Energy retailers climb on board with Panasonic for battery trials
June 2, 2015 - 8:22PM
Angela Macdonald-Smith
Energy Reporter
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ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht says batteries will drive a revolution in home energy supply.
Photo: Anthony Johnson
Snowy Hydro's retail arm Red Energy, ActewAGL and Queensland's Ergon Energy will trial a home battery system made by Panasonic in a bid to ensure they don't miss out on
a "revolution" set to hit the Australian energy supply market.
The three retailers expect to start commercial sales of the eight kilowatt-hour, lithium-ion storage system in October.
If batteries are cheap enough this value proposition will ensure that most homes have solar and storage within a few years.
Ivor Frischknecht
Several electricity retailers were late catching on to the massive swing by households to solar PV and are making sure they get in early on battery storage. Major player AGL Energy, with 3.8 million customers, launched its first initial battery product last month, a 6 kW unit, while arch rival Origin Energy is set to introduce one later this year.
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"It's what our customers want and if we don't supply what they want, they'll ask another retailer to supply it," ActewAGL managing director Michael Costello said at the launch of the Panasonic battery in Sydney on Tuesday. "So I guess we'd better be in it."
The Panasonic battery will compete against other systems such as Tesla Motors' Powerwall battery, which is due to be available in Australia in 2016. California-based Enphase Energy is also targeting early 2016 to launch its rival "plug and play" battery, which will have an integrated inverter and software to interact with the grid.
Panasonic Australia head Paul Reid would not disclose the likely cost of the system to a household. He said various factors had yet to be determined, but it would be "competitive" with rival products. Mr Costello suggested the payback period may be 10 to 12 years for a typical household.
Peak-hour benefits
Batteries are still set to be particularly popular for the 1.4 million Australian households that have rooftop solar, allowing them to maximise the output from their panels and cut energy consumption during high-priced, peak periods. The Panasonic one, which can produce 2 kilowatts of power for four hours, could increase a household's self-consumption rate from rooftop solar panels from 30 per cent to 60 per cent, says the Japanese electronics giant.
Morgan Stanley has forecast that 2.4 million homes within Australia's National Electricity Market grid will have solar generation combined with battery storage within the next few years, each paying up to $10,000 for a storage system. That would create a $24.4 billion market that could eat into the earnings from traditional electricity retailers unless they participate in the sector.
Paul Broad, managing director of Snowy Hydro, said the company did not want to get left behind in the battery storage space race so was moving early, in contrast to its belated stance on rooftop solar.
"We stood by somewhat in the solar PV market in a retail sense – we had some issues with it, we didn't want to be an early leader; we wanted all the economics and the regulatory and safety issues to be sorted out," Mr Broad said.
"But we thought for batteries there was less of an issue and we felt there's such a market in the 1.4 million [homes] that have solar, we can't blindly turn away from it."
He said he expected the cost of the systems would mean that "early adopters" would be the biggest users of battery system in the first five years.
Ivor Frischknecht, chief executive of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, said the battery will allow excess energy generated by solar panels during the day to be used when it is needed in the evening.
"That saves you, as the home owner, money and it prevents the grid from overloading," he said.
"If batteries are cheap enough this value proposition will ensure that most homes have solar and storage within a few years."
However, several regulatory barriers stand in the way of mass adoption of battery storage, including rules that ban the installation of batteries indoors in households in the ACT.
The Panasonic battery, about the size of a two-drawer filing cabinet, is designed to be installed outdoors or indoors. It has been designed specifically for Australian conditions and for the Australian marketplace, said Katsufumi Miyamoto, a former Japanese rugby international who heads strategy planning at Panasonic's EcoSolutions subsidiary in Tokyo.
Mr Costello expected keen interest from consumers for batteries, and pointed to the growing installation of solar PV panels, despite the winding back of generous state subsidies available in previous years.
"We're pushing on an open door, not on a closed one," Mr Costello said.
Red Energy's involvement in the alliance was first revealed in Street Talk earlier on Tuesday
Cheers Omega
