Big batteries are going in fast. Too many are being left dumb, unsupported, and unable to earn their keep.
I was on ABC Adelaide this week to talk about the battery rebate. First question was easy. Has it been popular?
Hell yes.
Roughly 150,000 batteries in six months. That is a staggering number.
But then I said something that sucked the air out of the studio. About half of those batteries, from what I am seeing, are paired with sketchy gear and rushed installs. Big batteries. Cheap prices. Forty or fifty kilowatt-hours for peanuts.
A residential battery that size is not a simple box you bolt on for self-consumption and forget. Most homes need about 16 kWh for self-consumption + backup reserve. That leaves tens of kWh free to trade via dynamic tariffs or VPPs. That is also where things get tricky. Even if the electrical work just scrapes through, the battery configuration almost never does. Dynamic tariffs change all the time. Prices go negative. Export rules flip. Control logic needs tuning. Software needs updates. Someone has to take responsibility for that over years, not just on install day.
Cheap installs do not price that in. At all.
Then the calls started.
A Negative Experience
Ben rang up. He said he was on a tariff where prices can go negative. When that happens, he gets charged for exporting power. His system is meant to stop exporting when prices go negative. It is not doing that. Installer says talk to the energy retailer. Energy retailer is too busy to help.
I asked him a question. You are with Amber, right?
Dead silence.
I have been on ABC enough to know naming names is fine if you are not selling anything. And the silence said everything. Amber is flat out with the rebate surge. Support queues are long.
Ben then said he had been poking around his switchboard and turned off the breaker to his solar inverter. That stopped the exports. Which of course it did. I told him straight. This is not your job. You should not be fault-finding your own energy system. Your installer should be fixing this.
I do not know which installer Ben used or what he paid. I also do not know whether he asked his installer to set the system up for dynamic tariffs in the first place. If he did not, then it would be fair for the installer to charge for that work after the fact.
The problem is not that installers charge for this work. The problem is when it is never offered, never explained, or quietly skipped.
If the installer will not configure the system and Ben stays on a dynamic tariff, he will keep bleeding money. The safest move might be to switch back to a boring retailer with flat prices and no nasty surprises.
Ben did not want to hear that. I get it. People like the idea of being clever with power. They like seeing prices dance around on an app. But clever systems need proper setup and support. Lots of people bought batteries from installers who priced only for basic self-consumption. The result is batteries that save a fraction of what they could. In many cases, those people would have been better off paying more for solid hardware from an installer who allowed time for proper configuration and ongoing help as tariffs and rules change.
Not Everyone Is A Home Assistant Ninja
Yes, some people can do this stuff themselves. They know how tariffs work. They know how to configure an energy system. They know what settings to touch and which ones not to. They might even be Home Assistant ninjas. They are allowed to save a grand or two by using their own valuable skills and time.
Most people are not those people.
If you want a battery that earns its keep, plays nicely with dynamic pricing, and still functions properly three years from now, it will cost more upfront.
Cheap installs just send the bill later.
Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.
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This is just like the majority of solar installers who don’t transfer electric storage hot water systems to run from solar in the middle of the day – instead they keep them connected to the off-peak grid supply ❌️. This means the abundant solar is not being maximised, self-consumption is less than it should be, and more grid electricity is being imported (with higher emissions) than necessary.
So many friends are getting McBatteries. Another very useful article for them, thanks Finn.
I’m very tech-savvy (an engineer) and also happy to tweak and adjust. I have a single PW2 at home, installed nearly 3 years ago. When the rebates started I did some simple sums. We have to draw from the grid in winter, so i thought hmmm, let’s see if I should change that with additional storage.
It never even got close to adding up to being a sensible thing to do. On the best scenarios I modelled it was going to cost me twice what just buying the power from the grid would cost me over 10 years, to add a second battery.
There is absolutely no way known I will share my 80kwh battery with anyone, especially bloodsucking power companies..I deliberately oversized so that I can tell the grubs to go procreate with themselves. The up yours factor is far more significant to me than pure cost-effectiveness.
Did you use a rebate Doug? This is where I think public policy gets more complicated. Public subsidies I think can reasonably expect some level of mutuality in the use of the energy.
A responsible retail VPP would help protect a client against negative prices – it is so eminently feasible. It seems not only unprofessionally negligent, but professional malfeasance to bleed a client by facilitating export when that will not only not pay the client, but cost them money.
A VPP knows the next 5-minute energy price. To be fit for purpose, it must send that to all clients, for their local VPP app’s export/pause decision when it’s positive, and unconditionally pause when it’s negative.
If the VPP vendor does not supply a client app, which pauses export on negative price or loss of VPP contact, then they do not have a product which is fit for purpose, I submit.
In order for a VPP vendor to have a viable product, it must work reliably, to *always* benefit the client. And a client who pays a fee for rubbish which costs him money, needs to question his judgement, neh?
Discrimination: Ability to tell the difference between a sausage and a dog turd.
For more than 80 percent of the population of Canada, the electricity system is Provincial-govenment-owned.
So subsidized home or utility owned battery makes little difference, it’s the same pot of money either way
Batteries are not a big deal here, because at the scale it’s been installed, rooftop solar has little effect on total generation most of the year, but it does help measurably in midsummer.
But for those of us in that other 20%, solar and battery are the only way to use less fossil generation. I hope that despite this first major Australian rollout of home batteries not going perfectly, it’ll still displace a couple gigawatts of coal generation, and relieve some strain on the evening ramp-up.
And hopefully other governments will observe and learn from the good and the bad.