countries is a huge threat to Australia's coal industry – but there is very little Australian industry lobbyists can do about that. And whether Australia goes down that route has only limited influence on whether the coal importing countries will.

Almost ten years ago, in February 2017, the then Treasurer and now former Prime Minister of Australia literally brought a lump of coal into Parliament and metaphorically started licking it while telling all to not be afraid of coal.

* https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/09/scott...

Its also electrician unions fighting things like balcony solar (SB 868) and maintaining regulatory capture over licensing and certification to bottleneck how many people can enter the industry by forcing antiquated models like 4-6 year apprenticeships into a career path that could be 2-4 semesters of vocational courses and bi-annual relicensing exams. This keeps installation rates sky high.

On the particulars of residential solar deployment, it's the utilities. (And to a degree, the US's completely backwards permitting system which varies by municipality and mostly exists to drive up costs for everything and maintain stasis.)

Utility leadership is highly tech-averse, change averse, and rooting for the "clean beautiful coal" sports team. But also they can't imagine a future where there's massive electrification, with people switching from gas to getting their car energy from the grid, and being able to profit from it. It's somewhat shocking, but just like US car manufacturers, utility leadership is from a different era and are rentiers, rather than innovators.

Than Australia? Probably not.

1. The subsidy was fixed per kWh at a level that has always been vastly above utility scale BESS. 2. Power usage is flatlining. There is no reason to need transmission upgrades for BESS. Successful projects are colocated at retiring generators, or at existing major grid terminus. 3. Are those benefits worth 4x the price? Noting again, that's 4x the subsidy, not even the actual installed cost which is closer to 8-12x. 4. It would have been cheaper even at just the subsidy rate.

also ignoring that Australia is building snowy 2 which is the world's largest battery by far, due to be finished in 2027-2028.

I've tried to be as charitable on both sides. As you note the real subsidy is higher, but the owner contributions are still high, and the projected cost of the program is now closer to 7.5Bn.

It's pure middle-class welfare.

>I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies Don't forget about the EV subsidies! No fringe benefits tax, no road user charges, discounted registration.

Set aside the broader incentives (noble though they may be) and just look at the equity in the distribution of the welfare.

I was surprised there were no companies offering finance deals, such as loans to cover the out of pocket costs. An energy retailer could lock in a customer for 10 years to reasonable rates, make more money, and customer pays less. I suspect it was because the limiting factor was not cash, but the installer capacity. Solar installers have been working flatout, and even more customers would just push their prices up further.

We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants.

> Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. A couple of electricians doing 20kWh (average install size) once per day, with an individual inverter, gateways, etc. is not at scale, by any means of the word.

That doesn’t sound like Hawaii

This does

“ A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted Photovoltaics proved so successful in Hawaii that the local utility, HECO, has instituted policies to block further expansion”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-solar-boom-so-s...

As of today Hawai’i rates are at $0.40+ per kWh

> the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.

I'm sure this is the way you remember it, and maybe even the way it was explained in that article but if you bought a solar panel the sunlight to power it is free, so your electricity from the panel is free. You're not "buying" that power and so the commercial supply can't be "cheaper".

Now if I've paid $5000 for a product which makes me electricity for free and then later you offer me the same amount of electricity for just $4000 you could say yours is cheaper, but, er, I already bought that $5000 product, I'm already out $5000 and my electricity is free, yours is not actually cheaper now. What we're seeing here is just "Did you know solar panels have become cheaper over time?"

Which translates to "the local power company was knowingly using ineficient sources to steal from their clients, until their clients did something about it and forced them be efficient".

These systems are not truly redundant in that sense though - as they are intended to be centrally coordinated (the manufacturer provides a web API). So they are potentially vulnerable to e.g cyberwarfare.

For the record, the full quote is : * think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and [end p29] there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”. That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look! It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!”*

Just putting this here for clarity.

No. The modern grid has little relation to capitalism. There is some private ownership, but there are massive government barriers to entry and massive regulation of the system.

No. When the government pays for it, that isn't capitalism.

Final numbers are not known yet. The Australian government's own 'Gencost' report put grid vs home based storage at 2x as efficient. In this subsidy program, the ratio of private to public money per a battery is about 1:2 (ie 70% subsidy). It was in my own case. Therefore, we would have had more battery storage if the government had just built grid storage.

Yep. Here in Colorado I installed two powerwalls moderately subsidized by the electricity company. It’s not going to save me meaningful amounts of money even in the long term and I would much rather see energy issues solved at a societal level. But our electricity provider is just unable to reliably keep the lights on through winter and wildfire season, I.e. most of the year. Since installing the batteries a couple years ago our home has stayed warm and lit through two multi-day outages when neighbors have had to go stay in a hotel.

This isn't a federal government issue in the US. Local and state governments dropped the ball here. No one wants to pay what it costs to bury power lines in most locales, and we have a ton of byzantine regulations that make it slow and expensive to add generation capacity.

What are you going to do when winds rip the solar panels off your roof, or drop a big tree branch on them? Who will you call to repair it? Who will pay for it? How many days will it take? Have fun.

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

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/

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

In 25 years, those panels will still be producing 80% of their starting value. Imagine what you can do with 25 years of energy independence.

You have 25 - 50 years. Put your STE people to work. CSIRO is probably a decent org, give them a Manhattan project?

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

what if you develop manufacturing capabilities during the 30 years lifespan of the panels?

The alternative for most countries except a handful is that they continue to import oil from the two dozen-ish odd countries who export it.

The policy relevant question then boils down to, in two decades how many countries will be producing enough solar panels to export it? How many will be friendly to my country?

Which quickly becomes politically untenable when a large part of the voters either have their own distributed renewables and storage or benefit from lower electricity prices.

11, and I wish I'd bought 15

Probably depends on what country they live in and whether their government is spending billions of their taxpayer dollars to simply not build renewable energy projects and invest additional billions on top of that in new oil, gas and coal instead.

You could try using arguments instead of an appeal to authority fallacy?

Good thing he just interviews the technical experts who do. He more or less just gives people in the energy industry a megaphone to discuss the things they are doing.

What does "LCOE" stand for?

elaborate

> David Roberts does not have an EE degree

Elon Musk doesn't have an automotive or aeronautical engineering degree. People can understand work they don't have a degree in.

> misunderstands anything related to power system operations

Do you have some examples?

Our local power utility has realized they’re waaay behind on maintenance. This year power went up 7% in town and 16% for those out of town.

Both going up 8% next year.

Free as in kids eat free

It is free if you can afford a suitably sized battery. Everyone else should stick to the existing plans. Fuzzy area in the middle for slightly undersized battery owners.

Solar panels don't necessarily get the most power at noon, as it can depend on what angle they're at if they're static (eg on a roof). Ideally you would want it facing the sun in the afternoon (especially if you don't have batteries and are trying to cut into your AC bill) or morning as you'll get more direct sunlight. It would also depend on how far on the horizon the sun is, which will depend on latitude. So peak generation will depend on how much exposure you'll get.

IMO, this plays into how solar is used. An individual household would have different goals than a grid-level solar/battery project depending on how they consume electricity. A grid is going to optimize (ignoring any desire for extra capacity for days without sun) for the peak that tends to happen between 4-6 for most western grids.

you're gonna have to expain that to me.

so cheaper 'leccy prices are bad? or that this upfront cost to get batteries installed are bad? even though long term costs will be dropping?

I mean whats the cost of 30% of 500k batteries compared to creating a new peaker genny or five?

That's why paying EV owners is th right incentive. All new cars will be EVs. In 20 years, all cars are EVs.

Could it be that most people drive shorter journeys than the capacity of their cars with occasional long journeys?

I know that my next will need enough range for one particular journey to a relative's house but I only do that journey once or twice a year at most.

I could easily reuse the "spare" capacity the rest of the time and I'm going to lease the car so long term battery health won't be an issue.

To honest I think plugin storage to go along with plug in solar will be a game changer.

You looked wrong. These batteries can do 100,000 charge-discharge cycles while retaining 80% of their capacity.

Unfortunately most of the EVs already purchased don't have the electronics to support V2G. Newer Leafs and a couple of other brands do, but I think most models in most markets cannot support V2G.

It’s not really clear what you mean. 100kWh is more than the entire battery capacity of the EV.

EVs are parked 95% of the time. If it's parked, it can be charged. Work places also have electricity.

Depends. residential fleets v commercial fleets. different behaviours.

Even most residential batts that get plugged in when they get home typically have SOC >40% (depending on jurisidiction).

surely its possible to invent a "plug in road" system, then cars could charge (at least on highways etc) even when driving. I had this thought ages back when EVs first came out, to tackle the problem of long charge times when doing cross country road trips.

Tell me more? Why can’t you 2x or nx the number of panels by wiring those additional panel in parallel (as opposed to in series)?

Absolutely. Energy has to be baked into every structural element. Either producing energy, or storing energy, or providing insulation, or acting as a transfer medium (heat pump).

Why don't they do this for cars?

Solar overcapacity is really cheap, because panels are really cheap. Dedicated seasonal energy storage technology doesn't even exist right now, much less economically efficient storage technology. The closest thing would be a massive thermal store used for district heating, but only prototypes are starting right now. Industrial scaling and mass deployment? That's a decade+ away at a minimum.

We could build seasonal overcapacity today, and it would be nearly economically competitive with existing fossil sources.

It's hard to internalize just how cheap solar panels have become. Keeping the same inverter and grid connection, and doubling the panel capacity, nowhere near doubles the cost of the install.

    > As a side note, perhaps Australia perhaps has the most open and transparent electricity market in the world?

How do you know so much about the Australian power grid? Is it a hobby (personal interest) or profession-related?

> The coast-to-coast "long distance transmission" is not in fact a thing in Australia.

The main Australian electricity grid reaches from Cooktown in far northern QLD [0] through to the Lower Eyre peninsula in South Australia [1] and down to the Huon Valley in Southern Tasmania [2]. So if by "coast-to-coast" you mean "East Coast" to "South Coast", then literally we have it already.

Of course, I take it you actually mean including WA and NT into the main national grid. No, we don't have that, and probably won't any time soon.

But there is a project (Australia-Asia Power Link aka SunCable) [3] to run a HVDC cable from Central Australia to Singapore via Indonesia, to export solar power. Why not the same thing between Perth and Adelaide? It simply comes down to economics – Singapore and Indonesia have the energy demand to economically justify it, domestic Australian consumption doesn't.

However, there is a plan to extend the national grid to Mt Isa. [4] There's only around 600 km from Mt Isa to Tennant Creek (where the AAPL/SunCable project starts). It isn't impossible that they'll eventually link up. So we might actually see the northern NT connected to the national grid, eventually.

[0] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/networ...

[1] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/networ...

[2] https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/electricity/nem/networ...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CopperString

>That was the Hornsby battery

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

Which is precisely the kind of thing that causes cries of “but that’s socialism” in the US!

I think you could use more citations.

The South Australia blackout was not caused by coal or renewables or lack of interconnectors. If there had been zero interconnects (the local grid was self-sufficient) it wouldn't have happened! The primary cause of the extended blackout was simply a lack of readiness/contingency planning/compliance particularly at several large windfarms. See wiki article.

Coal is generally cheaper for baseload power like an aluminum smelter, even though solar is cheaper during the day. Firming with wind/battery is not yet competitive but is getting very close and is at the point where building new coal power plants is not viable. Refer to gencost report. However, replacing such a large load with brand new renewable capacity is almost certainly more expensive than simply continuing to burn coal, particularly when factoring in the grid upgrades required to make such a transition.

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