Canberra’s Battery Test Centre has been going a couple of years now. What do the results so far tell us about the state of the home battery market?
I am very happy. I just found out there is a battery testing centre in Canberra. Who would have thought there would be something useful in Canberra? Besides, of course, for the Federal Government and the bureaucracy that’s necessary for the functioning of a modern representative democracy.1 [Read more…]
If you order a Tesla Powerwall 2 home battery system, according to a Tesla spokesperson, you will now have to wait until early next year to have it delivered. This means the supply of Powerwalls for new Australian orders will be halted for at least 7 months. If these turn out to be Tesla months then your guess as to when they will be available is as good as mine. [Read more…]
If you are a business owner there’s an excellent chance you’re not happy with cost of grid electricity and would love to lower your bills with rooftop solar. Unfortunately, there’s also an excellent chance you rent your business premises and so don’t have much of an incentive to install solar. After all you can’t take it with you when you leave. [Read more…]
If you live in ACT and install solar – you are forced to choose between 2 not very great electricity tariffs.
If you are getting a new house built or having solar power installed in the ACT I have some bad news. You will lose the ability to freely choose between electricity plans. You will no longer be able to select a standard tariff; which is usually best for solar households. Instead you will be forced on to either a time-of-use tariff or a demand tariff. [Read more…]
Don’t let a half-cut solar installer install your half-cut (AKA split-cell) solar panels.
Silicon solar cells of the type now used for almost every residential solar installation in Australia have been around for a long time. They are 64 years old. This makes them the same age as nuclear power generation. They’ve come a long way since they were first made at Bell Labs in the United States. Originally they were only able to convert around 6% of the energy in sunlight into electrical energy but now the most efficient solar panels on the market manage 22%.
Unfortunately, the days of large improvements in efficiency have long been over. Now we only see small incremental improvements and one of these in use that will be much more common in the future are panels that use half-cut solar cells. These panels are known as both half-cut and split-cell solar panels. [Read more…]
Last week I wrote about the “Power of Choice” reforms that put electricity retailers in charge of electricity meters.
Today I’m writing how Power of Choice reforms harm the consumer by stealing the most valuable thing you possess: your time on this Earth. [Read more…]
A new scheme called “The Power Of Choice” has moved responsibility for meters to the retailers.
On the first of December 2017 responsibility for electricity meters in the National Energy Market or NEM changed hands1. The NEM is a National Electricity Market that apparently thinks Western Australia and the Northern Territory are other countries because they’re not included.
The job of installing and maintaining electricity meters was taken from Distributed Network Service Providers or DNSPs and given to Electricity Retailers. In other words, it was taken from the people who distribute electricity from long distance transmission lines to homes and businesses and given to the people who bill you for electricity. [Read more…]
Will Super Capacitor Energy Storage Save The World?
Note from Finn: People have asked me if I would recommend buying a ‘super capacitor’ over a conventional battery. My short answer is no. Personally I think the technology is too new to consider it in a residential application. As Ronald says at the end of the post: “…they are a new thing and sometimes new things have problems that aren’t apparent at first.” Buyer beware.
Australian company Arvio is now selling a supercapacitor energy storage module. If you go to their site you can see the Kilowatt Labs Sirius module that stores 3.55 kilowatt-hours of electricity on sale for $4,950 including GST – here’s how it looks: [Read more…]
It’s only two months now since I wrote an article telling everyone in the world the product warranty for LG Solar’s NeON 2 panel was being extended from 12 years to 15. But if you were looking forward to to getting some NeON 2 solar panels and enjoying that sweet 15 year warranty, I’m afraid you’re out of luck because it’s no longer available. Instead you’ll just have to enjoy a massive 25 year product warranty as it has been extended by another 10 years. [Read more…]
The cost of rooftop solar continues to fall despite the fact that the Australian dollar has been falling too. It has been a while since I’ve harped on about how cost effective rooftop solar is, so I stayed up all night to make beautiful graphs of the simple solar payback time in every capital city. In other words I will show you how many years it will take the savings on your electricity bills to cover the cost of your solar power system. [Read more…]
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