Can you recommend a good way to find a better electrical supplier offering decent prices? What's your go to method/service? I've just realised that I haven't shopped around for quite some time.
Seems to disprove the title of the article to me though.
Battery has a .1% grid contribution (point 1 percent, not one percent).
Coal is a massive 62% of power generation in Australia!
Seems improbable to me that the major driver of reducing 60+% electricity contribution is something producing .1%.
Seems more like Australia is "quitting coal in records" purely because it's using so much of it and battery contribution is incidental.
The big energy producer is the huge number of rooftop solar installations which everyday Australians have been putting on the roofs of their houses and wind. There are periods in summer when South Australia has surpassed 100% solar generation [1], the excess being exported to the East. These periods will continue to become more frequent, until they merge and South Australia is 100% renewable. They are the leaders, but the rest of the country is following.
By happy coincidence the most southern state and least sunny, Tasmania, is already 100% renewable due to abundant hydro, but they also have lots of wind being near the Southern Ocean.
[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australias-remarkable-100-...
For example: a battery that large could easily absorb a voltage spike that would cause a grid fault or brownout. Those tend to cascade and not having them immediately has a large effect on grid stability.
Anecdotal: SA was pushing towards clean energy notably before the battery came in, but in turn, had a very unstable grid, and the things like energy trading et al. were tied up in international ownership iirc (needing authorization to do a large energy trade required someone from France giving approval, timezones didn't match up, and the grid fully shut down for a significant period of time)
After the battery was put in and operational, (noting that other things may also have been happening that I'm not aware of), the grid ended up being a lot more stable. Almost a night-and-day feeling to the change.
Overall the local sentiment about it is "electricity is too expensive", https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-15/australian-energy-reg... A very hot topic.