Will Australians quit the grid?

Nearly 230,000 people who have installed solar across Victoria, NSW and South Australia will lose their ‘feed-in’ tariffs at the end of 2016. Will these people go off-grid? Or will they go hybrid? The answer lays not only in the technology available, but equally as importantly are the policies of electricity generators and distributors.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt said that it was “inevitable” that “significant” numbers of people would and could leave the grid.

Even with some users taking steps to lower their electricity consumption, the cost of grid electricity connection including service charges and fees for solar meters and point of use tariffs has seen an increase in the overall cost of electricity for the end user. This has made Australians distrust electricity utilities, hence 50% of all solar enquiries are now related to battery storage.

If these people do leave the grid, then obviously the people still connected to the grid will be the ones paying the electricity utilities for network upgrades, increased power prices etc. Surely, these people will not be happy.

For those who are building it might be easier to make a decision to grid or not to grid in the planning stage. This decision is relatively easy because of the enormous cost of grid-connection and the inevitable increased costs of electricity. Wanting to compare the real costs, Stand Alone Power did the comparison below some time back as a guide for Grid-connection vs Off-Grid connection.

But for those people connected to the grid, facing a decreasing network demand and an increasing cost, will they look for alternatives?

Greg Hunt MP says that “They might be fully self-sufficient, or, more probably the case, it (battery storage) will smooth the load from what (consumers) need from the grid and what they put back into the grid, so people will be able to store by day and use by night.”

Hunt would not exactly say how he would encourage battery storage, other than to say he would encourage the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to continue their programs. But this has nothing to do with how electricity generators and distributors will deal with people dropping off the grid, especially when the technology surpasses the old centralized grid model, which has been around for decades…