00:00Alan Benn is an early adopter of all things electric.
00:07He bought his EV a decade ago and installed rooftop solar 20 years ago when the costs
00:14were high, but so were the government rebates.
00:17Someone has to buy these sort of things early on to develop the industry, to start getting
00:24the price down.
00:25Since then, solar power has gone gangbusters.
00:28About one in three Australian households are turning sunshine into energy.
00:32Many of those people did it to save money.
00:34Some because they wanted to stick it up an energy company, and some because they generally
00:40wanted to make a contribution to climate change, or some combination of all three.
00:44The output from rooftop solar is now so significant, the system can struggle to cope.
00:49This was a new problem that maybe we should have seen coming, but because Australia was
00:54so far and is so far ahead of the rest of the world, we're the first ones to see this
00:58problem emerging seriously.
01:01It's particularly challenging in Western Australia, the world's biggest isolated electricity grid,
01:06because unlike the interconnected East Coast, WA has to manage supply issues on its own.
01:13We don't have the ability to borrow from our neighbours, or indeed to give them the benefit
01:16of our excess supply at times when we have it.
01:19WA's main electricity grid powers about 1.2 million homes and businesses.
01:26Household solar is already its single biggest source of generation, supplying up to 76%
01:32of demand at times.
01:33And it really very much is an opportunity.
01:36Storage of electricity is really the silver bullet.
01:39Governments are building large-scale batteries like this one in Kwinana, south of Perth,
01:44which stores enough energy to power 160,000 homes for up to two hours.
01:49But small batteries have a big role to play too, as demonstrated by the outer Perth suburbs
01:55of Harrisdale and Piara Waters.
01:58Here locals were given incentives like subsidised batteries and power credits to take part in
02:03a recently completed trial.
02:06The three-year trial here in Perth's southern suburbs showed that harnessing and coordinating
02:12consumer energy resources like rooftop solar and home batteries could save the state $920
02:19million over the next decade.
02:22In our studies that we do for the national electricity market, effective coordination
02:27again of these consumer energy resources could save literally billions of dollars of investment
02:31in large-scale infrastructure in our system.
02:34Some people are taking matters into their own hands.
02:37The latest addition being these two 5 kilowatt-hour batteries.
02:40Alan Benn recently bought a battery system for his inner-city Perth home at a cost of
02:45$12,500.
02:47The only con is really the cost.
02:49It's a huge cost because there is no subsidy at all, you're paying the full price for that
02:53battery.
02:54Stubbornly high prices mean the uptake of home batteries has been slow, particularly
02:59in WA.
03:00If everyone had batteries, it could potentially eliminate that very high peak in early evening
03:06electricity prices and that would benefit everyone.
03:10For more UN videos visit www.un.org
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