Powering What's Next - Energy storage, from backup to backbone

I'm going to come back to you on some of the kind of industrial aspect and the kind of reliability, which I hear from industry.

But first, Anna, how are we looking at where energy is? You talked about consumers, people have batteries on their house.

I heard the energy minister once talking about the amount of energy that is floating around the country in electric vehicles.

So when you're talking about the changes of how we look at energy across our communities, can you just talk us through what does that look like right now? Because we've come a long way from just looking at coal and gas.

So I'm going to jump out from the large-scale utility assets Nigel was just talking about to this small-scale revolution almost.

Australians lead the world almost in our investment in rooftop solar.

On a per capita basis, I think we are, if not the one of the leading nations for how many households have invested in their own rooftop solar which has done amazing things for our transformation towards renewables but comes with its own challenges because you know sun shines at the same time approximately every day that's when we get all that generation for people's houses from their own rooftops but then in the evening you've kind of got this massive sudden drop because sun goes down all at their fellow stops and they'll need the same amount of electricity and in fact if not more because it tends to coincide with that time of day when people are getting home and need to use more So adding the battery storage into the household level is, sorry, I've used this word twice in a very short space of time, but a game changer because what it means is at a household level, not only can they create their own electricity during the day and use whatever they can during the day, they can now store it for themselves and use it during that evening peak.

And so we've seen already, like I think there's now half a million have been rolled about through the cheaper home batteries program, is that what we were famously calling the duck curve in the wholesale market pricing because of that kind of very big change in demand from the middle of the day when it was really low when everyone was using their solar and so the price completely fell off and then it really spiked up at the end of the day when all the households suddenly needed to get grid scale power.

It's starting to really flatten out.

In fact, I heard somebody call it a platypus the other day.

And so making that change really helps us with how we think about what's the maximum amount of utility scale infrastructure we're going to need to meet people's needs.

And so being able to have those customer scale asset serving the customers that bought it, but also harnessing it to be able to service other customers.

So contributing back into the grid.

And there's multiple ways to do that.

There's the wholesale market, which is the obvious one, but also probably talk about network services.

And then Nigel's also talked about security services.

So there's all these different things that we can use things for.

If we can keep it really valuable and really simple, because customers at that end, you know, they've bought an asset, they just want to use it to really save money for themselves and no doubt Many also are wanting to contribute to addressing climate change, but they don't necessarily want to sell up to the security services back to market.

But on the other hand, if an intermediary says, here's your total package, I can make it really easy for you if you're happy to turn on and off or for the technology to be set to turn on and off in these conditions, then we can pay them for doing that.

They can get their advantage to saving money and we can also then contribute back into saving money for everybody else.

So our customer resources are an incredible asset that we have at the AMC, we've done a lot of work over the last really four or five years now to be trying to refine the market framework so that we can do what I've just talked about is provide a simple option for customers that helps us save money for everybody.

it's like a resilience layer of everyone's playing a part.

Nigel, what are you hearing from industry? Because, you know, what we hear is all about stability of policy, like reliability of energy.

You know, businesses are very kind of aware of how reliant they are on energy.

So what is industry saying to you and where does Australia sit in this conversation from a regional perspective?