> I haven't look into the details, but It sure feels like a slap in the face to those of us who invested in panels.

Sure. But if you live in Australia, you knew that slap was coming. You could almost have said to have signed up for it.

Very early in the piece, the government offered to pay people who installed solar about $0.50 for every kWh you fed into the grid. To be clear, that was far more than the retail price of electricity at the time. It was sunsetted, in 2028 from memory (so if you signed up back then, that sweet subsidy money still flowing strong.) I know a few people who installed 50kW of panels on their houses and sheds purely because of that incentive.

The idea behind the subsidy was to kickstart the solar industry, and it worked. It was always obvious what was going to happen to feed in prices if it did work. Given the price of power is now very close to $0 for 8 hours a day, it's working very, very well. That's how this "free electricity" offer came about.

The same incentives are now happening for batteries. The Australia electricity regulator created a special kind of retailer called a "Virtual Power Plant". It's effectively a collective of battery owning consumers, and the VPP allows them to sell their excess storage into the wholesale market. The government is now subsidising batteries, in the same way they subsidised solar panels. And now, they are looking at offering free power to charge the batteries(!) The result you should be able to get will over a 10% return by installing a battery and joining a VPP. Consequently, there is currently a shortage of battery installers.

That 10% won't last forever of course. It will last for a while, especially in Queensland (where I live) as the conservatives are installing more gas turbines rather than building more renewables. The high price of gas generated power guarantees a good return on my battery investment. I will take great pleasure in sending the gas and coal generators broke by selling when the price is highest (which is a night) and taking their profit.

And fortunately night lasts a long time, and years and years of battery installs to take a real bite out of it. Nevertheless the fun and profit will wind down eventually. When it does I won't be whinging about a receiving slap in the face. I will shrug, be thankful I could have my fun while it lasted, and move on.

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nandomrumber 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

What we’re dealing with is successive Australian governments with absolutely no plan for long term energy infrastructure, so they’ve lobbed it over the wall to the residential customer.

Here, you deal with it. No options. It’s solar and batteries rammed down your throat. At your cost. If it doesn’t work out, it’s on us.

No big (reliable base load) energy projects to power industry in to the future, China can do all of that for us.

Equality. Everyone can have nothing.

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rstuart4133 2 days ago | parent [-]

> No big (reliable base load) energy projects to power industry in to the future

Snowy? https://theconversation.com/white-elephant-hardly-snowy-2-0-...

Snowy aside, households are installing 40kWh batteries now. Add 2 cars V2G that give you an additional 40kWh with impacting the car battery life overly. Across the 12 million Australia houses that adds something of the order of 1 terawatt hours of storage to the grid. It's almost double the total predicted storage (660GWh) Australia will need by 2050 https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/battery-storage-au...

The strategy of "lobbing it over the wall to the residential customer" has already turned Australia households into major suppliers of electricity to the grid. Apparently they don't mind the risk if there is money to be made. Now it looks like the government are hoping household batteries will become major suppliers of storage to the grid. If that is as successful as solar, it will be by any definition a wildly successful strategy for handing the transition away from fossil fuels.

The weird thing is: this was all kicked off by the Howard government. They would be the very conservatives who are railing against renewables now.

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nandomrumber 2 days ago | parent [-]

Snowy 2.0 isn’t an electricity generator, it’s pumped hydro. It relies on electricity being generated elsewhere.

The governments plan is bait and switch. Make it seem lucrative at the start, and then squeeze everyone who committed on better terms by ratcheting up the fees and ratcheting down the feed-in tariffs.

Alternatively, we could have built a handful of big combined cycle gas plants, close to the retiring coal plants to take advantage of existing transmission infrastructure, and legislated a cheap rate for gas from the gas extraction industry, and Australians could have had all-you-can-use electricity for $40 a month.

But instead of that, we’ve committed at least a couple of generations to virtue signalling, like Australia’s GHG emissions make any difference.

We’re happy to export the gas and coal, and uranium, so India and China can have cheap power to run industrial economies.

Cheap power comes not from residential customers managing their time of use, but from the excess of industrialisation. And we’re rapidly making it cost prohibitive to manufacture anything in Australia, or even run a restaurant. So that people in far away lands can have better lives.

Make us look pretty stupid to be honest.

	▲	nandomrumber 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Further to my comment about: In October 2025, the scheme was reported to be 67% complete but it could not be completed within the A$12 billion forecast cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_2.0_Pumped_Storage_Power... 6 years, incomplete, expected to cost well over six times the initial estimate if it ever gets completed. Expect Snow 2.0 to a big impact on electricity prices in Australia. Upwards. We’ll have to most expensive pumped hydro in the world. What an achievement!

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locusm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The feed in tariff you refer to was 52c in the beginning and was limited to a 5kW inverter. I installed 6.25kW worth of panels with a 5kW inverter in 2011 and haven't paid a single power bill since. There's no slap in the face, sure I have to give up the FIT if I want the battery subsidy but I haven't paid a cent for power in 13 years (beyond initial investment).

	▲	rstuart4133 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		In NSW it was limited to 5kW. That wasn't the limit in Queensland. Granted, there is was "only" 44c, but 44c at 30kW isn't something to be sniffed at. The 50kW of panels was to ensure you got that full 30kW for most of the day. You also got the 15c the retailer paid you, so for a while you were easily earning $40k/yr on something that cost of the order of $200k to set up.