19 December

A new twist on batteries today. One big government announcement, and one change coming. Both will have a profound impact on the decision whether or not to own a battery. Today the government announced the building of 8 mega-batteries by 2025. The graph below which I shared before, from the main energy regulator, explains why. By 2025 the amount of electricity generated by peoples’ home solar will be so massive, it may break the grid. During those years where morons carried bits of coal into parliament and did nothing to shift Australia to renewables, Australians did it anyway and installed millions of rooftop solar systems. Because the idiots in government didn’t upgrade the grid at the same time, we now have a tsunami of energy available from these panels, and nowhere to put it. Thus the new 8 mega batteries, to help store all of this energy. But there’s a more sinister development too. The main electricity distributors who manage the wider grid (Essential, Endeavour etc.), now want to tax solar panel owners who export to the grid. Rather than rub their hands together at all this super cheap electricity they can take and sell on, which might need them to invest in storage themselves, they’re proposing to tax ordinary people who export to the grid instead, to force them not to. Typical stupid, lazy, unimaginative Australian business in action. Owning your own battery is very useful in this context, because you’re less dependent on earning money by exporting back to the grid, you store your own power and use it instead. And this puts all the call for more ‘supply’, for more ‘baseload power’, into perspective. We don’t need more supply, we have way more than we can currently use. We need more distribution and storage. Fat and lazy gas, oil and coal companies will always spin the supply line, because they know their industries are in terminal decline.