Last week two flaws in PHP went public. PHP is the programming language behind SolarQuotes and a big slice of the web, and these bugs had been sitting in its code for about 14 years. AI models found them. Within 45 minutes of the announcement, Cloudflare was seeing tens of thousands of attempts to exploit them. By that evening it was millions. [Read more…]

Customers buying home batteries are often going for “whole home” backup on the assurance that going forward, everything will be solar powered.

People are however alarmed when bills lob in the letterbox with hundreds of dollars consumption charged out. How is that even possible?

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Australia’s most popular battery brand, Fox ESS, has launched the Power Cube in Australia. It’s an all-in-one home energy system that combines an inverter and batteries into a single stackable unit.

The Power Cube uses two to nine EQ5500 battery modules, giving you between 10.92 and 49.14 kWh of storage. Fox ESS says its design makes installation quicker and easier, and the different sizes help you choose what fits your home.

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A smoke alarm near your home battery might seem like a sensible precaution, but is it actually compulsory? The answer depends on where you live, where your battery is installed and, in some cases, whether you’ve claimed a government incentive. We look at the different rules and recommendations across Australia.

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More battery owners can now take a ride on Amber Electric’s wholesale pricing rollercoaster, with leading battery brand GoodWe integrating with the retailer’s SmartShift technology. It is the second big reveal from Amber in a matter of weeks, after the company announced BYD’s Sealion 7 can now join its vehicle-to-grid (V2G) trial.

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Neovolt have been threatened with de-listing because their CEC approval paperwork isn’t in order.

I find this curious because when I’ve asked about similar approval paperwork in the past concerning Growatt products, they weren’t de-listed. And the CEC refused to answer our questions.

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A fortnight ago, 7.30 aired an investigation into Solar Power Nation, a retailer the ABC reports is under investigation by authorities in Queensland, NSW and South Australia after hundreds of complaints.

One customer, Amin Khorram, paid $13,000 for a battery system. Only one of the two inverters was installed, so he got 5 kW of the promised 10 kW and couldn’t charge or discharge his batteries fast enough to get all the savings he expected. He chased the company for eight months. The missing inverter finally appeared last month, as his QCAT hearing date approached. Funny, that. [Read more…]

I first wrote about this back in 2012. Fourteen years later, I’m still writing about it. That should tell you something about how sticky this confusion is. [Read more…]

Looking at a modular home battery, adding another module appears about as difficult as stacking another Lego brick. Lift the new battery into place, stack it on top of the others, plug it in and away you go.

How hard can it be? It’s probably why the question pops up every now and then in online owner forums. [Read more…]

Australia’s electricity market operator has been warned that an overly cautious approach to planning the grid could leave consumers paying more than necessary.

That’s one of the findings of an independent review of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which has also raised concerns about potential conflicts between some of the organisation’s expanding responsibilities. [Read more…]