Albo has gone for household batteries. The Australian.
Taxpayers will contribute $4000 for an average household battery installation under a $2.3 billion election commitment by Anthony Albanese, with Labor promising the policy will push electricity prices down for “everyone”.
The Prime Minister will on Sunday make a speech in the Brisbane electorate of Griffith and vow to make it about 30 per cent cheaper for Australian households to install batteries that are charged by energy generated by rooftop solar panels.
The installation cost of an 11 kilowatt battery – a size used for a typical family home – would be brought down to about $9300.
The subsidy also applies for the first 50 kilowatts of a 100 kilowatt battery, which would be enough power for a small business, with the cost to taxpayers for a battery of this size to be about $15,000.
Here is the relevant chart from the AEMO’s Integrated System Plan.
The relevant piece is the strip of purple and grey, “CER storage”.
If Albo’s batteries are rolled out on schedule, it would dramatically accelerate 50GW of CER storage capacity by about twenty years.
This is a good policy in terms of stabilising the grid and the “duck curve” which tends to spike power prices in the evening.
So, I agree it will lower prices at the margin if it reaches scale.
However, there are three issues.
$9,300 is still plenty, and an eight-year payback period is not fast.
Second, the plan still relies upon an expanding role for gas as coal is phased out.
This will raise electricity prices much more than batteries reduce it if the gas supply is not addressed and LNG imports begin.
Third, because the policy is not means-tested, Albo will effectively install batteries in Australia’s one million richest households.
Everybody else will still be bled to death by the power bill gouging of the East Coast gas export cartel.
Indeed, as the rich depart the grid courtesy of the taxpayer, everybody else will have to pay even more as distributor charges go up to compensate for the loss, and the polls and wires rollout to support renewables falls on fewer customers.
‘Albo from the projects’ doing his thang.
