When I was a youngster, the Snowy Hydro Scheme still held quite a strong place in Australia’s collective memory. The largest engineering project undertaken in Australia, the Scheme was a massive government-led initiative that drove employment and economic development.
Even though this project is lesser known nowadays, it’s because of this hold on the imagination that we like to use Snowy Hydro as a touchstone for grasping the impact that rooftop solar is having on the Australian energy system. In aggregate, rooftop solar has gone beyond the 5 gigawatt mark, which by our calculations means the generation coming off people’s roofs is now greater than that generated by all of the Snowy Hydro Scheme.
So we read with interest the news that Prime Minister Turnbull has announced “Snow Hydro 2.0.” Turnbull’s plan includes AUD$2b to create a pumped hydro-facility. Essentially pumped hydro is a “big battery”—it is a form of energy storage. Turnbull is quoted as saying:
“We are making energy storage infrastructure a critical priority to ensure better integration of wind and solar into the energy market and more efficient use of conventional power.”
While this is a refreshing advance on the “debate” around the “energy crisis,” something stuck out to us.
What if we extend the comparison of the original Snowy Hydro and rooftop solar today? What if that $2b was applied to home-scale storage instead, as we argued in our previous post on South Australia’s new energy plan?
In the Conversation article linked above, Tony Wood, energy program director at the Grattan Institute, noted that:
“the plan would involve technical and economic issues, including whether it could make money, and to what extent it could contribute to solving the short-term power crisis.”
Would there be as many “technical and economic issues” with a decentralised approach? Maybe. But even so, wouldn’t taking a decentralised approach contribute to reducing the “power crisis” in a much shorter time frame, with home-scale batteries being rolled out far quicker than a large scale public infrastructure project?
In broad terms, we’ve seen over time that taxpayer enabled investment in energy infrastructure is often privatised in due course, and costs don’t go down over time. However, decentralised storage infrastructure has the potential to reduce costs, not only for householders with batteries, but for the broader community if approaches like local energy trading are engaged.
It is, of course, more a thought experiment—a decentralised approach is unlikely to be adopted by the present Government given the politics involved and institutional tendencies towards “big projects and silver bullets.” But certainly food for thought as we continue on the journey to distributed resources and the “internet of energy.”
Posted by: Grant Young, CXO of Nexergy.
