1. You are using the current point-in-time cost for batteries as compared to a subsidy spent over years while battery costs were dropping.
2. You do not include transmission upgrades and costs to distribute energy from centralized batteries.
3. You ignore the benefits and efficiencies of having generation and batteries distributed and close to the source of demand. It also increases resilience of the grid.
4. You assume the political will was there for government and taxpayers to bear the full cost burden of development of the batteries.
Where are you getting that? The 2026 AEMO plan says:
"Electricity consumption is expected to almost double over the coming decades, driven by population and economic growth, electrification across homes, businesses and industry and the emergence of new large loads such as data centres."
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/isp...
lots of people confuse a $75-$120 / kWh cell price for grid scale battery installed price, which these days is about $300 / kWh.
1 gigawatt hour of installed BESS therefore at current prices is roughly $300 million.
Snowy 2 is 350 gigawatt hours, which would cost $105 billion in equivalent batteries which is about $150 billion in Australian dollars, or ~7x cheaper per gwh.
Note that figures like $66m/GWh are projected costs based on projects starting today, not coming online today. They may not include 'balance of plant'. For better comparison you would have to look at the financials of recently commissioned storage.
It's pure middle-class welfare.
Then the local power company realized that as well and started shifting to solar with the net result that it became cheaper to buy the power company supplied electricity than from your own solar.
This does
“ A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted Photovoltaics proved so successful in Hawaii that the local utility, HECO, has instituted policies to block further expansion”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-solar-boom-so-s...
As of today Hawai’i rates are at $0.40+ per kWh
I don't live in Hawaii anymore, but when I last did and HELCO was still allowing homeowners to participate their home solar with a grid tie they had the following limitations: no matter what your balance of power production to consumption differential was, there was no discount for a base 'connection fee' - essentially the lease of the meter.
They would sell each household kWh at full price, and 'purchases' daytime production at a wholesale rate derived from a mainland commercial grid interconnect rate, the difference was about one order of magnitude, and their meter had the ability to cap output from the panels, such that no matter what the purchase price of excess power would never exceed the consumed power price, and every month there was at least $80ish in connection fee.
This kept most of my neighbors from either, a) considering solar for the household, or b) deciding to stay disconnected from the grid when the house finished installation.
My friends with new houses being built mauka (up-country) also faced a Many-KiloUSD per pole cost to run lines along the road to new housing areas, and if even you could get everyone on a road to pitch in for a new run it often was more economical for everyone to just DIY their own selection of solar, wind, generator, batteries and it still was less expensive than just running the lines, even before accounting for kWh costs.
Even in towns down closer to the coast, it still made more economic sense to use wind+solar and a batteries with a backup generator than to pay for HELCO's power... which also came in with such erratic voltage and irregular wave profiles that it routinely toasted anything sensitive, from refrigerators, televisions, washing machines, you name it... which careful reading of the manufacturer warranties shows that for most main brands they specifically exclude Hawaii from any guarantee of service or replacement.
Now, HECO services a different island than where I lived, and the situation is widely variable in each of the islands, with completely different rules and operating practices. So that's not to say my observations have any validity outside of Big Island, and some limited observation from friends' ohana in Maui.
When we lived in town, it was necessary to put UPS inline for everything more complicated than a toaster oven, and when we moved way up mauka to our little goat farm, the answer was solar and at first golf cart batteries, then a whole stack of recycled/reconditioned submarine iron core 1.2v cells and some very heavy duty cycle inverters; combined with extremely conservative electricity consumption: about 10~15 kWh per week.
One of the benefits of using all LED red lighting at night, and living at elevation to never need A/C, plus methane digester powered by goat waste for refrigeration and mostly using a rocket stove for cooking with guava wood. and no TV, no tower PC, hand crank wringer for laundry like most mainland peoples great-grandparents and line dry on the patio where the rain cant soak them and the wind might get them dry before too long. Its not an easy or soft way to live, but in many ways my wife and I wish we sere still there.
I'm sure this is the way you remember it, and maybe even the way it was explained in that article but if you bought a solar panel the sunlight to power it is free, so your electricity from the panel is free. You're not "buying" that power and so the commercial supply can't be "cheaper".
Now if I've paid $5000 for a product which makes me electricity for free and then later you offer me the same amount of electricity for just $4000 you could say yours is cheaper, but, er, I already bought that $5000 product, I'm already out $5000 and my electricity is free, yours is not actually cheaper now. What we're seeing here is just "Did you know solar panels have become cheaper over time?"
I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.
> Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. A couple of electricians doing 20kWh (average install size) once per day, with an individual inverter, gateways, etc. is not at scale, by any means of the word.
There's also something to be said for distributed production and storage. We don't all live in ultra-compact cities. I agree apartment buildings don't need to be playing this game. But Australia (and the US) are extremely dispersed relative to Europe, for example. There should, in theory, be resilience in distributed production and storage that grid managers could call upon to help manage point failures.
And when they break, many people lose power.
Ukraine's seen some of the benefits of hyper-local generation over centralized production.
There are probably more than a thousand electricians in Australia.
And the battery thing even looks kind of neat.
https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-sourc...
There's no use pretending. Utility scale has a single political point of failure. Batteries in home do not.
Domestic electricity was too expensive (and I’m assuming producers would rather pass the costs onto consumers rather than spend their own money and build solar/battery plants themselves), so individuals with capital did the cost-benefit analysis and determined that installing solar is cheaper in the long term.
This drove the price of electricity down during the day, causing the cost-benefit of home-scale batteries to become positive over a reasonable timescale. Thus, people with capital invested money for a positive ROI over a medium term!
The government subsidies level the playing field so it’s not only the upper-class that can benefit from this phenomenon - they are providing equity, not equality. And, cutting out all the middle management waste of the large utility companies, meaning Australians get more electricity for their buck.
Modern capitalism is what failed here. The Australian power providers should’ve gone down this route, but (I’m assuming) shareholders would be upset about ROI on the scale of 5-20 years. Homeowners are more reasonable.
"An industry is a natural monopoly if a single firm can supply the entire market at a lower long-run average cost than if multiple firms were to operate within it."
Investing in more grid power would require additional grid capacity which would raise the price for all grid users, and with cheap renewables that would be an increasing amount on power bills.
Everyone I know has had that happen at one time or another, and it’s extremely common to want home battery just for the degree of ‘power sovereignity’ it grants you.
You can read up on the subsidy itself too - they basically set a cost per kwhr target based on the few bespoke batteries on the market, before it was flooded with cheaper Chinese options. Because it was based on capacity rather than a percentage discount, this caused the effective discount to be much higher than intended at the outset.
We don't know the final numbers yet - but government has reforecast for 7 billion for the program's duration, which includes a much smaller subsidy continuing until 2030. I expect it will be close to about 5B spent so far.
That's simple! As per Felon Musk - to sell overhead to electricity providers. Allegedly they will gladly buy energy from you! So with big enough roof, you can just sit home relax and watch TV, while your solar panels make your living.
Because government is failing to address these issues?
Back in Trumpistan we had some storms roll through my area the other day. Power has been out for some (not me, thankfully) for a couple of days in a major metro. It was a bad storm and I do not fault the crews who are doing hard work out there repairing everything and it takes time.
But what the hell are you supposed to do when the power goes out and it takes a few days to get turned back on? Well, spend $10,000 - $20,000 and install your own backup power. Is it inefficient? Sure! Does that matter? Absolutely not.
Plus in some sense the utilities are regulated by the government but they are private companies. If they're getting out-competed in the market by battery backup systems or other alternatives because of poor performance and high cost, fuck em' they can go out of business. We'll (free market democracies) figure it out.
Solar installer. Or DIY if you're handy.
> Who will pay for it?
Homeowner or insurance.
> How many days will it take?
Depends on the availability of installers. Or your skills.
I don't know why this is some gotcha. How many times have you had a storm rip your roof off and take down the entire neighborhood's grid? And if that happened would you still live in your house or find temporary accomodation?
How is that different than any other weather related house damage? You'd call your insurance company and a licensed contractor.
Assuming the house is habitable, you'd still have grid power, or if not you'd move temporarily while repairs took place.
I'm not arguing against the electric grid. In fact, I'm an advocate. The grid has different failure and restoration modes than local generation and storage.
Unless you actually have no grid connection option at all (or it's prohibitively expensive) it makes a great deal of sense to pair a solar+battery system with the grid.
Done smartly, these systems can actually support each other.
Sounds like a good backup option for resilience!