In our latest webinar, Smart MD Huon Hoogesteger, Lochie Burke from NetNada, and special guest Wayne Smith from Smart Energy Council, unpacked what matters most to large Australian organisations, from mandatory reporting requirements to emerging opportunities in clean energy.
Check out the Q&A session below.
Wayne Smith: DNSPs are the energy networks. AER is the Australian Energy Regulator. We've actually got a number of the Energy Network's as members of the Smart Energy Council; South Australian Power Networks, Synergy, Energy Queensland and others are all key members of the Smart Energy Council. We work very closely with them and others, The Central Energy as well.
But we were also finding significant challenges around the network. Increasingly the energy networks, they're finding problems with their own revenue streams as solar and batteries are kind of eating their lunches. And so, they're looking for new energy revenue streams. We're finding that they're increasingly trying to take control and benefit from individuals, households and businesses investing in solar and battery storage.
We've got to find the balance between that. I think Australians would be pretty upset if they found out that the energy networks are actually trying to take advantage and taking effectively a commission from people's investments in home batteries. And so there needs to be a much greater transparency about this.
But the energy networks are also really important, they’ve got an important role to play in our energy future. We are talking to the networks; we are talking to the energy regulator. But yes, I agree that this is a priority area.
Huon Hoogesteger: On the small scale, it's more difficult. But Amber Electric, which is probably my favourite retailer, is the best bet for homes. And if you've got a battery and solar at home I would definitely be looking to Amber for my retail. They will trade your battery. The trick with batteries is that we need to aggregate them.
Typically, we're not allowed to actually trade a battery unless it's five megawatts dispatchable capacity or above that. Not all of our customers will have space to put in a five-megawatt, ten-megawatt hour battery, which is probably two or three containers of batteries. So, what we do is we orchestrate across multiple sites. We might have a 250-kilowatt hour battery in one location and 500 in another, and we stack all those up into a five-megawatt capacity battery, which is virtually managed across the networks. And that's how we do it.
Wayne Smith: The one thing I would say is, there needs to be much greater transparency in the system. We should all be shining a very bright light on what makes up the energy bills and whether or not it's absolutely justifiable for those network costs to be there at that level. I think we've all got a role to play in that.
Huon Hoogesteger: Network costs have increased by 60% over the last ten years. They have had to do a lot of work to build a network capable of taking a highly volatile, more renewable grid. And I do feel for the networks, the poles and wires and the transmission is extremely important if you want to have a renewable grid, hence the renewable energy zones which are in effect. I wouldn't use a nefarious way of thinking about it, but it is a bit of a Trojan horse in order to build more network and get bigger transmission.
A big part of our problem is that, you know, you can see negative prices in in Queensland and high prices on the spot market in Victoria. The issue is our speed of transport because Australia is a very big country, with a very diverse geographic situation, very spread-out population, the speed of our network and the use of our network is somewhat limited.
I think the amount of investment required for networks has got to go up. That means the cost has got to go up. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can see in the next 3 to 5 years that is actually going to see the costs of decrease. The networks are trying to pay for that increase in investment with less and less kilowatt hours being sold to less and less customers, because more and more people have solar, which means that they're not paying for kilowatt hours coming through those poles and wires.