AGL trumps Tesla with batteries-and-solar-cell package You could almost pity Australian energy company AGL: while Elon Musk was displaying Tesla's Powerwall to a breathless, waiting world, it quietly entered the consumer battery storage market and nobody noticed. The utility, which has been sniffing around the renewable market for some time and recently decided it would “ …
I suspect Musk has plans to lease the batteries, as a hedge against the huge initial cost of supplying anything with useful capacity. Because batteries of all types have only a limited lifetime, but many types have an almost unlimited recycling capacity, leasing just makes sense. That way, the true cost is amortized over a much longer time, pushing the upfront costs down to something mere mortals can afford.
From what I read, he was selling them to companies (like solar city), who would likely then go on to lease them in the same way they currently lease solar panels. Or in some cases the customers doesn't pay anything but then only receives a certain amount of electricity for given up the space on their roof, with the rest and the profit going to solar city.
Either way the upfront battery costs doesn't have to be paid by the customer.
The number one reason to install battery banks would be to get off the grid. As more people install solar systems the power companies have found they are no longer making as much money from usage so to make up for lost revenue they are increasing the daily supply rate for the grid connection. AGL's solution doesn't seem like much more than off-peak for solar customers by proxy.
I think borkbork misses the point, at least as far as Victoria is concerned.
The retail companies are separate from the distribution (LV poles and wires) companies, which are separate from the generating companies (I've left the HV transmission companies out of this model). Admittedly, AGL both own generators (such as the notoriously bad brown coal generators in the Latrobe Valley) and are a retailer.
But a retailer can't "make up for lost revenue" by "increasing the daily supply rate for the grid connection" because the retailer merely passes on the distributor's (regulated) cost - they are separate items on the power bill (even if a quick read of my bill (not AGL) doesn't make it obvious that the supply charge is being collected on behalf of the distributor) . Maybe AGL could arbitrage the cost that it sells its generator output to its retail arm, but I'm not even sure if that is possible under the national energy market despatch model.
I suspect that what AGL might be doing here is building off peak capability, and possiby even peak surge capacity, by storing the solar in people's homes when the sun is shining so that they can tap it when demand is high and the sun isn't shining. With the advantage that the capital is being put up by householders, not the company. And they don't have to pay for warehouses to store the power. And under the gross feed-in model that most people seem to be on, AGL get to charge retail for the power the household uses, but pay wholesale for the power (panels plus battery) that the household sells to them.
Coat icon cos that's how dealing with the retailers feels like - their hand in my pocket
> 4.5 kWh of solar
Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh !
Can't people get simple, really really simple, technical facts right. I assume it's meant to say 4.5kW.
In the UK I can't see any point in these due to our high feed in subsidies, err I mean tariffs, which don't include any variable element. So it pays to export it without the losses involved in storing it first. There's no point trying to match supply and demand within the house as everything you produce is paid for whether you use it or export it, and any saving from not paying for imported power won't pay for one of these systems.
I can see that where the cost/reward structure is different, it may pay to store up what you don't need at the time of production (rather than export it for peanuts) and then use it later to avoid buying in expensive power later.
AGL have run an effective fraud campaign with the government to kill carbon pricing and therefore kill the industry and competitors. Meanwhile all this is happening they get corporate handouts from the government like most miners do to keep them afloat.
They want to run a monopoly. While competitors start dropping off with the help of the government they are quietly setting up their own solar farms. They a utility they don't want off grid. They want to of course control everything.
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