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The program has so far spent $2.5bn, and installed 11GWh. That's just the cost of the subsidy (~30% discount), not the cost of what home owners tipped in. Util

• boxed 1mo ago
  Do you have some citation to back those numbers up?
  • skew-aberration 1mo ago
    Final numbers are not known yet. The Australian government's own 'Gencost' report put grid vs home based storage at 2x as efficient. In this subsidy program, the ratio of private to public money per a battery is about 1:2 (ie 70% subsidy). It was in my own case. Therefore, we would have had more battery storage if the government had just built grid storage.
    • boxed 1mo ago
      It says the subsidy is 30%. You just said it's 70% and that it's 50% in the same sentence. Surely you can give one link to something that backs up anything you said.
      • plantain 1mo ago
        The program is of course much more complex than can be fit in a HN comment, and it has evolved over time. The simplest answer is the government contributes $252/kWh. Approx. 4x the cost if the government funded a utility scale BESS - noting the installed cost of a home battery is 400-1200$/kWh depending on brand/options etc.
      • skew-aberration 1mo ago
        Everyone in my office paid around 7.5-8.5k AUD for batteries around the 24k mark, so I know this to be the case. I could email you the invoice if you don't believe me xD You can read up on the subsidy itself too - they basically set a cost per kwhr target based on the few bespoke batteries on the market, before it was flooded with cheaper Chinese options. Because it was based on capacity rather than a percentage discount, this caused the effective discount to be much higher than intended at the outset. We don't know the final numbers yet - but government has reforecast for 7 billion for the program's duration, which includes a much smaller subsidy continuing until 2030. I expect it will be close to about 5B spent so far.
    • lazide 1mo ago
      Having your own battery + inverter setup dramatically reduces the ability for the grid utility to screw you over. Everyone I know has had that happen at one time or another, and it’s extremely common to want home battery just for the degree of ‘power sovereignity’ it grants you.
• ericmay 1mo ago
  > Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? Because government is failing to address these issues? Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time. But what the hell are you supposed to do when the power goes out and it takes a few days to get turned back on? Well, spend $10,000 - $20,000 and install your own backup power. Is it inefficient? Sure! Does that matter? Absolutely not.
  • ch4s3 1mo ago
    This isn't a federal government issue in the US. Local and state governments dropped the ball here. No one wants to pay what it costs to bury power lines in most locales, and we have a ton of byzantine regulations that make it slow and expensive to add generation capacity.
  • jebarker 1mo ago
    Yep. Here in Colorado I installed two powerwalls moderately subsidized by the electricity company. It’s not going to save me meaningful amounts of money even in the long term and I would much rather see energy issues solved at a societal level. But our electricity provider is just unable to reliably keep the lights on through winter and wildfire season, I.e. most of the year. Since installing the batteries a couple years ago our home has stayed warm and lit through two multi-day outages when neighbors have had to go stay in a hotel.
    • ceejayoz 1mo ago
      Isn't "subsidized by the electricity company" partially fulfilling "at a societal level"?
      • jebarker 1mo ago
        It is, yeah. The condition of the subsidy is that up to 60 times a year the electricity company can pull the power from our batteries to cover higher demand. When I said "at a societal level" I was more imagining solar farms and grid level storage though.
• alexpotato 1mo ago
  There was an article a few years back about how homeowners in Hawaii were buying solar panels to try to get cheaper power. Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
  • otherme123 1mo ago
    Which translates to "the local power company was knowingly using ineficient sources to steal from their clients, until their clients did something about it and forced them be efficient".
  • tialaramex 1mo ago
    > the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar. I'm sure this is the way you remember it, and maybe even the way it was explained in that article but if you bought a solar panel the sunlight to power it is free, so your electricity from the panel is free. You're not "buying" that power and so the commercial supply can't be "cheaper". Now if I've paid $5000 for a product which makes me electricity for free and then later you offer me the same amount of electricity for just $4000 you could say yours is cheaper, but, er, I already bought that $5000 product, I'm already out $5000 and my electricity is free, yours is not actually cheaper now. What we're seeing here is just "Did you know solar panels have become cheaper over time?"
    • nemomarx 1mo ago
      If you have to pay a connection fee for having the solar panel hooked up to your houses grid, I could see it ending up cheaper to disconnect the panels and sell them back tbh
    • sidewndr46 1mo ago
      Sure, if you live somewhere you own the power you generate. I don't own the power I generate if I had solar.
• ghaff 1mo ago
  Sort of. While not really mainstream, there are private roads (and long driveways), wells, and a (limited) amount of home-schooling. Not hospitals obviously as that requires specialized training and equipment.
• nickpp 1mo ago
  Cost is never the only factor though. Being energy independent and self-sufficient feels awesome. Also whole house backup rocks, together with a smart app showing and optimizing your energy usage.
• sanderjd 1mo ago
  Honestly this seems like a pretty good efficiency multiplier for a distributed vs. centralized solution at that scale!
• skew-aberration 1mo ago
  I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies I've ever seen in this country. The numbers are much worse than you make out. The program has spent more than 2.5bn (the projected figure) and we don't know yet how much. The subsidy was closer to 70% for a typical large battery install. The government's own gen cost report would have put grid storage 1.5x ahead on ROI. Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.
  • plantain 1mo ago
    I've tried to be as charitable on both sides. As you note the real subsidy is higher, but the owner contributions are still high, and the projected cost of the program is now closer to 7.5Bn. It's pure middle-class welfare.
    • skew-aberration 1mo ago
      For 2N government dollars, the program gets 3N home battery. Grid is 2x more efficient by their own accounting. Therefore, we could have gotten 4N grid storage. This is not comparable to the home solar programs - which I understand to 'enticed' more private investment. Simply buying votes and lying to the public. I feel for the renters who paid their taxes and never saw a cent.
  • stubish 1mo ago
    I was surprised there were no companies offering finance deals, such as loans to cover the out of pocket costs. An energy retailer could lock in a customer for 10 years to reasonable rates, make more money, and customer pays less. I suspect it was because the limiting factor was not cash, but the installer capacity. Solar installers have been working flatout, and even more customers would just push their prices up further.
  • plantain 1mo ago
    >I agree 100%, this is one of the most inequitable government policies Don't forget about the EV subsidies! No fringe benefits tax, no road user charges, discounted registration. Set aside the broader incentives (noble though they may be) and just look at the equity in the distribution of the welfare.
• dcan 1mo ago
  Is this not free market capitalism? Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term. This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term! The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck. Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.
  • pocksuppet 1mo ago
    No. When the government pays for it, that isn't capitalism.
  • barney54 1mo ago
    No. The modern grid has little relation to capitalism. There is some private ownership, but there are massive government barriers to entry and massive regulation of the system.
    • leonidasrup 1mo ago
      Electric grid are excellent example of natural monopoly. "An industry is a natural monopoly if a single firm can supply the entire market at a lower long-run average cost than if multiple firms were to operate within it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
      • Mainan_Tagonist 1mo ago
        if anything it is THE natural monopoly
• mrtesthah 1mo ago
  There are still advantages to distributed power generation beyond overcoming governance failures—-microgrids lie somewhere in between and can increase resilience in the face of more severe and unpredictable climate events.
• jgilias 1mo ago
  My neighbour has a battery installation because where I live they subsidise both - the panels and the battery. In the event of a power outage he can keep running his house for ~3 days if being somewhat frugal with consumption. And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.
• nutjob2 1mo ago
  The subsidy has the effect of prompting the wealthiest consumers to spend around 2.25x the amount of subsidy on battery installations while reducing the load on the grid, lowering prices for all grid users. Investing in more grid power would require additional grid capacity which would raise the price for all grid users, and with cheap renewables that would be an increasing amount on power bills.
• figbert 1mo ago
  Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. This is a big deal. I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.
  • plantain 1mo ago
    We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants. > Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. A couple of electricians doing 20kWh (average install size) once per day, with an individual inverter, gateways, etc. is not at scale, by any means of the word.
    • ceejayoz 1mo ago
      > We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants. And when they break, many people lose power. Ukraine's seen some of the benefits of hyper-local generation over centralized production.
    • marcosdumay 1mo ago
      A thousand electricians doing 20kWh installations every week-day add up to 5GWh/year. There are probably more than a thousand electricians in Australia.
    • mrngld 1mo ago
      No, we do not in fact have the "power pipes". Those "pipes" have capacity limits. Those "pipes" and getting them approved and built in the US is a key limiting factor that throttles... pretty much everything. Yes, it holds up data centers, but also I've heard 'green' energy advocates complaining for decades about how difficult it is to get the permits and approvals to get wind and solar facilities hooked up, they're holding up nuclear plants, they're holding all kinds of things up. There's also something to be said for distributed production and storage. We don't all live in ultra-compact cities. I agree apartment buildings don't need to be playing this game. But Australia (and the US) are extremely dispersed relative to Europe, for example. There should, in theory, be resilience in distributed production and storage that grid managers could call upon to help manage point failures.
• otherme123 1mo ago
  Decentralization might be dollar-inefficient, but brings resiliency and redundancy to the system. The whole internet infrastructure would be probably cheaper with more centralization. Data backups are also ridiculously innefficient dollar-wise.
  • skew-aberration 1mo ago
    These systems are not truly redundant in that sense though - as they are intended to be centrally coordinated (the manufacturer provides a web API). So they are potentially vulnerable to e.g cyberwarfare.
• matt2000 1mo ago
  Fair points, but you are glossing over important issues: 1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping. 2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries. 3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of demand. It also increases resilience of the grid. 4. You assume the political will was there for government and taxpayers to bear the full cost burden of development of the batteries.
  • pydry 1mo ago
    also ignoring that Australia is building snowy 2 which is the world's largest battery by far, due to be finished in 2027-2028.
    • plantain 1mo ago
      Are you really holding up Snowy 2 as a success story? We're past 20bn on Snowy 2 now. Run those numbers against grid scale BESS, on both capacity and peak generation and get back to me - 10 years ago it looked good, now it's not favourable.
      • pydry 1mo ago
        OK. lots of people confuse a $75-$120 / kWh cell price for grid scale battery installed price, which these days is about $300 / kWh. 1 gigawatt hour of installed BESS therefore at current prices is roughly $300 million. Snowy 2 is 350 gigawatt hours, which would cost $105 billion in equivalent batteries which is about $150 billion in Australian dollars, or ~7x cheaper per gwh.
        • ZeroGravitas 1mo ago
          If you price it on throughput and not storage size, because Snowy 2 is very constrained on when it can charge and discharge then the realistic 8Twh per year you can get out of Snowy2 loses to batteries by a factor of 3 based on your costs. But that's assuming the batteries can charge and discharge in full every day. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle where Snowy can act as seasonal storage with a big capacity that isn't used every day. I think it would then also lose on price if compared with a portfolio of batteries alongside solar and wind to directly supply electricity and continually recharge the batteries over seasonal scales but that is a more complex comparison. In general I think even good hydro schemes (and Snowy 2 is not a good one) rely on non-electrical factors to be worthwhile now batteries have plummeted in price, e.g. managing seasonal water flows for agriculture, and the electricity can be seen as an additional benefit.
• dyauspitr 1mo ago
  That’s great value for money! Even with gas peaked plants that would cost roughly $10 billion in the US. They should massively expand this program.
• rglullis 1mo ago
  Not all inneficiencies are bad. If the cost to build ridiculously redundant systems is low enough, the system overall is more robust to black swan events than any central planner could ever be.
• skybrian 1mo ago
  It makes enough sense in rural areas for a Vermont power company to lease batteries to residential customers. They avoid having to do expensive upgrades that way: https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-source-is-now-a-virtual-power-plant/ https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-sourc...
• joering2 1mo ago
  > Why have we suddenly decided to DIY our own redundant power sources? That's simple! As per Felon Musk - to sell overhead to electricity providers. Allegedly they will gladly buy energy from you! So with big enough roof, you can just sit home relax and watch TV, while your solar panels make your living.
• splicebot 1mo ago
  Are we a society though? Margaret Thatcher famously said "There's no such thing as society" and a lot of people have been doing their best to make that true. There's no use pretending. Utility scale has a single political point of failure. Batteries in home do not.
  • Mainan_Tagonist 1mo ago
    For the record, the full quote is : * think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and [end p29] there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”. That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look! It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!”* Just putting this here for clarity.
• thelastgallon 1mo ago
  A distributed grid is a resilient grid. Legacy grid needs massive transmission infrastructure. Solar + batteries at home have zero real estate costs, zero transmission infrastructure costs. Keeps a lot of people employed.
• pibaker 1mo ago
  A government subsidized home improvement project is an easy political sale. It gets the homeowners on board, because they will see an immediate drop in energy costs, plus they also get to personally pocket the increased property values. Versus spending money on utility scale buildouts, where the benefits will come at an undetermined later date, unceremoniously, when the utility company lowers prices. And even after that happens your political enemies will still wag finger at the price tag of your project and ask why don't you spend that somewhere else. Inefficient and overly preferential towards homeowners? Sure. But better than a policy that will be dead by political reasons. It is what it is.
• solatic 1mo ago
  > ridiculously inefficient So too is building single-family homes an inefficient way of providing housing, compared to apartment buildings, not to mention the cost of suburban roads and utility connections etc. > We are a society Indeed, and part of living in a society is about making progress that is politically feasible. That the 2nd Avenue subway (in New York City) costs such a stratospherically insane amount in time and money is not an argument against subways or public transportation. Politics is the art of the possible, and Australia's progress should be celebrated here, not second-guessed.
• rstuart4133 1mo ago
  > Utility scale batteries are now at ~$66m/GWh That equates to AUD$66/kWh, after shipping, installation and connection to the grid. It seems very low. Have you got citations for that number?