Australia’s cheaper home batteries scheme is being hailed as a clean energy success, with more than a thousand batteries installed in homes every day, with installation costs slashed by a third.
But Dean Spaccavento, co-founder and CEO of Reposit Power, describes the policy as “a colossal, wasted opportunity.”
Spaccavento’s frustration isn’t with the ambition of the program — which he calls “excellent in its scope” — but with what he sees as its weak regulation, loose technical criteria, and lack of accountability.
He argues that the way the federal government has designed and administered the program means only a fraction of the new batteries will ever help support the grid, despite billions in public funds being spent.
“No more than 4% or 5% of those batteries will ever participate in a VPP [virtual power plant] based upon data we’ve seen,” he says in the latest episode of Renew Economy’s weekly SwitchedOn Australia podcast.
“That’s just a wasted opportunity. Probably 1.2 maybe 1.3 gigawatt hours of home batteries [have been] installed in the last three months, and 4% — 40 or 50 megawatt hours of that — will actually contribute to the transition of our grid from a coal-fired, gas-fired one to one based upon solar and battery.”
Spaccavento has spent more than a decade trying to make distributed consumer energy “punch at weight” with centralised power. His company, Reposit Power, has long been a disruptor in the energy market, pioneering ways to harness and orchestrate household solar and batteries.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and federal government are counting on virtual power plants (VPPs) — networks of connected home batteries — to play a key role in stabilising the grid by 2050.
But Spaccavento says that’s unlikely to happen without major reform. The first hurdle, he says, is trust.
“People don’t like the VPP thing because they say, I bought this battery. This is my battery, and I don’t want to share it with somebody who’s going to make a bunch of money out of it.”
Currently, only around 4% of households with a battery have joined a VPP. But trust isn’t the only barrier. Spaccavento argues the federal program has failed to ensure batteries are technically capable of participating in these schemes in the first place.
While he doesn’t believe batteries subsidised under the program should be required to join a VPP, he says the government’s definition of what qualifies as “VPP ready” is meaningless.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he says. “Everybody can say that any battery they install is able to participate in a VPP, and what that’s doing is allowing people to install things that will never, ever be able to participate and gain the full subsidy.”
The other problem, he says, is the lack of oversight once batteries are installed — or even to confirm they’ve been installed correctly.
“Maybe it is [VPP-capable] when it’s first installed. And then something breaks. No one’s looking. The majority of these batteries are being installed by solar installers, and then not really looked at again, except by the homeowner.”
“I think there’s an obligation where 17 or $18,000 of public money is being spent, that these devices actually do remain able to participate in a VPP.”
Spaccavento wants every subsidised battery to undergo an automated quarterly performance check, using an existing communications standard known as the CSIP-AUS protocol, which he says has already been adopted federally.
“It’s a protocol that has all the abilities required to do a quarterly check of the performance standard of that battery,” he says. “It’s automated. It would cost nothing for the homeowner, and it would have no impact on their bill. But if a battery fails that test, it means it’s not fit for purpose for delivering grid services and can’t participate in a VPP.”
Originally introduced as a backstop to manage excess solar generation during grid stress, the protocol could also be used to ensure batteries continue to perform as promised.
“No one’s talked about using the protocol for performance monitoring, and so that’s why I talk about it. It’s absolutely capable, and we should be doing it.”
Right now, he says, no such oversight exists.
Spaccavento blames regulators’ lack of understanding of how distributed energy systems actually work — and their tendency to oversimplify.
“They don’t understand the nature of distributed energy assets and the way they get installed, how they work, the pieces that must work together,” he says. “And I think they assume things that are not true.”
“[They assume] you slap a battery down, you pull some wiring through and bing, bang, boom, hey, look at all those megawatts we could get under control. And it’s absolutely not like that.”
Even if a battery has the right communications interface, Spaccavento says, other parts of the system often fail.
“The metering is probably not installed correctly, or the solar isn’t configured properly, or one of many, many things can go wrong. A lot of this capacity will never participate in a virtual power plant. It will just cost too much to remediate the system.”
After a decade pushing for a smarter, fairer energy transition, Spaccavento says the cheaper batteries program could have been a breakthrough moment for distributed energy.
“I think we need to do better.”