https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
No doubt the profits will come down (as long as the free market can do its thing) but for now it’s a crazy market. There’s a reason graphs of battery installations are a hockey stick right now.
I will call out one thing for European readers. You’re suspiciously absent on lists of battery build outs. You guys don’t have lots or lobbying from legacy power providers wanting to maintain the ridiculously high peak prices by any chance?
As in everywhere in the world except europe has a hockey stick of battery build out growth happening right now. (Not a criticism just an Australian confused at why europe as a whole has fewer battaries than australia).
Edit: according to [1], numbers predict a coming tsunami of battery installations for Germany
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.de/2025/01/13/uebertragungsnetzbetre...
You still need peaker plants to power the country if there are longer Dunkelflauten. I am skeptical that the total cost for m hours additional power need:
n hours battery power + (m - n) hours of peaker plants is going to be cheaper than m hours peaker plant power.
And our wind turbines seems to have crazy maintenance costs…
Don’t give our politicians more ideas, let the market just solve this please. They are already taxing energy to death because of ”fairness”.
The European power grid has multiple interconnections between the various countries, and some of those counties already have their grid scale storage (mostly pumped hydro). So it's much less needed.
So why would the countries heavy on renewables in their mix invest a lot in batteries? For instance the UK can rely on French nuclear and Norwegian hydro as a grid scale alternative source. While sometimes there are continent wide issues (we've had twice a month of low winds + overcast which impacted negatively wind and solar), the grid is sufficiently diverse and dispersed that it works pretty well.
As the recent outage in Iberia showed, it's slightly more complicated than that and batteries could still have a part to play to smooth demand ups and downs. And there are still a bunch of battery projects, even in France that doesn't have that much renewables in its energy mix, being heavy on nuclear.
If I had to pull reasons out of my ass for this, I'd suggest South Australia and Texas both have a great deal of land with shitty agricultural output (as compared to Europe) and a lot more sunlight. I suspect building batteries is obviously very profitable today in Australia and Texas today, and companies will target Europe when the tech is a bit cheaper and the most profitable markets have been saturated.
Probably not yet though, the UK government seems fairly keen for Biofuel in their net zero policy.
Banning Drax from using woodpellets from important nature (ancient forests, rainforests etc) is probably a route that'll be more likely to havesuccess.
No one here is against solar panels on their home and few are against wind farms, there's just also the realisation that for many applications, oil will remain for the time being. Aircraft, boats, tractors, and cars in many regions of the world are simply unsuitable for electric power with the current state of electric storage (batteries are heavy relative to energy stored).
I think the US is moving this way, by removing grants for green energy, continuing grants for oil, placing targetted tariffs on solar panel manufacturing countries, and blocking planning permission for wind.
Oil isn't used for grid energy generation in most parts of the world... We shut down our last diesel plant many years ago. It's way too expensive, relatively speaking. Like, here we're using renewables to power oil extraction lol. For the most part, renewables don't compete with oil since renewables power the grid and oil doesn't. Electric vehicles can reduce oil demand somewhat, but there will still be massive demand for oil for shipping, air travel, construction vehicles and farming vehicles, for the forseeable future.
I wonder how they look in a US landscape that's hostile to renewables. Arbitrage works because solar and wind and very cheap and very indeterminate. The more gas, coal and biofuel (all much more expensive but more flexible) in the grid, the less opportunity for arbitrage.