Calls to turn more solar and battery-powered homes into virtual power plants | ABC NEWS

Australia's consumer watchdog has found most people getting a battery under the Commonwealth's $7.2 billion subsidy scheme are spurning virutal power plants, or VPPs. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) noted fewer than a quarter of customers installing batteries were signing up to such schemes. This was even though customers on a VPP were, on average, better off than those who were going it alone, the ACCC found. Yolande Strengers from the Monash Energy Institute said the question of whether Australia can properly coordinate household solar and batteries was not a trivial one. More than 4 million homes have solar panels, while almost half a million now have a battery as well. "If we can be treating that as a coordinated resource … discharging that power when the system really needs it, and if we can also be charging those batteries when we've got abundant solar in the system, we can improve the efficiency of the overall system," she said. Professor Strengers said coordination could help avoid the need for billions of dollars in upgrades to the grid, as well as benefiting customers who could not get solar panels and batteries themselves. But widespread acceptance of VPPs is no sure thing, she argued, given the reasons households may have turned to batteries to begin with. Simon Hackett runs a company called Energy Autopilot, which he says will aim to cut out the middleman and give consumers direct access to the electricity market when it launches later this year. He argued VPPs are based on the outdated idea that batteries must be controlled by one or a few big players to help the grid. Mr Hackett said the size and sophistication of batteries was growing as their costs fell. This meant customers had every incentive to sell their excess power back to the grid at times of high demand and high prices. He said households now could tap the wholesale market directly and the technology to handle their trading. "That combination turns you into a genuine power plant, that can buy and sell power just like the big boys used to," he said. The rise of so-called dynamic retailers, which give households direct access to spot prices, is appealing to some, but experts have warned they are not without their risks. Price volatility in the spot market means extraordinary highs, but some customers could be caught out as prices swing low. #ABCBusiness Subscribe: http://ab.co/1svxLVE Read more here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-0... Note: In most cases, our captions are auto-generated. #ABCNEWS #ABCNEWSAustralia