New Power Rates

[Newcastle George]

I thought of putting in a solar diverter to heat the hot water rather than pay for the off peak but at $1000 it wasn't worth it.

George

[T1 Terry]

We had someone from SA Power at the last EV meeting talking about the new time of day rates and new meters a number of retailers were setting up. Basically, between 10 am and 4 pm the grid charge drops to 4.2v per kW/h and suggested storage hot water could be shifted to this new time of day charge away from the "J" rate that is the SA night time off peak rate. I asked if this low rate period could be used for battery charging that wasn't feed back to grid but rather used to supplement the peak load times and he said that sort of thing was encouraged along with EV recharging and the newer two way EV power sharing appearing on the market now where mum's taxi could be the house load share battery that was not tied into the grid battery scheme .... in other words, they could not pull the power back out when the grid demanded it .... the catch with the present solar/battery/grid arrangement.
When asked he went further to say some companies were collectively controlling their members feed in from the independently financed solar/battery/grid systems and selling back to the grid as an independent energy generator during peak pricing times and sharing that better selling power with the members ... less a cut for themselves of course

He then went on to future power arrangements where supply pricing would be dependent on supply/demand and there could be some periods where customers were actually paid to draw energy from the grid to stabilise the system while they switched inter-connectors on/off to the various states linked in via the high capacity DC connectors, the same idea as the Bass Strait inter connector with Tasmania from Victoria. It was suggested that power generated in SA could be stored at any number of batteries or stored water hydro schemes developed in the future ...... the SA Power future plan is to become a renewable generated power supplier to the rest of Australia, that includes rooftop solar, solar farms and wind farms ......
Also, the SA Power grid was already set up to handle any load the switch to electric vehicles may present .... so the nonsense about the move the EV's would cause a collapse of the electrical infrastructure is just B/S put out by those who stand to loose with the move away from fossil fuels.

T1 Terry