The FiT was always intended to go to $0.00. It was just a matter of when and the slope to get there. The more honest installers have been up front not to depend on a FiT for deciding to install a PV system and its only reliable payback is the power you use yourself that you do not get from the grid.
Too right. It might also be the case that batteries may never get there because a futuristic storage device of some sort may overtake them.
The missing link is that at the point on the grid ( i.e . our local neighbourhood) ,we are charged 20 +c/kWh for taking energy from grid but are paid 3 to 10 c/kWh for putting the energy back into grid??? Need Regulator intervention?
On the question of cost-effectiveness, I suspect economies of scale would favour the neighbourhood battery ,serving about 150 dwellings ,positioned alongside the neighbourhood transformer. What is required are the control devices to maintain grid balance by managing inputs from transformer and the status of the neighbourhood battery. Hopefully such management leads to more solar energy production and therefore less fuel consumption by centralized generators. Just need to keep neighbourhood grid balanced so that inverters donāt get interrupted.
This is because users are charged a network usage fee, while generators donāt. Exporting to the grid is dealt with no differently to any other generator connected to the gridā¦that being payment is for energy/electricity only.
3c/kW is equivalent to $30/MW and 10c is $100/MW. Average pool price of electricity is around $100. In low demand times it can be significantly less than this (has been negative in the past year) to up to thousands of $$$/MW in peak demand when demand exceeds generation capacity. Low demands periods are very frequent while high cost/peak demand where generation capacity struggles to meet demand might occur for a few hours each year (or not depending on weather).
Agreed 3 c/kWh is equivalent to $30/MWh . However the issue is why a kWh is valued differently based on its origin. If it comes from 100km away from a major power station to No 6 Smith St it is charged at 20 c/kWh but if it comes from the solar panels at No 4 Smith St No 6 pays 20 c but No 4 is paid 3-10 c. As for the kWh arriving at no 6 , it does the same job,has the same value , regardless of where it comes from. Current pricing concepts need a shake up. Easy to be wise in hindsight , but this situation possibly arose as a result of the pretty much simultaneous energy industry privatization and suburban solar panel installation acceleration. Regulators in those years had to focus on development of the new wholesale market while retail still stuck with previous practices based on the government owned integrated supply industry.
Yes and no. Yes the electricity has the same value, but no, you arenāt comparing apples with apples (viz. what you import from the grid and what a generator gets for exports).
As outlined in the previous post, the major power station doesnāt get charged a network fee for the delivery of the electricity to the grid. All they get paid is the pool price for the energy which they deliver (which historically has been generally between $60-100/MW (or 6-10c/kW)).
The consumer of the electricity pays the network charges based on the amount of electricity used. When you take electricity from the grid, you pay a energy component, a network component, a retail margin and some other costs (such as environmental levies etc). When one generates PV electricity and exports it to the grid, it is dealt with the say way as a major power station, that being, the generator (you) only get paid for the energy supplied to the grid and there is no network charges included in the exported electricity.
If generators started paying for network costs for all the energy delivered to the gridā¦along with consumers paying a network cost for energy consumed, this would be seen as double dippingā¦the network operators getting money (through the regulator) for both generation and consumption.
The current system is based on a user pays model, where one pays a contribution towards the network used to deliver the electricity which is consumed. The network charge is part of the tariff charged by the retailers and the more electricity one uses, the more the total network charge.
Edit: This brochure from the AER explains the cost components of a consumerās electricity bill/tariffs. A generator only receives money for the wholesale cost included in a consumerās bill/tariff.
If you want to see what the current wholesale energy market costs for electricity in WA is (what generators receive for electricity added to the grid), it can be found on the AEMO website. In the past 24 hours, (at 2.15pm on 3/09/2020), the pool price ranged from $26.98 to $121.46/MW. The average price would be around $50/MW).
Micro grids offer some of the flexibility you seem to be aiming at, particularly the sharing of local power at lower cost than more distant power imports. There is of course a cost to implementing Micro grids so it will not be as substantial a saving as the simple cost recovery from what a PV exporter is paid.
Or electron movement with current flow?
Cash flows can be equally difficult to account for.
Our national electricity grid is currently highly interconnected, power supply centralised and commercially driven because? Thatās what those with the influence (vested interest) and the ability to deliver outcomes (governments) decided.
If we keep on referring back to how the grid is currently designed it seems inevitable to arrive at the same outcomes. Large centralised generators, with multiple peaking generation sources all pushing supply over 1,000kms of copper (Update, actually aluminium and steel and ā¦ thanks @Fred123 Iām showing my age.) . With a large portion of this system privatised, or feeding Government coffers it seems unlikely that there is any appetite for looking at the design any other way.
If we choose should we put all of that thinking to one side and consider what the system should be? IE how can the system be reconfigured to maximise benefits to the consumer given the rapid advance of alternate technology.
Outside the box for some.
It seems an unlikely direction. The recent example of the NBN with a monopoly on the last miles or kilometres of service delivery is a similar precedent.
The HV lines are actually aluminium with steel cantenary wires. Much cheaper and lighter than copper.
https://www.aluminiumleader.com/application/electrical_engineering/
Also helps prevent absolute stupidity as per the incident our son-in-law related to us when he was a maintenance superintendent at a gold mine in Sumbawa in Indonesia when some locals had organised one of some regular copper cable thefts, only this time, their contact in the power station at this mine site failed to de-energise the HV powerlines at the scheduled time.
When the mine site staff investigated the blackout, they found some fried thieves at the base of a power pole after they tried to cut live HV conductors.
These are the previous generation of wires used in modern HV electricity networks. Currently used/installed conductor in Australia is principally 100% aluminium or Aluminium Alloy Conductors (AAAC). It is lighter, its twisted strand makes it quite strong.
To achieve a good level of supply reliability, the cost for a solution similar to this would be significantly more than an existing integrated HV/LV network. The capacity within the system to meet any expected demand would mean that there would be a lot of money spent on redundanciesā¦to cater for those higher oeak demand events. Alternatively, if the community accepts unreliable supply (namely regular brown or black outs), then it can he done cheaper, but still very expensive.
When electricity networks were first developed, they were local/regional (in Qld operated as boards) and separate. The local power stations were like a battery in the local system. In the 1960/70s, these boards were linked and integrated into a state wide (and later interstate) networks. There were many reasons why this change was made and included meeting changing demand profiles on a individual, local, regional, state and national basis (including increase in demand through development/population growth) and cost efficiencies. Reliability was another major factor.
A solution with a battery servicing exclusively local network will repeat historyā¦and means we have not learnt why intergated electrucal networks were created. It may also create a electricity class system where more affluent local areas have more reliable power as the consumers in such areas can afford it, while lower socioeconomic areas live with third world electricity reliability. Government could pay for it, but the price would affect their ability to provide other services.
