By Jo Nova

In a brave election promise, the Australian Labor Party want poor people to help pay for batteries for rich Australians.

The discount battery deals will only be suitable for people wealthy enough to own a home with solar panels, and who happen to have ten thousand dollars sitting around that they don’t want to use or expect any return on for nearly a decade. There can’t be too many of those.

The true cost of home batteries is about $13,000, so the $4,000 discount still leaves a big bill. And the savings for electricity bills are estimated to be around $1,100 per household each year. So no one comes out ahead for nine or ten years, and that’s assuming their battery is still useful at age ten or eleven, and their house hasn’t caught fire.

This policy isn’t a winner for the rich or the poor. Because batteries are essentially uneconomic, the policy screws the whole country. The only beneficiaries are the solar and battery installers and Chinese industrialists. Them, and the politicians who got us into this mess. To avoid admitting they were wrong, they’d probably like to trick Australians into buying the batteries that […]