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The cost of a home solar-panel system can come in

June 12, 2018 by Ella Pickett

The cost of a home solar-panel system can come in at US$35 (about AU$40 in Australia) or AU$40 (about AU$50 in the United States, according to PV Magazine) per kilowatt-hour, but the cost for battery storage is far less. And because of South Australia's high cost of electricity, some people are reluctant to invest in batteries at all.

"I don't really feel comfortable buying solar-power, but we have a lot of options," says Michael Tewa, senior vice president and chief executive of Renewable Energy Australia, which helped support the $100 million in government funding. "So I'm really excited to see how we can help, and why we're supporting South Australians."

As for the government, Tewa said he does not know whether to support the government-led National Grid's proposal for a $100 million home solar-power financing program. Instead, Renewable Energy Australia is supporting a new system where households would be able to purchase an electricity-storage system and install it in the country. The government has also announced plans for an AU$1 billion funding project to deliver battery storage in the nation's capital.

"The big picture is to see a new approach that will offer a lot more efficiency and scale, and a new approach that is affordable enough to the cost," says David Kettleman, chief executive of the Australian Association of Home Energy Builders. "That's the challenge that we're finding in the current system of funding."

The National Grid is also working to figure out how to build a new smart grid in the future, a process called Smart Grid, where it will use the existing grid technology to install low, intermittent power in the country's power plants. The National Grid's new smart grid will be able to store electricity and then store it in the grid's systems. The new system will use the existing grid technology to build a new grid for the first time.

The National Grid is also looking at how to move electricity between the grid's energy storage systems and the grid's batteries. "There is still an issue of where the current grid is and where the current batteries are, but we can build a new grid that does exactly that," says Kettleman.