Australians installed 100,000 home batteries in 17 weeks. Why can't we all do that?

If you’re one of those folks who likes to keep abreast of the latest developments in all things renewable, then you will no doubt have heard the quite astonishing recent statistic that homeowners over in Australia installed no fewer than one hundred thousand home battery systems in just the seventeen weeks between early July and late October twenty-twenty-five. What prompted such a feverish flurry of domestic technological enhancement? Well, we’ll come to that a bit later on. The question is – what impact has such a large surge of distributed energy storage had on Australia’s grid, AND have we got ourselves a template here that can potentially be replicated elsewhere in the world? Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think So, here’s the headline in an article on the Renew Economy website. And I suspect you will not be in the least surprised to hear that the accelerated uptake came as a direct result of an incentive scheme. In this case it was a federal subsidy called the Cheaper Home Batteries Program, which was launched on July 1st. That scheme provides a discount of around thirty percent off an eligible small-scale solar battery system and it sits within the context of a wider initiative called the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme or SRES, which also came into force on July 1st. Under SRES, household renewable systems including things like solar panels and solar batteries generate tradable certificates known as “Small-scale Technology Certificates” or STCs. The value of those STCs is typically realised as a discount from the installer. The capacity of the batteries installed over the 17 weeks I just mentioned is, according to the report, just under two-thousand megawatts. That’s enough to cover roughly the average daily electricity consumption of almost four-hundred-thousand households. And that’s a very good thing indeed for an electricity grid that was struggling to accommodate the variable generation from rooftop solar in a nation with the highest per-capita penetration of that technology anywhere in the world. Why was it struggling? Well, according to Australia’s national scientific research organisation. CSIRO, “one of the biggest challenges in local networks with high levels of solar-powered homes is the emergence of large ‘tidal’ swings in power flows between power utilities and homes. ” Because so many homes are now producing electrons during the middle of the day, local networks often see significant exports from homes to grid during that period and then heavy imports later in the day. That large reversal in direction puts a heavy strain on systems that were really only designed to flow one way. Back in September twenty-twenty-four, The Australian Energy Market Operator had to issue a “minimum system load” warning in Victoria, because rooftop solar output on those sunny spring days was so high that demand for grid power dropped to levels “below a threshold critical for keeping the electricity system on an even keel. ” Without getting too much into the weeds, the problem is exacerbated because of something that CSIRO describes as “phase imbalance”. Most Aussie homes are connected to a single phase of the three-phase electricity supply. When electrons are flowing from grid to homes that’s no problem. It’s just like a bunch of tributaries running downstream from the main river. But when all those domestic solar PV systems start lobbing electrons back in the other direction ‘en masse’ and in random, variable single phases, it’s like getting large tidal swings that flood back into the main river and cause real turbulence in the flow. Sigh-row explains that in a grid system that means increased inefficiencies, power quality problems and network congestion. One way to fix that problem is curtailment, which essentially means limiting or even halting the electricity coming back from each house. That’s a complete waste of energy and it’s purely a result of an underprepared grid network. High rooftop solar penetration, also tends to reduce the need for conventional generators like coal and gas to provide inertia, but at least at the moment, those services are still required for system stability. A big part of the answer to that conundrum is a technology called grid forming inverters, which is not something we’ll delve into today, but IS a technology I looked at in detail in a recent video and something that is covered in a brilliant video from my friend Rosie Barnes over at the Engineering with Rosie channel, which you can jump over to by clicking up there somewhere. BUT…even before grid forming inverters are rolled out at scale, if each home that has solar panels on the roof also has its own home battery storage system, then all those unused midday electrons can be funnelled into the battery and either used by the homeowner when they get home in the evening OR MORE GENTLY fed back into the grid at a time and at a pace that doesn’t cause so much disruption to the grid operator. That’s brought about a whole new term for our energy transition – The Prosumer. And according to the folks at Renew Economy, those battery systems are getting bigger, which means more capacity per system, better value

and even more flexibility to shift loads. No wonder the Australian government has thrown a bit of cash at the problem to encourage people to make the move. As long as the prosumer is getting a decent export price for their electrons, then it becomes a bit of a win-win situation that increasingly cuts the old outdated centralised fossil fuel behemoths out of the supply equation altogether. It's a perfect example of how a mix of subsidy and rebate plus regulatory eligibility in a dynamic and rapidly growing installation market can drive the energy transition forward at real pace. But is it a template that can be exported to other parts of the world? Well, in their recent “Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions” report, our friends at the International Energy Agency highlight the dramatic decline in battery costs and point out the new battery capacity is doubling year-on-year. So, perhaps the answer is yes it can. There are some major caveats though, which I’ll come to a bit later on, but let’s afford ourselves the luxury of accentuating the positive for a moment, shall we? When multiple homes have battery systems, you effectively get yourself a network of distributed storage. And the additional flexibility that comes from shifting consumption, storing solar output, and reducing reliance on the grid during peak times actually creates more breathing space for even more renewable capacity to be added to the MAIN grid system. That means even less fossil fuels and more TIME for the grid operator to put in place the necessary upgrades to the network to recalibrate for the new distributed model. The ability to hit a hundred thousand battery energy storage systems in just seventeen weeks suggests the market is mature. That should send a signal to investors and policymakers in other countries that this is something that can scale up from “pilot scheme” to “mass‐market”. And of course, lest we forget the main reason for getting involved in all this kerfuffle in the first place - more renewables and fewer fossil fuels means a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. And God knows we need every bit of help we can get in that direction right now, don’t we? So, what about those caveats I mentioned a moment ago? Well, I suppose the most blindingly obvious one is that Australia is one of the sunniest places on earth, so you could argue it’s all very well for them to have their lovely la-di-da solar PV systems operating at close to full capacity for several hours of every day, making quick payback on investment an extremely viable proposition indeed. Here in the UK, and across all of the more Northern climes, we’re obviously not able to rely so heavily on a constant stream of sunlight during the day. That doesn’t make it impossible or impractical to get involved though. I’ve had solar panels and batteries for about seven years now, which I bought with no government help or incentive at all. Even so, by my estimation, they will have paid for themselves by about the end of next year, and the system is still working perfectly well. That means anything I generate from twenty-twenty-seven onwards will effectively be free power. But it is fair to say that financial and environmental returns are highly context-sensitive. In other words, your local energy tariffs, the load profiles of your local power generators, the carbon intensity of your country’s grid, and the subsidies that your local or national governments put in place all make a huge difference to how big an impact a new system will have on your pocket and on the climate. Australia has relatively high electricity prices in some states, which is arguably another reason why rooftop-solar penetration is so high there. But there’s also strong policy support and a general culture of leaning towards self-generation in a country with so much wild space, much of which is off grid. In other countries with lower retail electricity tariffs or weaker subsidies, the economics might not stack up so well. I might have decided to bite the bullet on cost when I got my system, but I’m clearly a climate emergency ZEALOT, aren’t I? And I’m also in a far more fortunate financial position than most, so there’s not really all that much value in me pontificating about my own circumstances, even though I just did! Lots of studies show that, while the majority of people understand the climate crisis and are concerned or alarmed by it, most households will still only adopt technologies when a genuine perceived economic benefit exists. If preferential tariffs and subsidies are not sufficiently compelling, then uptake will lag. That means we need very smart policymakers and civil servants working hand in hand with technology manufacturers and grid operators. That might be the case in Aus. But it’s certainly not happening all that well in some of the largest economies in the Western world right now, is it? So, what are we saying here then? Well, we probably shouldn’t assume “100,000 home battery installations in 17 weeks” to be a universal target or blueprint. Scaling to hundreds of thousands or millions of household batteries globally means manufacturing, raw-material sourcing, recycling, and second-life use cases. But materials sourcing is improving rapidly, western nations are starting to look for and find their own raw materials rather than relying

on supplies from questionable regimes, and as this recent article points out, new recycling processes are making it possible to recoup more than ninety-nine percent of critical metals like nickel, cobalt and manganese from end-of life batteries. And the latest data on the cost of rooftop solar and battery energy storage systems reveals a truly staggering decrease over the past decade or so, and that trajectory shows no sign of letting up as the science of photovoltaic electricity generation continues to improve and even better stationary energy storage solutions come to market, like sodium ion for example which is projected to move the cost of battery cells down to around ten dollars per kilowatt-hour – something that would have been pure science fiction just a few years ago. So, while Australia’s whirlwind sprint to a hundred thousand home batteries won’t map perfectly onto every corner of the planet, it does show us something profoundly important: when governments provide the right incentives, when technology becomes affordable, and when ordinary folks are given the chance to participate directly in the clean-energy transition, remarkable things can happen very quickly indeed. The trick now is to take those lessons and adapt them intelligently to our own local circumstances. Because if we do that, then the shift from a creaking, centralised fossil-fuel system to a cleaner, smarter, more resilient energy future stops being a pipe dream, and starts looking like exactly what it is in Australia right now…a transition that’s already well underway. I’d love to know what your thoughts and experiences are of solar and battery systems in your part of the world. And as always, the place to do that is in the comments section below. That’s it for this week though. Don’t forget to like and subscribe if you enjoyed the video. It’s just a simple click down here somewhere. It’s completely free, but it makes all the difference to my ability to operate effectively here on YouTube. You can also directly support me in producing my weekly videos by joining the total legends over at Patreon dot com forward slash just have a think who enable me to keep everything going AND keep ads and sponsorship messages out of your way, Most important of all though, thanks very much for watching! Have a great week, and remember to just have a think. See you next week.