Thread: Future of the Australian Electricity Market

I thought "respected newspaper" was an oxymoron, like "Army Intelligence"

Originally Posted by Mr Brush

I thought "respected newspaper" was an oxymoron, like "Army Intelligence"

boom boom

Basil Brush - Boom Boom!! - YouTube

Originally Posted by Mr Brush

I thought "respected newspaper" was an oxymoron, like "Army Intelligence"

boom boom

Basil Brush - Boom Boom!! - YouTube

"I'll be here all week folks, please try the veal"

Originally Posted by doug3030

Are there any "respected" newspapers left?

Pravda ?

Originally Posted by Mr Brush

Apparently people are already ratting the battery packs out of written off EVs (of all brands) to use as very high capacity house batteries. BYD state that the lithium iron phosphate battery (LiFePO 4 battery) in Atto 3 is designed to be shoehorned into an enclosure for use as a house battery when it has reached end of life for the car (maybe degraded to 80% of original capacity - but that's still 50kWh for home use vs the 14kWh of Tesla wall battery). Trouble is the BYD Blade battery is expected to last for over 1 million km in the car, so I may not be around to see that !! Also, at the current (sic) rate of battery chemistry development, it's pretty safe to say that any existing technology will be obsolete in a few years anyway.

Given that these Lithium-iron-phosphate batteries are so much better, what is stopping these to be standard in domestic wall batteries?
I agree that battery chemistry will make current batteries obsolete. On the other hand, one has to bite the bullet sooner or later! We happen to have bought of 5kW panel array 10 years ago when we had the opportunity to do so and despite the fact that panel efficiency has improved significantly, we have not regretted doing so.

We are thinking about adding batteries to our system but the "cost recovery" would a quite long, particularly now that electricity costs are no longer dictated by supply & demand only and are becoming a political issue.

Cheers,
Yvan

Real cost recovery is an interesting phenomenon.

Spending $10k on a battery to get say $5k back over its lifetime is a narrow way of looking at the "overall cost"

If NOT spending $10k generates $100k+ worth of problem down the road for our kids and grand kids to solve then the $5k immediate cost is cheap.
Leaving the $10k in a will for our kids to solve a $100k+ future problem can also look pretty churlish.

Same reason why I will eventually be getting an EV and replacing my gas HWS with a heat pump (we already have solar and are electric for everything else).
All up I'm considering spending somewhere in the $80-90k range and at this price i'm definitely not saving me any money.
Not sure about a house battery because the car battery will probably soak up any spare solar. I'll wait and see how it goes
I've had a long chat with my son about this and how this would reduce his inheritance, but he is more than happy for me to do this.
AND
if I die sooner rather than later he will inherit the lot anyway.

All this manly applies to people who have the readies, people struggling to pay for pressing expenses like rent and power etc will have different priorities.

In 2010 at a small ski resort village in the northern Italian alps the householders and resort buildings were using/importing/burning $100k+ a year of heating oil to provide heat mainly during the winter.
The net result of all this was that a combination of the topography microclimate together with burning oil turned the local ski fields "brown" and covering the village on many days with a foul smelling smog.
A group of locals hired some engineers (including one of my cousins) and they came up with a plan to burn green waste trimmed from the ever encroaching forrests along road sides, and sawdust from the half dozen or so saw mills in they area.
They setup a pari of highly efficient 10MW biofueled burners that provided hot water to all houses in the village via a large loop PLUS generated electric power.
The stumbling block was every house in the village had to replace their oil burning heaters with a smart heat exchanger at a cost of about 2k euros.
For families with small kids suffering from the smog this was a no brainer but for seniors (mainly older women) approaching the ends of their lives it was a bit harder.
The town committee in charge of the project set up teams of parents and kids to visit these grannies and explain to them why they should switch.
Within a month they had everyone on board.
Result is clean ski fields, no smog - just an occasional faint whiff of piney aroma.

OK this is a small scale local solution and is not being implemented on a larger scale due to the energy economics of biofuel transport and large scale particle generation by burning impacting on health.
Biofuel burning has since been capped in Italy while more efficient burners are being developed, but it still shows a future way of thinking that we seem to be slow at getting onto here in Oz.

Originally Posted by BobL

Same reason why I will eventually be getting an EV ...

And they will stop making ICE's.

... Not sure about a house battery because the car battery will probably soak up any spare solar. I'll wait and see how it goes ...

Bob, you have the level of mathematics required; have you considered doing some simulations on the various permutations of the alternate strategy of using the car battery as the house battery? If you have an EV it is a sunk cost. I will remain mute for the time being so as not to influence you.

Nevertheless. There are 8,760 hours in a year.

A car driven 20,000 kms in a year at an average speed of 80 kmh is actually driven for 250 hours. It is parked for 8,510 hours - or 97.1% of the time.

A low usage vehicle like mine that does 6,000 kms per year is parked for 99.1% of the year - mainly in my drive.

A commuter's car may spend ~25% of the year parked near the place of employment, mainly in daylight hours.

Most people use their vehicles for less than 100 kms per day, except for the occasional long trip, usually planned in advance.

It would not take a lot of fuzzy logic and a learning curve on a very smart energy manager to integrate solar, the car, the grid and the family's usage patterns.

Over to you.

Another thing to consider is the cost of getting grid power connected to larger acreage properties. We're on 20 acres, house situated towards the back of the block, and I think the cost to get 3-phase power connected from the front boundary was $30k when we first built 20 years ago. I hate to think what it would be now, probably at least $50K or a lot more. The original house had in-slab electric heating running on 3-phase off peak (which was actually surprisingly economical), but due to the damage in the bushfire this wasn't re-usable even though the house slab survived. Bung 15kW of solar on the roof, add some kind of battery storage (house battery, or car battery when V2H is more supported), and even a small back up generator, and go completely off grid? Total cost would still have to be way less than getting a rural property grid connected on Day 1, plus no more supply charges or power bills for all time.

Not convinced about small wind turbines though - cost/benefit analysis doesn't seem to stack up for small home scale systems.

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

And they will stop making ICE's.
.
.
.

It would not take a lot of fuzzy logic and a learning curve on a very smart energy manager to integrate solar, the car, the grid and the family's usage patterns.

Agreed and When they are available I be one of the first in line to buy.

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

It would not take a lot of fuzzy logic and a learning curve on a very smart energy manager to integrate solar, the car, the grid and the family's usage patterns.

It seems to me that we are not ALL that far away from a nicely integrated system being available. Solar Panels are more or less fully developed (but there will no doubt be improvements and costs cuts), car batteries appear to be viable right now, and there'll be significant developments in the next couple of years. Home battery? Nah, waste of money once we have V2H or V2X cars all over the place. Maybe the inverter will need changing with the implementation of an interface to stitch all the components together?

This may be of interest and explain some of the detail on EV batteries, their capacities, charge times and ratings:

EV battery size, charge speeds and range explained | TechRadar

Regards
Paul

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

It seems to me that we are not ALL that far away from a nicely integrated system. Solar Panels are more or less fully developed (but there will no doubt be improvements and costs cuts), car batteries appear to be viable right now, and there'll be significant developments in the next couple of years. Home battery? Nah, waste of money once we have V2H or V2X cars all over the place. Maybe the inverter will need changing with the implementation of an interface to stitch all the components together?

A lot of wishful thinking there, not everyone will have a BEV due to supply constraints in manufacturing and not everyone will have solar panels due to any number of other problems, they don't own the home, apartment living, no off street parking etc.

Keep in mind most (the whole two or three of them) BEV's V2L is limited to 3.6kw and that is not going to keep a house very warm during the hours before bedtime even in Oz let alone OS where it gets seriously cold.

Originally Posted by FenceFurniture

It seems to me that we are not ALL that far away from a nicely integrated system. Solar Panels are more or less fully developed (but there will no doubt be improvements and costs cuts), car batteries appear to be viable right now, and there'll be significant developments in the next couple of years. Home battery? Nah, waste of money once we have V2H or V2X cars all over the place. Maybe the inverter will need changing with the implementation of an interface to stitch all the components together?

I reckon there will always be a use for a small-medium size house battery when the sun aint shining and your car is not at home or charging.
EG
If you go away for a holiday with your EV, a home battery will easily run your frigde/freezers overnights.
It''s a stinking hot day and you've decide to go out for the evening, a home battery will keep your ACs ticking over till you get home.

Also if the EV is charging can it be used to power your house, You've been away for a long trip and you schedule a long recharge for an all day charge starting 9am next morning and your Solar may not be able to run your house and recharge the EV at the same time.

Battery costs will eventually come done whereby people who don't like sucking off the grid can still have one even for incidental use..