Why Battery Technology will force Power Companies to embrace domestic supply

Around Australia and parts of the world like the USA, some governments and especially many large scale power utilities, are pursuing a campaign to prevent domestic solar from being fed back into (sold to) the grid. I’m assuming that the (fundamentally flawed) thinking is that by denying additional energy production points, they’ll prop up or sustain their own margins and profits. Which was probably accurate until the 2015 International Year of Battery Technology got into its groove

 

The one core challenge with renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and tidal energy is that it is a use it or lose it kind of generation. Unlike gas or coal or oil, wherein the energy source is stored as a fuel that is then burnt in an engine of sorts to produce electricity when needed, renewable production is typically required to be utilised pretty well straight away or it vanishes into the ether.

In that light, power utility companies know that if they can prevent renewables being connected to the grid, excess production of renewable energy (unneeded by the provider) will therefore go to waste, and help prop up prices for low demand periods.  In high demand times such as when it is particularly hot, customers will be forced to pay significantly more for their energy because excess domestic supply in the form of roof mounted solar panels, will not be available to ‘flatten out’ the demand spike. In South Australia, the abundance of roof top solar has proven to flatten the demand on the overall grid, adding to stability whilst lowering costs of supply to everyone as this article shows

So in that light it would make sense for energy utilities to do whatever they can to stop additional renewable capacity being added to the grid. In Queensland and across the US the practise seems almost a fait accompli for any energy utility using last century’s technology like coal. Things seem no less bitter and short-sighted in the US and I say short-sighted because unfortunately the ‘deny access to the grid’ approach is now flawed, with the rise of Battery Technology for storage upon us.

Rather than try and prevent access of renewable energy producers selling into the grid, power companies ought to be encouraging the method under managed guidelines. Because here’s the main problem – the available large scale storage battery technology is getting some serious development as this story shows and this means one thing for the future of utilities: if you deny domestic supply points a chance to access the grid and sell excess, they’ll by-pass the grid completely and store their energy which they’ll then make available for free. In other words, denying the domestic supply model will push the domestic supply to become a viable alternative and accelerate the existing utility businss model to a fast demise.

The International Year of Battery Technology has just kicked off. Like the cost of solar cells and data storage, the acceleration will see smaller units at ever cheaper cost expand from small sites at commercial buildings, to residential housing estates and then into individual domestic supply options – a model that remote homes have proven successful for almost four decades. At the point at which scale and cost becomes available to urban domestic sites, energy utilities can kiss their business goodbye

 

Need a high quality speaker to wow your audience, jolt your  Board or provoke the thinking of your senior management team? Contact Marcus Barber today 

 

‘China’s Gift’ – Why the AFL needs to Prepare for Crowd-Free Rounds

Mar 9, 2020

China’s Gift to the world, the #CaronaVirus is not yet as severe as what the US gift to the world (Spanish Flu) was, and still signs are clear that disruption to normality is the key theme. In that the light, the Australian Football League (AFL) need to plan for crowd free rounds.   Because that’s…

Read More >

China’s Gift Has a Fat Tail – Corporate Collapse

Feb 11, 2020

Potential Impacts of the Carona Virus will cascade across the globe. With deaths on track to climb quickly now that it has reached epidemic proportions of infection, the fat tail extends to the corporate sector.   With whole areas of China on lock down, factories are shuttered and with it, Multinational and local firms who’ve…

Read More >

My Personal Experience of #Covid19 (thus far)

Jan 15, 2020

Five days ago I tested positive for Covid. Here’s a bit of what the story has been like so far Tuesday was spent moving on of the offspring out of their rental property in country Vic and back down to Melbourne’s suburbs. A hot day of heavy lifting and a fair bit of driving. By…

Read More >

If that, then what? The question that unlocks almost everything

Oct 22, 2019

Decision making is an interesting field of inquiry. I’m about three months in to a long term contract with an organisation working on enabling its people to be more effective and the thought that keeps popping into my head is ‘Start with the End’ When you start with the end in mind (know your desired…

Read More >

Can GM Foods rescue the planet? – the Only way GM food can come to our rescue

Aug 16, 2019

There’s a little problem with food production in the world that not many people want to talk about.  About half the world is being starved to death whilst we are seeing a spike in obesity due to over-consumption of food. The strange thing about that issue is that both ends of the food consumption divide…

Read More >

Employee Engagement Beyond the Workplace

Jul 31, 2019

My most recent long term client contract had me specialise in Employee Engagement, something I’d done consistently at the Senior and Middle Managers level. But this client need was across the board and at a time when major changes were occuring.   With a previous survey of their staff in two states and across three…

Read More >

Social Issues Hackathon co hosted by Casey and Dandenong

Jul 25, 2019

Great to see some quality collaboration between the City of Casey and City of Greater Dandenong aimed at addressing or tackling Social Issues and importantly bridging the divide between ‘our area’ and ‘their area’ artificial boundaries. Well done to both Councils   Here’s the oveview of what they’re doing. This one looks to be an…

Read More >

Beyond VUCA – the VUCA 2.0 concept

Jul 9, 2019

Most people who’ve been involved in planning and strategy development will have heard of VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous. Emerging out of the US War College in 1987, it’s come to be more widely used by consultancies aiming to at least ‘sound smart’. But that’s not the main problem with its usage   Instead…

Read More >

Is Manufacturing Output Data a Reliable Indicator of Economic Activity

Mar 19, 2019

In short – ‘No’. In days of yore manufacturing data meant jobs being done, employed people being paid, sales being made. But with robotics and off-shoring in many parts of Australian manufacturing, it’s no longer the value indicator it once was.   In the US it is an even less reliable indicator because in the…

Read More >

The Drive to Make Futures Thinking Pragmatic

Mar 13, 2019

  I’ve writen a fair bit over the years about the need to move futures thinking out of a theoretical approach and into a more applied model.   Recently I’ve come off a 6 month project working with the Asian Productivity Organisation, an entity that brings together 20 member countries and their core government policy…

Read More >