If you have solar on your roof, you are a potential candidate for home battery storage. The challenge is, battery storage is still expensive and in most circumstances, the up-front costs are so high that you’re unlikely to recover the cost of the investment before the warranty period is up (10yrs+).
An alternative to every home getting its own battery, is to build a series of community batteries. What this does is store power at a local level, so when power is needed, households draw power from the community batteries, rather than draw from the power station. Often power comes from hundreds of kilometres away, and there’s a significant amount of transmission losses.
Transmission losses mean the energy generation plants need to create more energy at the source to deliver the required power at the destination (your home). Also important is the capacity to deliver energy at peak times. Having homes drawn from a community battery, rather than the wider grid, reduces the energy generation required to meet demand, also reducing power bills to the consumer.
Victoria has a State election coming up at the end of November and one of the policies announced by the Andrews Government has announced that they will install 28 community batteries across Victoria – 15 in metropolitan Melbourne and 13 in regional Victoria.
The Labor Government plans to invest $42 million to install 100 neighbourhood batteries across Victoria. It is worth noting that these are part of Federal Labor’s commitment to installing 400 community batteries as we covered in June.
Victoria is the battery capital of Australia with a world-leading storage target. Now we’re building 100 neighbourhood batteries across the state to make sure all families can share the savings from our solar boom.
Victorians know the Liberals should never have sold off our energy supply. Labor will give it back to local communities – with a power station on your roof and a secure energy supply at the end of your street.
Only Labor is doing what matters – driving down power bills and creating thousands of Victorian jobs in government-owned renewable energy.
Premier Daniel Andrews
The proposed locations for the Initial Neighbourhood Batteries are as follows:
• Ballarat
• Bass Coast
• Baw Baw
• Campaspe
• Cardinia
• Casey
• Darebin
• East Gippsland
• Greater Bendigo
• Greater Dandenong
• Greater Shepparton
• Hume
• Knox
• Macedon Ranges
• Maribyrnong
• Merri-Bek
• Mildura
• Moira
• Monash
• Moonee Valley
• Mornington Peninsula
• Port Phillip Bay
• Wangaratta
• Wellington
• Whittlesea
• Wodonga
• Wyndham
• Yarra Ranges
More information here.
