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If you read the article, most of the decline in gas consumption in Australia is from changes in industrial usage. Residential demand is only down by 6% and part of that is likely due to the effective ban on gas in new residential construction which started in 2023 in Victoria. Prior to 2023 residential gas usage was increasing.

I have made this argument several times that capitalism literally solves the issue of solar panels if the market allows arbitrage and true dynamic pricing.

Good to see now a working example that capitalism is an excellent system of rewarding those who solve inefficiencies in markets

free trade's amazing, seriously!

Time was, mercantilist countries would use foreign colonies for resource extraction; and sell the goods manufactured with these resources back to them.

It was great for everyone!

What is even more amazing is how many of Australia's politicians have been in the pocket of coal barons and yet they put up barely any struggle against solar adoption. Compare that to places like California where they've been fighting tooth and nail against green power.

Isn't it because the US has a more entrenched "clean beuatiful coal" class of people?

In the end you have to replace those panels and nobody in your country now produces them or has the incentive to start producing them unless they not only drop the subsidies but sell well over market value.

How many solar panels did you buy?

> Personally, I would have preferred it was used to build grid scale storage instead of funneling tax money to the relatively wealthy (myself included).

I am generally sympathetic to this POV but I think for solar and batteries actually I end up leaning the other way. Solar PV scales appropriately for home owners unlike wind or indeed any conventional generation and both solar and batteries change how their owners feel about this so that you end up with people who have "skin in the game" in a way they didn't have when it was a BESS install six miles away they saw on TV once and have never thought about since.

I suspect in practice putting the money into grid scale storage would have taken a lot longer and been more of a PITA.

For a grid scale battery you have to organise financing, deal with local government and NIMBYs putting obstacles in the way, comply with all the red tape etc. On the other hand anyone that owns a home can finance their own mini solar power plant and battery and skip all that. It's kind of genius even if it's not in theory the most efficient way to do it.

Fair points, but you are glossing over important issues:

1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping.

2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries.

3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of demand. It also increases resilience of the grid.

4. You assume the political will was there for government and taxpayers to bear the full cost burden of development of the batteries.

I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies I've ever seen in this country. The numbers are much worse than you make out. The program has spent more than 2.5bn (the projected figure) and we don't know yet how much. The subsidy was closer to 70% for a typical large battery install. The government's own gen cost report would have put grid storage 1.5x ahead on ROI.

Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.

There was an article a few years back about how homeowners in Hawaii were buying solar panels to try to get cheaper power.

Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.

Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. This is a big deal.

I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.

A distributed grid is a resilient grid. Legacy grid needs massive transmission infrastructure. Solar + batteries at home have zero real estate costs, zero transmission infrastructure costs. Keeps a lot of people employed.

Decentralization might be dollar-inefficient, but brings resiliency and redundancy to the system. The whole internet infrastructure would be probably cheaper with more centralization. Data backups are also ridiculously innefficient dollar-wise.

Not all inneficiencies are bad. If the cost to build ridiculously redundant systems is low enough, the system overall is more robust to black swan events than any central planner could ever be.

My neighbour has a battery installation because where I live they subsidise both - the panels and the battery. In the event of a power outage he can keep running his house for ~3 days if being somewhat frugal with consumption.

And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.

It makes enough sense in rural areas for a Vermont power company to lease batteries to residential customers. They avoid having to do expensive upgrades that way:

https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-sourc...

Honestly this seems like a pretty good efficiency multiplier for a distributed vs. centralized solution at that scale!

Sort of. While not really mainstream, there are private roads (and long driveways), wells, and a (limited) amount of home-schooling. Not hospitals obviously as that requires specialized training and equipment.

Are we a society though? Margaret Thatcher famously said "There's no such thing as society" and a lot of people have been doing their best to make that true.

There's no use pretending. Utility scale has a single political point of failure. Batteries in home do not.

Cost is never the only factor though. Being energy independent and self-sufficient feels awesome. Also whole house backup rocks, together with a smart app showing and optimizing your energy usage.

Is this not free market capitalism?

Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term.

This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term!

The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck.

Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.

That’s great value for money! Even with gas peaked plants that would cost roughly $10 billion in the US. They should massively expand this program.

The subsidy has the effect of prompting the wealthiest consumers to spend around 2.25x the amount of subsidy on battery installations while reducing the load on the grid, lowering prices for all grid users.

Investing in more grid power would require additional grid capacity which would raise the price for all grid users, and with cheap renewables that would be an increasing amount on power bills.

There are still advantages to distributed power generation beyond overcoming governance failures—-microgrids lie somewhere in between and can increase resilience in the face of more severe and unpredictable climate events.

Do you have some citation to back those numbers up?

> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?

That's simple! As per Felon Musk - to sell overhead to electricity providers. Allegedly they will gladly buy energy from you! So with big enough roof, you can just sit home relax and watch TV, while your solar panels make your living.

> Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources?

Because government is failing to address these issues?

Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time.

But what the hell are you supposed to do when the power goes out and it takes a few days to get turned back on? Well, spend $10,000 - $20,000 and install your own backup power. Is it inefficient? Sure! Does that matter? Absolutely not.

David Roberts does not have an EE degree and misunderstands anything related to power system operations. Great for positive vibes and LCOE parading tho.

Given the durability of panels, it'd be fascinating to see roof redesigns, and some changes in panel packaging, that standard large rectangles become the basic components of a 30 year roof. Or as siding. I've seen them used vertically on the Southern walls of commercial buildings in Alaska, and they looked great.

It requires large solar overcapacity to compensate for seasonal intermittency. Dedicated seasonal energy storage might be better economically.

You pay a higher daily supply charge and more per kWh outside this window so it's more like free (conditions apply)

The supply charge is 6% higher for the Solar Sharer plan, while the peak rate is 92% higher. Solar Sharer’s peak rate is almost double the flat rate. The off-peak rate is 17% lower than the flat rate.

https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/solar-sharer-plans-compa...

Some of that will be electricity usage that otherwise wouldn't happen, but a lot of it will be shifting load from times where electricity is carbon-intensive to produce to times where there is a surplus that would otherwise go to waste

The electricity is "free" because the energy generation is highest at noon (sun is at its zenith), and the population is at the work (low demand for residential electricity). So there is an oversupply of energy at that point. Just like there is an under supply of (solar) electricity at night time when people are using lights, watching tv and eating dinner but the sun isn't shining.

cause they have massive operational issues induced by effectively must-run oversupply that has increased costs for both ratepayers (and sometimes shifted to the taxpayer to hide costs).

And then try to fix those problems with populist TOU rate magic (they won't be fixed), and bills continue to rise!! But hey, LMPs are down LOLOLOLOL

In Australia people do both. We don't have V2G yet, but EVs plugged in at home overnight with L1 charging can get charged by the home battery that was charged up during the day by the PV on the roof.

The solar PV and now storage rollouts in Australia have been one of the best government investments in public infrastructure in my lifetime here.

The more we electrify, the less reliant we are on the crude -> foreign refineries -> imported/distributed fuel risk.

Harvesting solar power is an awesome thing to do both at home and utility level.

PV and wind utility installations are being built with storage co-located, there are companies building synthetic condensers to maintain the grid stability and the job of frequency support is now done mostly by batteries, not gas.

We need to make electricity basically "too cheap to meter" and electrify our primary industries, mining and agriculture.

When I looked into it it didn't make sense to use an EV as a solar battery, the chemistry isn't made for high cycle counts compared to regular home/solar batteries.

1. A couple orders of magnitude more people own homes than EVs; 2. EVs already are used as energy storage, but the thing about EVs is people want to use that energy to yknow, drive them.

Agreed. V2G is actually one of the best DER strats out there. The EVs are already purchased, the batteries and PCS are already configured for bidirectional flow in most brands. Coordination/visibility problem remains at Dx level, but actually worth the investment.

The issue here is that EVs tend to be charged when the sun is down. When sun is up you tend to be at work or driving. The surplus power is coming from solar.

Distribution infrastructure capacity is a current and ongoing concern for summer peak loads (every house turning on air conditioners at once) even with the large government subsidies that have existed for residential solar panels, residential batteries, reverse cycle heat pump cooling/heating and insulation. The cost to rebuild every distribution substation, change every pole-top transformer and rewire suburbs would be much higher if these subsidies never existed.

For most of Australia's population you can look up an annual report that each transmission and distribution operator is required to publish annually for their predicted demand on substations, transmission lines and distribution lines. For example in Victoria this report is the TCPR, an example available at [1]. For many distribution substations, the 10th percentile maximum demand is predicted to occur in the early 2030's, meaning that at least transformers at substations would need upgrading, or the substation rebuilt or expanded. The reasons include higher density development in urban areas, electric vehicle charging and for winter, electrification of gas heating.

As an example of the impact of residential solar generation, [2] states that for an urban growth corridor of Melbourne being built largely in the era of residential solar panels being a standard housing feature, a distribution substation ATS West has 2x 150MVA transformers operating at combined peak of 200MVA, also with 125MW of embedded residential solar generation. Without that 125MW embedded residential solar generation, this substation and feeders perhaps would have had to be replaced years earlier to allow import of ~325MVA rather than ~200MVA. Also not mentioned explicitly in this report is residential battery storage which may be reducing maximum demand from predictions made before residential batteries were widely installed.

As a side note, perhaps Australia perhaps has the most open and transparent electricity market in the world? I don't know any other country where the entire electricity grid down to 230/400VAC distribution lines running on poles in every residential street is available publicly on a map, including serial numbers of poles and ratings of pole-top transformers. And substation schematics and constraint reports, etc are all available through various public reports. I think the transparency demonstrates a great deal of confidence in the electricity grid and how it is managed.

[1] https://www.powercor.com.au/network-planning-and-projects/ne... -- refer to the PDF document in the TCPR zip file download for a substation-by-substation analysis in easy to read format.

[2] https://media.powercor.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/121...

As you say, Australia is very big. Big sections of it are also, as a result, empty. The coast-to-coast "long distance transmission" is not in fact a thing in Australia.

China has long distance HV transmission, but it's crazy expensive and they built it because most of China's people live near its coast but most of its solar power is in the interior so the power needs to be moved.

Australia is exceptional for having a lot of humans who live somewhere that's incredibly sunny. The whole place is sunny. It'll vary from place to place whether that's only "Southern Spain" sunny or full-on "Middle of the Sahara Desert" sunny, but it's all very sunny indeed, if you were inventing a country to buy solar panels Australia would be that country.

"Energy Minister Chris Bowen said that Australia now has more home batteries than the United States, which has a population 12 times larger."

Yes.

Not quite. It was already starting, but the Federal government at the time was very anti RE.

South Australia had a single interconnect to the rest of the Australian Energy Market that covers the states except for WA and Northern Territory.

There was a big storm that took out an interstate interconnect and the voltage spike caused all the other generators to disconnect to protect themselves.

Then Elon promised to build utility storage in 6 months or the state would get it for free.

That was the Hornsby battery which is mainly used for Frequency services (basically when supply/demand fluctuates, it keeps things stable).

That used to be done by gas plants, but the battery saved a large chunk of its cost in the first year by being able to switch on much faster.

Wholesale power is ~37% of the customer bills.

The other costs are the "poles and wires" distribution network and the HV transmission network.

The government is also building out the transmission network to various renewable energy zones, which has the added benefit of making the transmission network more resilient.

With large coal plants, the network was only one interconnector failure from blacking out a state (as happened to South Australia).

Now there is a much better network of interconnected transmission across the entire east and south coast of Australia, covering something like 80% of the population.

The government just bailed out an aluminium smelter that was going to close because of the increased cost of power because it was relying on an old coal plant. Now that will be replaced with renewables.

So we get the benefit of the continued operation of the smelter, as well as the build out of replacement generation for the old coal plants at EOL that will be closed by 2030.

in other words there's no winning because circular arguments about how things "really" work, plus insisting on and worst-possible-case-outcomes-as-inevitabilities.

right ...