Originally posted by jantimot
Only about 15 years behind clear.png. SEQEB’s rationale in the early naughties for encouraging local power generation was that it reduces the requirement for upgrading distribution infrastructure. Any rooftop solar is a bonus for them, as it’s used locally, reducing peak demand statewide. As the final kW costs something like $20m, the high rebates are justified because of the savings on CAPEX.
I suspect that hydrogen regeneration power provided locally will prove more economical than Li batteries, unless they can improve their lifespan.
Yes, it's interesting how things change. If you follow the history it is amazing how the wheel turns.
One hundred years ago or so we had little electricity generators selling electricity locally to a few customers. Then it started to evolve for a whole bunch of sensible reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Victoria
I guess now that we have an interstate ( national ) grid and energy market established with rules and regs in place, we can go back to individual generators. The interesting thing about power generation is that it has shaped the market by design. Big projects were built e.g. Portland Smelter partly to justify power station construction . ( Loy Yang ). Power stations used to idle overnight ( remember off peak hot water ? ) and ramp up during the day. Imagine the efficiency gains if you can run a cfps at a steady rate for days, weeks or months on end ?
So, while it's been a pretty good philosophy and has worked well in the past, it is probably not the most efficient one these days.
You can certainly see the savings benefit of not having to build the connecting infrastructure. I recall one of the issues with the hot rock developments in SA ( apart from the downhole problems
) was that they were 500ks from decent high voltage transmission lines. I note that these days the big wind/solar farms are always built really close to that sort of connection.
Fast forward a couple of decades and assuming that storage gets to decent and reliable commercial size, I imagine we will see the end of price gouging because the power system will be tailormade to suit the customer.
And that's where these localised power systems will play a big role. We are starting to see the community hubs that are generating their own green power for enviromental reasons but what they are effectively doing is building the model for anyone going forward. Legislation will be developed around these models so that any community or business wanting to install their own system will have had all the hard development work already done for them.
It is the age of information sharing and innovation and I reckon it's going to be pretty exciting.
