High-Voltage Wealth Transfer Disguised as Aussie Climate Policy
The big new “cheaper battery scheme” was so badly designed it accidentally burned through $2.3 billion in just six months
We could have built two new gas plants… instead we blessed a few wealthy homes with batteries bigger than they can use, which will probably sit around doing nothing most of the time.
The scheme is so bad, the government has already promised to add another $5b to the pyre.
And since most homeowners are not opting to share their battery in a virtual power plant with the voracious retailers, this extra battery power will probably just sit there unused in homes around the country, hopefully not catching fire too often.
It’s just another Soviet-style failure of communist midwits.
The government keeps bragging about the rampant success of the program but it is a globalist lemon from end to end. The Cheaper Battery Scheme was supposed to save homeowners $4,000 on a new 10kWh home battery, but the rebate was offered “per kilowatt hour” not per battery. (Does Chris Bowen does even know what a kilowatt hour is?).
The design meant solar installers had every incentive to offer homeowners a supersize battery (a 20, 30, 40 or 50kWh monster) and the homeowners had every reason (apart from morals and ethics) to let taxpayers foot the bill for batteries that were much larger than they needed or would have bought themselves.
Finn Peacock, founder of “Solar Quotes” explained to the ABC that instead of buying a 10kWh battery homeowners could order a whopping 50kWh battery which would get a rebate as high as $18,000 dollars.
In the end, he said, it would cost the homeowner effectively the same amount regardless of the size of the battery. That would also give people a reason to buy the biggest cheapest battery they could get — what could possibly go wrong?
The government experts thought people would buy 10kWh systems, like they did in the free market, but in the new fake market, the average size installed is now more like 25kWh.
The scheme started in July, and failed in a predictable fashion, but the government apparently only realized things were running amok after 160,000 big batteries were installed in homes around Australia.
According to the ABC, solar and battery installers were asked last Friday to join “an urgent briefing by the minister on Saturday outlining major changes to the policy.” Righto then, panic stations at the Dept of Weather and Energy?
The original plan was to help a lot of households reduce their electricity bill (at the expense of the other households who subsidised the solar panels and the batteries).
Instead a few homeowners with enough money lying around to spend thousands on a battery, have had a bonanza with up to $18,000 in battery bonuses.
The glorious waste of it all
Other industry participants, who were not authorised to comment because of their work advising the government, said the scheme had created significant waste.
They pointed out that most households were only using about 10 kilowatt hours of power overnight and would struggle to fill a system with five times as much storage.
One critic said: “You end up with a lot of batteries that will never fill up, just sitting there empty forever, paid for by the Australian taxpayer.”
If the government then mandates free electricity for everyone at lunchtime, the wealthier battery owners can really capitalize on it.
Too bad about the national economy.
And too bad about the battery chemistry. Some worry that running the batteries flat-tack to make the most of the “free electricity” window is stressing the batteries…
One of his biggest concerns was the flight by consumers to the cheapest batteries on the market — a trend that was being fuelled by the incentive to maximise size rather than quality.
On top of that, he said the spread of “free” electricity periods during the middle of the day to help soak up excess solar power was creating another risk.
“People get the big battery and then they run them absolutely full throttle for three hours a day to charge them from the free electricity,” he said.
“What we’re seeing is that it’s really stressing these batteries to the extent you’ve had a recall already.”
Chinese battery maker Sigenergy issued a voluntary recall for some of its inverters last month over concerns about overheating plugs.
As usual — the Labor Party helped make a few rich-people richer at the expense of the working poor.
See more here joannenova.com.au
Some bold emphasis added