As Derryn Hinch once said, con-men wouldn’t prosper if people weren’t greedy. PT Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. Read the fine print. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, to quote Robert A Heinlein.
All these worthy aphorisms come to mind when reading the following story.
Sydneysider Peter Anderson installed a solar system at his home in 2019, adding a battery in 2022.
“The funny thing about it was that our solar installer, when I first spoke to her, she’s like, ‘Oh, you don’t need a battery,’” Mr Anderson recalls with a laugh.
“I said, ‘It’s not about needing a battery, it’s about spite, taking money away from the power companies.’”
Famous last words, pal.
In exchange for a $1,000 discount, Anderson agreed to participate in a ‘virtual power plant’ (VPP). This means that the power company can use participating households’ batteries and other ‘smart’ devices to try and balance the grid.
Mr Anderson says that in the first year after joining the scheme and getting the battery, he barely noticed a thing […]
That all changed after a year or so when Mr Anderson says he started noticing some dramatic shifts.
In other words, around the time that Chris Bowen started implementing his ‘Net Zero’ agenda. Funny about that. It’s almost as if grids were being plunged into inherent instability and power companies were scrambling to prevent a complete collapse, including by punishing users.
For starters, he claims AGL placed him without proper warning on a complicated type of dynamic charge known as a demand tariff.
Under a demand tariff, consumers are charged according to their single greatest half-hourly period of electricity use from the grid across an entire month.
The charges are designed to discourage people from using power from the grid at peak times but consumer advocates and even some regulators say they are incomprehensible, ineffective and unfair.
AGL denied it did not provide adequate notification, stressing Mr Anderson was given written communication flagging the change ahead of time.
On top of this, Mr Anderson asserts AGL also started “draining” his battery at times, forcing him to buy power from the grid at peak prices.
Well, that’s what a VPP does. With idiotic government regulations forcing the shutdown of the reliable coal fleet, experts are repeatedly warning that grids are constantly teetering on the edge of blackouts during peak periods. Large-scale penetration of solar only exacerbates the problem: draining power at peak times, such as the early evening, and overloading grids during the off-peak times in the day.
[Solar consultant Gabrielle Kuiper] says virtual power plants hold huge potential as the energy transition gathers pace and the number of households and businesses participating in them could eventually number in the millions.
And she reckons policies such as the pledge by the federal Labor government to subsidise the cost of household batteries is only likely to supercharge this trend […]
“Once we have a lot of batteries and also a lot of electric vehicles with the capacity to feed back into people’s homes or the grid, we will see this become a really significant part of the electricity system.”
Or not. Household power is only a fraction of total energy use, about 10 per cent. Which is why rooftop solar makes sense for households, but not for grids.
AGL is pointing out that no one held a gun to anyone’s head and forced them to enrol in the VPP.
Customer participation in the VPP is entirely voluntary, and by enrolling in our VPP, customers receive payment for allowing us to use their battery in this way.
Customers who want all the benefits, but aren’t too keen on shouldering the costs they’ve imposed on everyone else.
