Solar to be competing directly with old coal grid power - Australia

Whether Abbott and his coal corporation like it or not, a solar revolution is coming to Australia. With new battery storage technology, available for as little as $5,000, a household can unlock itself from the grid at certain times of the day. Such as peak hour for example. It will significantly reduce their power bills and collectively take a huge chunk of profits from the traditional polls and wires technology.

Makes Abbott look like a total dinosaur.  

The Powerwall models, designed to allow homes to store and use their own renewable energy primarily from solar PV systems, are expected to be available in Australia in early 2016. 

The modest price of the batteries – which in the US cost US$3500 (AUD$4800) for a 10 kWh system – has led investment bank Morgan Stanley to predict 2.4 million systems will be installed in Australia within a few years. 

That is a huge disruption to the way energy is generated, distributed and sold. 

A 10 kWh system could boil the average kettle non-stop for five hours, or run a typical split-system air-conditioner flat-out for the same amount of time. 

Battery storage allows households and businesses to control when they draw power down from the grid, when they supply power to the grid, or in some cases are used to go ‘off-grid’ altogether. 

And Mr Musk’s ambitious plan to get his lith-ion batteries into homes around the world looks likely to be undercut within a few years by similar, but cheaper batteries such as sodium-ion batteries being developed in the UK. 

That’s terrible news for the existing model of power generation, in which large out-of-town coal and gas generators supply cities over hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines – distances that result in up to half the power being lost along the way. 

Customers seizing control of their energy production and consumption undercuts the utilities’ business models because what those companies sell is not really electricity – they are, in effect, selling access to their expensive networks of poles and wires. 

If punters try to buy power at off-peak rates to charge their batteries, the loss of peak-power revenue to the utilities is huge. more