“It is clear that now is the time to back home batteries, build on their growing popularity among households and write the next chapter of Australia’s solar success story,” CEC policy director of distributed energy, Con Hristodoulidis says.
The hope by energy players and the market operators is that these batteries can help soak up excess solar, and become part of a manageable grid, many in the form of virtual power plants.
But anecdotal reports from solar battery installers and hard data on virtual power plant (VPP) takeup by the likes of SunWiz show that Australians don’t feel like they’re being brought along for the ride.
It means that regulators and networks will need to start working even harder to figure out how to manage a source of electricity that is largely uncontrolled by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and owned by individuals who all have their own motivations for having home energy assets.
“People will need good reasons to hand over control of their solar, batteries and appliances, particularly if they bought expensive equipment such as batteries for back-up power or to increase their energy independence,” wrote a team of researchers led by UNSW associate professor Anna Bruce in The Conversation.
“It would be a major setback to the net zero transition if AEMO and network businesses, lacking better options for managing the grid, continue to cut back and switch off solar systems until people find it unattractive to purchase them.”
Premium feed-in tariffs were the jump start for rooftop solar in Australia, but what followed was a lot of work on curtailment, advanced inverters that help in orchestration, and in some cases emergency kill switches that give AEMO and networks the ability to switch off solar systems as a last resort, Hristodoulidis says.
What needs to come next — and quickly — are incentives and rewards for managing energy demand that show households that regulators and large companies value their energy assets.
‘We haven’t got to the tipping point yet where we’ve lost the community on this, but we need to start moving on work around incentives and rewards with the ability to opt in and out,” he says.
One example of incentives working is the original South Australian Home Battery program, which was ended in 2022, which provided a rebate for home batteries that was heavily promoted as part of the state’s VPP program.
Hristodoulidis says almost three quarters of battery buyers through the scheme also signed up to the VPP, proving that with the right incentives Australians are willing to buy into aggregation and do still have a lot of goodwill towards these kinds of schemes.