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I made this point because (I thought) TFA was saying all we need is better government policies, but we also need cheap storage and long distance transmission (w

I made this point because (I thought) TFA was saying all we need is better government policies, but we also need cheap storage and long distance transmission (which are hard/expensive). Your example shows that the storage cost is still on the order of the cost of panel installation, and you live in a very sunny place so probably use the battery less than average (I’m guessing based on AUD).

Jedd 5y ago
Well, here in AU we definitely need better government policies - as our current administration is hellbent on coal and gas, and penalising renewables. As per the story linked in TFA, written by two former AU prime ministers, the reasons for this aren't hard to identify. Depending on panel capacity and storage size, then yeah, you may find they align - but it's all a tradeoff. My point with those numbers is that for a reasonably small cost (compared to say the capex of a house build, which is the time these things should be installed) you can get very close to self-reliance in terms of electricity, at least at a residential scale, so we're not all held up by grid-scale storage systems. Commercial consumers of electricity tend to have predictable cycles, and therefore their baseload is much easier to manage.