MEA calls for wide adoption of home battery storage

Master Electricians Australia (MEA) is strongly recommending the adoption of home battery storage as an immediate solution for Australia’s at-risk energy grid.

MEA CEO Malcolm Richards said governments needed to stop prolonging the pain of the clean energy transition by hanging onto the hope that billion-dollar infrastructure projects such as Snowy 2.0 and the Marinus link would eventually provide a solution.

“The solution is an absolute no-brainer. The best way to prevent successive summers of blackout pain is to leverage the investments so many of us have already made in the clean energy transition by encouraging home energy storage,” Richards said.

“This would be a game changer that is well within our immediate reach.

“Investing in home energy storage takes away the need to build more transmission lines, but governments need to be working together to drive this in the right direction — not catching up when it’s all too late.”

Richards said a major obstacle to effective use of solar and energy storage is that current tariff structures do not sufficiently reward homeowners for the amount of power they offset from their solar panels into the grid.

“Excess energy produced during the day from these solar panels is wasted, rather being stored at the source of its generation and load shifted to times of peak demand in the evening,” he said.

Given a grid that often can’t cope with the excess load from solar panels, it was far more logical to invest in battery storage for homes and businesses that are, in many cases, producing more energy than they consume, Richards said. This stored power could then be distributed to the grid when needed.

Richards said the latest report by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) of an impending summer of blackouts as the grid struggled to cope with El Nino weather forecasts showed the urgency of the situation.

The MEA suggested the following measures would support the grid as coal-fired power stations continue to be decommissioned:

• Introducing metering reforms that speed up the rollout of smart meters into every Australian home and business.
• Providing rebates to incentivise home battery storage to soak up the feed-in from large-scale home solar systems across the country during the middle of the day and returning it to the grid.
• Legislating a preference for bidirectional-enabled EVs to further support load shifting, turning EVs from a potential drain on the grid to being part of the solution.
• Urgently reforming consumer electricity tariffs to take advantage of home batteries and bidirectional EVs.
   

Image credit: iStock.com/Marc_Osborne