OPINION: Battery investment has been mishandled by Coalition governments. Fortunately, there are plenty of small-scale options available.
Champions of coal-fired power generation persist with their argument that renewables are useless when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. But as climate and energy minister Chris Bowen pointed out last week, it doesn’t rain all the time, yet we’ve figured out a way to store water.grudgingly conceded that the Romans invented aqueducts.
Many of us predicted the problems now being encountered, and my warnings of “a looming crisis” were expressed inAmong the problems I expressly identified back then were: ageing coal-fired power stations; a critical shortage of firming capacity including storage; a predicted delay in the start date of Snowy 2.0 from late-2024 to at least 2027; a grid that was in the wrong place to feed in renewables; and unpredictable policy interventions.
Private electricity distributors need not wait for the government to fund community batteries; they can roll them out without delay. We are left with ageing coal-fired power stations, renewable energy sources that aren’t connected to the grid and a dearth of storage. Big batteries can be part of meeting the storage challenge. But in the near term, supply-chain disruptions have constrained the availability of new big batteries in Australia.which are about the size of a shipping container, to enable rooftop solar households to discharge excess power into the grid during the daytime for storage and use in the evenings.Fortunately, we already have lots of mobile community batteries and many more are on the way.
In fact, private electricity distributors need not wait for the government to fund community batteries; they can roll them out without delay and are doing so.
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