7 November

Something not often mentioned by the ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ energy folk is firstly that we obviously still manage to have water when it isn’t raining. We use storage. But the big sleeper here is going to be electric cars, which are huge batteries on wheels, 50-100kWh batteries. For comparison, a Tesla home battery that people use with their solar systems is 13.5 kWh. So your electric car will have easily enough stored energy to run your home overnight too. To give an indication of scale, there are about 20 million vehicles in Australia. Even at the lower end of 50 kWh batteries in each one, that’s one BILLION kWh of new storage that will enter the grid, without having to build a single dam or giant battery.