Like much of the country, Western Australia is embracing rooftop solar at a staggering pace. But the state's position as the world's biggest remote electricity grid poses a problem; how to avoid overloading the grid with solar. It's led to calls for the state to consider subsidising home batteries, what some say is the next phase of the energy transition.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00Alan Benn is an early adopter of all things electric.
00:07He bought his EV a decade ago and installed rooftop solar 20 years ago when the costs
00:14were high, but so were the government rebates.
00:17Someone has to buy these sort of things early on to develop the industry, to start getting
00:24the price down.
00:25Since then, solar power has gone gangbusters.
00:28About one in three Australian households are turning sunshine into energy.
00:32Many of those people did it to save money.
00:34Some because they wanted to stick it up an energy company, and some because they generally
00:40wanted to make a contribution to climate change, or some combination of all three.
00:44The output from rooftop solar is now so significant, the system can struggle to cope.
00:49This was a new problem that maybe we should have seen coming, but because Australia was
00:54so far and is so far ahead of the rest of the world, we're the first ones to see this
00:58problem emerging seriously.
01:01It's particularly challenging in Western Australia, the world's biggest isolated electricity grid,
01:06because unlike the interconnected East Coast, WA has to manage supply issues on its own.
01:13We don't have the ability to borrow from our neighbours, or indeed to give them the benefit
01:16of our excess supply at times when we have it.
01:19WA's main electricity grid powers about 1.2 million homes and businesses.
01:26Household solar is already its single biggest source of generation, supplying up to 76%
01:32of demand at times.
01:33And it really very much is an opportunity.
01:36Storage of electricity is really the silver bullet.
01:39Governments are building large-scale batteries like this one in Kwinana, south of Perth,
01:44which stores enough energy to power 160,000 homes for up to two hours.
01:49But small batteries have a big role to play too, as demonstrated by the outer Perth suburbs
01:55of Harrisdale and Piara Waters.
01:58Here locals were given incentives like subsidised batteries and power credits to take part in
02:03a recently completed trial.
02:06The three-year trial here in Perth's southern suburbs showed that harnessing and coordinating
02:12consumer energy resources like rooftop solar and home batteries could save the state $920
02:19million over the next decade.
02:22In our studies that we do for the national electricity market, effective coordination
02:27again of these consumer energy resources could save literally billions of dollars of investment
02:31in large-scale infrastructure in our system.
02:34Some people are taking matters into their own hands.
02:37The latest addition being these two 5 kilowatt-hour batteries.
02:40Alan Benn recently bought a battery system for his inner-city Perth home at a cost of
02:45$12,500.
02:47The only con is really the cost.
02:49It's a huge cost because there is no subsidy at all, you're paying the full price for that
02:53battery.
02:54Stubbornly high prices mean the uptake of home batteries has been slow, particularly
02:59in WA.
03:00If everyone had batteries, it could potentially eliminate that very high peak in early evening
03:06electricity prices and that would benefit everyone.
03:10For more UN videos visit www.un.org