Grid electricity is super expensive tonight.

Why? Ironically, it’s because it’s mainly powered by gas and coal power stations. Gas and coal supplied electricity is very expensive compared to when supplied by renewables. The second factor is that it’s a cold night, so power demand is high for heating.

Our entity retailer, Amber Electric, just passes on the wholesale price, which updates every 30 minutes. When renewable supply in the grid is high, we typically pay around 10c per kWh, sometimes less. When there is low renewable supply in the grid, we typically pay 60c per kWh. But tonight: over $10 per kWh!

Fortunately, we have a house battery, often referred to as a “solar battery”. This allows us to “fill” up from free solar during the day, or cheap grid (high renewables) at other times. So, we charged up during the day, ready for tonight. We actually had more energy stored than we needed, so the system exported the excess to the grid. This helps the grid, and pays us a whopping $70 for one night. It’s times like this that I wish we had more battery storage, or we could use our Tesla car as V2L (vehicle to load, or direct vehicle to grid).

This is a rare occurrence. We don’t make $70 every night.

If you’re interested in switching to Amber, you can use our referral link to geta discount:
https://www.amber.com.au/referral/refer-a-friend-discount…

By the way, the house battery has nothing to do with the EV. You don’t need a house battery for an EV.

The government is now offering 30% rebates on “solar battery” purchases, making them even more attractive. But it’s a big initial outlay.

Our house still has gas heating, which we’re planning to replace. I realised tonight that it not only burns gas, it also uses about 0.5kW of electricity for the fan to circulate the heated air.