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 a renewables grid “has to have” but no one can afford.
We only got into this mess because the government forced poor people to subsidize solar panel installations for rich people, and then hid it deep inside electricity bills. Ultimately this time too, the poor will end up paying — even though the wealthy pay the most tax, this scheme will be done on borrowed money, or buried in electricity bills.
Throwing bad money after terrible money
For anyone connected to a large networked grid — the only possible benefit of a battery is to make surplus solar panels slightly less useless.
Right now Australia is so overinstalled with solar panels that 1 in 3 homes has them, and the surge of power at lunchtime has become like a toxic waste. It threatens grid stability, costs money to dispose of, and forces large generators to switch off or operate inefficiently. Even large scale solar and wind power have to shut down.
With four million rooftop panels, the situation is such a problem most states are demanding new panels have remote control switches, not so they can be turned on, but so they can be turned off. In Sydney, new charges are starting to apply to solar panel owners who dump their unneeded electricity on the grid. In the Northern Territory, they’re just leaving solar plants permanently disconnected, baking in the sun, to avoid the risk they’ll knock out Darwin’s grid, like they did in Alice Springs.
The solar boom at noon distorts the market so wildly, it pushes reliable generators out of business, or forces them to raise their prices for the rest of the day, so they cover their costs. Industry chiefs admit investors don’t want to build many new generators anymore because of the midday glut.
Go Labor Go, fight for those Green-Teal seats
The Labor Party are fighting for the Green vote, but thankfully, the opposition are not. As long as conservatives keep pointing out the pain to the working class, and the unfairness of this, it will suck the moralistic fun out of buying a few Green voters.
Next, if the conservatives could admit renewables are a dead-end, and weather control is a fantasy, they could start explaining why wind and solar power are guaranteed to make system wide electricity more expensive. Then they will really fire up the voters…