New South Wales citizens can now save up to $2400 on a new battery with the state government’s Peak Demand Reduction Scheme, and buildings without solar access can install behind the meter batteries that can become solar sponges.
Australians are great problem solvers – our success as a nation stems from our ingenuity and ability to make the best use of our strengths. In the past these strengths were our agriculture and our mineral wealth. But we are also innovators – including being the original inventors of rooftop solar panel technology.
Today, we are world leaders in rooftop solar uptake (per capita), and we can become world leaders in household batteries. By marrying the two together, we have the opportunity to be world leaders in harnessing home energy production, independence and reliability. And be leaders in clean energy intellectual property that will enable the rest of the world to reduce both the cost-of-living and carbon emissions through higher uptake of household energy systems.
The old furphy that renewable energy is dependent on when the sun shines, and the wind blows is no longer true – home batteries make it possible to store the energy generated by rooftop solar and use it at night when demand is higher.
How we are deploying large scale batteries is already proving to be a game-changer. South Australia’s ‘Big Battery’ with 150MW capacity has already stabilised their power grid and made any discussion of nuclear power irrelevant in that state.
The question now is how do we harness the power of household solar batteries and make them available to the 3.7 million Australian homes with rooftop solar?
The good news is that NSW is leading the way with incentives to buy home batteries. From today, homeowners and businesses in NSW who have or plan to install rooftop solar, can save up to $2400 from the upfront cost of a new battery under the NSW Government’s Peak Demand Reduction Scheme, with additional incentives on offer for connecting to ‘Virtual Power Plants’ and sending excess energy back to the grid.
Victoria and the ACT offer no-interest loans to buy solar batteries - which have proven insufficient to drive the uptake that is needed - and Queensland had a generous battery booster rebate of up to $4000 (for lower-income households) but this is no longer available. Unsurprisingly in this economic climate, getting a cheaper deal through a rebate is more attractive than another loan.
The NSW Scheme represents the kind of financial incentive for home batteries that is needed for every Australian household wanting to bring their energy bills down.
But what is really needed is for the Commonwealth to step up.
The Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO, Modelling* shows that 8GW of household batteries, roughly equivalent to one million installations, are needed by 2030 to ensure lower energy bills during the orderly exit of coal-fired power, and have stated that household batteries remain the only technology in their roadmap without government policy to drive delivery.
That’s why Solar Citizens is calling for a national target of 1 million batteries - the number needed to firm the national electricity grid.
Our energy transition is a national challenge, our targets are national, and cost-of-living pressures don’t stop at state borders.
The optimal solution is a federal household battery rebate modelled on the NSW scheme, and delivered through modifications to the Commonwealth’s successful Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES). The SRES is the Howard government policy that provided rebates for rooftop solar and so successfully drove their high uptake. We need a small modification of the same legislation to do the same for home batteries.
And this can benefit homes that don’t have solar too, because if you have a battery you can buy power during the day at cheaper power prices as rooftop solar floods our energy grid, and use that cheaper power at night, avoiding the high prices from coal and gas fired power generation. Apartments lacking rooftops suitable for solar can be fitted with behind-the-meter batteries and quickly become rooftop solar sponges, enabling more people to benefit from clean, cheap energy and stabilising our energy grid.
The ball for this federal rebate is squarely in the court of Commonwealth Minister for Energy Chris Bowen.
This subsidy should also support equipment to enable vehicle-to-grid charging for electric vehicles. Electric cars are essentially batteries-on-wheels, and can become your household battery, so it should be treated as such. [see Solar Citizens Batteries on Wheels report and video]
Renewable energy with storage - including household batteries are the cheaper, more immediately available alternative to proposals for large-scale nuclear power plants. Adding home batteries to rooftop solar enables solar households to get more value out of their own solar panels, and send even more of their cheap, clean energy into the grid to help bring down the bills for other households by networking these home batteries as virtual power plants.
Both major parties would do better to focus on building on our rooftop solar success story by marrying it with support for home batteries.
Heidi Lee Douglas is the CEO of Solar Citizens, an independent, community-based organisation working to protect and grow renewable energy and clean transport in Australia.