One of the nation’s largest power suppliers, EnergyAustralia, says subsidizing battery installations would be the best way for the federal government to invest in the future of the power market while lifting the economy out of COVID-19, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
EnergyAustralia is an electricity generation, electricity and gas retailing private company in Australia that is owned by Hong Kong-based and listed CLP Group.
As the Morrison government looks to gas to drive the post-lockdown recovery, EnergyAustralia’s head of customer markets Mark Collette has called for a greater national focus on accelerating the transition to renewables by matching the recent boom in rooftop solar panels with household and commercial batteries, capable of storing surplus energy created during the day.
“I think the biggest problem to solve in energy … is how we deal with the ‘feast or famine’ – that is, having too much renewables at one point in time and not enough at another,” Mr Collette told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
“That’s the problem we should focus our time and attention on as a country.”
Between six and nine gigawatts of new “dispatchable” power resources such as gas, batteries and pumped hydro will be required to manage the energy transition in the next 20 years to fill the gap during overcast and windless periods when conditions for renewables are unfavourable, according to the energy market operator.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull this week said a “renewable-led economic stimulus” would be much more effective than concentrating on gas.
EnergyAustralia, which runs coal, gas and renewable energy assets supplying 2.4 million customer accounts, said incentive schemes in the past have helped drive a boom in solar panels’ uptake as increasingly climate-conscious customers seek to reduce their carbon footprint. Mr Collette said 250,000 EnergyAustralia customers had signed up to the company’s free carbon-neutral energy plans, offsetting 1.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and demonstrating that customers were eager to make a difference where possible. However, cost barriers have so far contributed a slower uptake of household batteries compared to solar, he said.
“Solar energy is now quite economic without government subsidy, it’s probably a train that moves without any support,” he said. “I think the case for action around batteries and different support mechanisms that might help on storage could be stronger because it helps some of the emerging challenges across the grid.”
Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor this week named energy storage as one of the government’s five technology priorities, including a “stretch goal” of cutting energy storage costs. The other priorities include clean hydrogen, low-emissions steel and aluminium production, carbon capture and storage, and soil carbon sequestration.
