Most Australians Look At Lithium Batteries To Save Themselves From Onerous Electricity Bills

Lithium Batteries gain Traction in Australia

A large number of Australians now believe that storage can help them further bring down their energy bills as the prices of grid electricity skyrocket. Despite having rich coal and gas resources, Australians pay abnormally high per unit energy bills due to a unique mix of markets and regulations. The electricity market is dominated by an oligopoly of large utilities which generally keep the price of energy quite high. Even gas prices are high for Australians despite massive projects such as the Gorgon project being built to extract billions of cubic meters of gas.

This has resulted in Australia having the highest penetration of rooftop solar home systems in the world as the country receives a high amount of solar radiation making it ideal for generation rooftop solar electricity at low prices. However, with feed-in tariffs in most states either being lowered or removed, rooftop solar systems are not receiving enough money for storing the power in the grid. They have to buy power from the grid at very high prices as compared to the low prices they receive from exporting power to the grid.

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Storage will solve this problem as it is possible to store the power and use it in myriad ways.

Storage can be used as:

1)      Plain vanilla storing electricity and using it when the sun is gone during the night time hours

2)      Exporting storage services such as VPP to the grid

3)      Using electricity when the TOD rates are very high

4)      Using high demand charges

In a survey, most Australians said that they think storage will definitely bring down their power prices. Already some major players like Sonnen and Tesla are present in their market offering their lithium battery solutions. It is expected that almost half of the rooftop solar systems by 2030 will be coupled with storage. Given the high prices of electricity in Australia and the continuously declining prices of storage, this does not look like an aggressive estimate. In fact, this may be conservative as storage prices become even lower than what most analysts think as massive gigafactories are built around the world.

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