Electricity Market Disruption in Australia
The Australian electricity market has seen a massive surge in rooftop solar energy systems in the past few years with almost 20% of the Australian households owning a solar panel system making it the highest penetrated rooftop solar country in the world. Australian utilities have been facing a big disruption to their normal utility led revenue model in the face of a large portion of demand going off as consumers use solar power for their energy needs.
Now the Australian power market is facing another disruption from German energy storage company, Sonnen, which entered the market. In return for consumers allowing the company to use their behind the meter storage for grid ancillary services, Sonnen is paying off their grid fees. This flat fee model is getting quite a lot of success in Australia which has seen its wholesale power prices increase in recent times. Where traditional retailers charge a monthly or quarterly grid access fee based on usage, Sonnen charges a monthly flat fee of $30, $40 or $50 based on its three systems.
Solar Storage Rooftop
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Sonnen has been the biggest installer of solar plus storage systems in Germany and is now using its expertise to capture a substantial share of the storage market in Australia which is also seeing good interest from the likes of Tesla-SolarCity. It is expected that solar+storage will become so cheap in the near future that it will make complete sense to install solar panels economically too. Australia is going to witness some of the largest product launches set to revolutionize the energy space globally.
It has been said that increasing penetration of solar and storage in Australia have caused large scale generators to shut down. Rooftop annual energy generation is forecast to reach ~6,350 GWh by 2020 and over 15,400 GWh by 2031. Australia’s solar bonus scheme or solar credits caused major interest in solar installations. In 2007 the government set that 20% of Australia’s electricity supply, would come from renewable energy sources by 2020, through the national Renewable Energy Target (RET) scheme. Hence many big storage companies are eyeing Australia to launch their products.
