This report provides analysis of individual participant data and key findings.
Report extract
Householders generally chose to participate in the battery trial at least in part based on their judgement of the likely financial outcomes for them as energy consumers. The project team gave some initial, generic guidance to the participant group on what they might expect if they installed a solar and battery system. System vendors and installers generally then provided more detailed estimates of financial outcomes for individual participants, based on systems proposed for installation. However, an accurate assessment of the benefits of participants’ solar and battery systems is only possible once detailed knowledge of energy use has been obtained.
In this report we use data at sufficient level of detail, collected during the trial period itself, to analyse the financial performance of each participant’s battery system. Furthermore, we break the financial outcome or benefit into each of its relevant constituent components: solar financial benefit, battery (simple) financial benefit, local energy optimisation financial benefit, and network support financial benefit.
While the analysis and conclusions contained in this report are specific to the project trial participants, they certainly have significance and wider meaning beyond the project context itself. The project participants in the Trial had diverse backgrounds, incomes and situations.
While there were some gaps in age groups, the participant households did represent a range of [post early adoption] residential energy consumer types, particularly in terms of the quantity of and timing of energy consumption and makeup of households and dwelling type. Some findings of this analysis, therefore, may be considered to be broadly transferable to other Australian jurisdictions, notwithstanding the fact that both Time Of Use tariff settings and typical peak demand times do vary from region to region. The range of participant financial benefits seen in this project, and especially the relative value of the constituent components, can reasonably be expected to be broadly consistent with what might be observed for households in other jurisdictions, for similar sized solar and battery systems, household energy loads, and situations.