5 ms·
It really is a death spiral in the making. As grid electricity prices rise: 1. Insulation and rooftop solar/domestic battery storage become more competitive /
by andrewwharton 9y ago
It really is a death spiral in the making.
As grid electricity prices rise:
1. Insulation and rooftop solar/domestic battery storage become more competitive / cost effective
2. Which drives adoption (including retrofitting to existing structures), reducing the demand for grid electricity
3. Which, due to the fixed network and distribution costs, becomes more expensive per kwh.
Australia is primed for boom in domestic battery storage.
Why? There's already a significant amount of roof top solar installed. And feed-in bonus tarifs (up to 40c/kwh which were used to drive roof top solar adoption) don't transfer when you sell a house. This means it's far more cost effective to keep the energy on site rather than sell it to the grid at 6c/kwh and buy it back at 25c/kwh. This combined with rapidly dropping costs for battery storage... It's going to be an interesting time to be a politician.
- andy_ppp 9y agoI find it strange that a huge number of governments aren't falling over themselves to get Tesla to build one of the roughly 100 needed giga factories in their country. Pay for it to be built, give crazy good loan deals etc. whatever it costs really to have energy independance has got to be worth it.
- dagw 9y agoHow does building a giga factory in your country lead to energy independence?
- andy_ppp 9y agoBy having a means of producing batteries you'll be able to rely on renewables won't you? I thought that was the whole idea?
- vkou 9y agoUnless you have very limited supply of lithium, you will not be energy-independent. The real reason for it though is that, unlike what HN thinks, Tesla is also not the only company in the world capable of building a battery. That, and batteries are a terrible solution to long and medium-term energy storage.
- andy_ppp 9y agoYes, we could choose to solve a lot of these problems by pushing water higher.
- gizmonty 9y agoI'm in Melbourne. I ordered my Tesla Powerwall 2 today.