As a South Australian, I'm (very!!) happy to trade a few tax dollars for much lower power prices. The extra tax is more than made up for in savings.
On this particular topic, the South Australian government's interests and mine are precisely aligned: We are both getting screwed over by power generators exploiting the intermittent nature of renewables to make bigger profits. Did you know they deliberately keep gas peaking generators off when it would be profitable to run them, because they can force the price to spike even higher and exploit the minimum billing periods?
I'm all for market driven solutions, but technology driven price disruption is a well known reason for market failure, and that seems to be what is going on here.
happy to trade a few tax dollars for much lower power prices
That's optimistic.
I guarantee you will be paying more for electricity generation because of this battery. There's no way the incumbents would allow this thing to be connected to the grid if there wasn't a dollar (quite a few dollars) in it for them.
Giving money and power to politicians is like giving car keys and whiskey to teenage boys.
There's no way the incumbents would allow this thing to be connected to the grid if there wasn't a dollar (quite a few dollars) in it for them.
There are no major non-renewable incumbents left in SA. The renewables love this because it lets them load shift. That's good for them but good for me too.
AGL has a small gas fired station but screwed up during the outage by not firing up one generator. That lost them any friends they have, especially since they blamed high gas prices, which the Federal Government saw as a criticism of them.
The interstate incumbents hated it enough to get the Federal Government to look at stopping it[1]. But then the Victorian Hazelwood coal fired plant closure was announced, and the coal industry lost a lot of credibility with the federal government. Basically the incumbents are suffering and are rapidly losing political power.
> There are no major non-renewable incumbents left in SA.
AGL operates 8.562 gigawatts of fossil fuel (coal / gas) power plants, and 2.33 gigawatt renewables (hydro / wind / solar).[1]
The 1.28 gigawatt gas fired Torrens Island Power Station in Adelaide is the largest power station in South Australia.[2]
South Australia has 16 operating wind farms with a total installed capacity of about 1.473 gigawatt.[3]
It definitely looking like we'll see, in our lifetimes, a future where wind + storage provides a significant majority of electricity in South Australia. My argument is there's no way this future will also provider cheaper electricity.
Why charge less when you can make people pay more?
The Libertarian in me thinks we should deregulate the energy market, and that means starting with removing subsidies to fossil fuels and renewables.
My left-leaning political sense thinks we ought nationalise the energy industry as it's too important to leave to the whims of the market, and work out a cost factor to apply to the waste products of energy generation.
My right-leaning political sense says nationalising energy assets would be a disaster and that we need stable base-load energy, because the alternative is untenable.
On this particular topic, the South Australian government's interests and mine are precisely aligned: We are both getting screwed over by power generators exploiting the intermittent nature of renewables to make bigger profits. Did you know they deliberately keep gas peaking generators off when it would be profitable to run them, because they can force the price to spike even higher and exploit the minimum billing periods?
I'm all for market driven solutions, but technology driven price disruption is a well known reason for market failure, and that seems to be what is going on here.