Western Australia might not have had the smoothest start to the home battery rush currently sweeping the nation, but according to one of the companies in the thick of the action, business is now booming under the state’s unique rebate offering.
Plico Energy, the only independent virtual power plant (VPP) provider approved under WA Labor’s Residential Battery Scheme says sign-ups have “exploded” under the state’s “stacked” approach to the federal battery rebate.
In WA, solar households can apply for discounted home energy storage through the federal government’s Cheaper Home Batteries, or they can opt for a combined offering taking in the state rebate, too.
In most cases, choosing the “stacked” state and federal rebate means a bigger overall discount on the cost of investing in a battery, and gives medium- and low-income households access to a $10,000 interest free loan.
Opting in to the state rebate also makes it mandatory to sign up to a virtual power plant, which is currently limited to two state-owned retailer offerings, with one alternative from Plico Energy (via Synergy).
For Plico Energy – a VPP pioneer in WA – this has been a mixed blessing, particularly with the shifting of the goal-posts in the lead up to July as the state government worked out how the federal rebate would fit with its own scheme.
Plico has been in the virtual power plant game for some years now, having started up in 2017 as the Dunsborough Community Energy Project (DCEP) founded by Starling Energy Group and funded by Swiss sustainable investor SUSI Partners.
After expanding and rebranding, Plico has grown to a network of 3100 home solar and battery systems, and counting, with the combined capacity equivalent to a 33 megawatt-hour battery.
But things have become a good deal busier and more complicated for Plico since the start of the year, when the WA Cook Labor government made the pre-election promise of a state battery rebate of $5,000 for customers on the state’s main grid, the SWIS, and $7,500 for those on the regional grid.
“Basically, since the election promise was announced in February, we went from selling batteries to selling nothing, selling the price,” Plico CTO George Martin tells the Solar Insiders Podcast this week.
The Cook government was re-elected and the rebate locked in in March, for roll-out in July. But the game changed again in May, when federal Labor made good on its own election promise of a national rebate and an additional discount had to be factored in.
And then, in June, the state part of the promised stacked state and federal rebate was reshaped and revised down.
“So we’ve had to go back to that same customer [for a third time],” says Martin, “and this time it wasn’t as good of a conversation.”
“A lot of the contracts [for batteries] that are now kind of getting installed have gone through three different iterations, three different admin, three different sets of overheads,” Martin says.
“Hopefully we’re kind of getting through that and then … kind of settling into a new [business-as-usual] and celebrating what are some seriously awesome policies at state and federal level.”
Happily, the new business-as-usual is pretty good. “It’s exploded,” says Martin. “We’re getting about five- or six-fold the number of contracts we were before these announcements, which is fantastic.”
Have home battery rebates changed the game?
“I sure hope so,” Martin says. “I mean, even at my son’s soccer training yesterday, folks are coming up to me and, for the very first time, asking about batteries.
“Before the rebates, they’d be asking me, are batteries worth it? And I’d have to go through the whole script … Now they’re like, ‘Where can I get one?’ So, yeah, it’s great. It’s fantastic.”
But on the VPP front, Martin stresses that there is still a lot of work to do – not on the technology side, so much, as on the consumer side.
“The technology is there. …While there’s all this work happening about interoperability and standardisation, which is necessary, we’re shifting the focus, at least internally, on language.
“We really need to get the trust piece as as good as we possibly can,” he says, noting that Plico has experienced the “full spectrum” of feedback on its VPP products.
“That’s been eye opening for us, and I do share that quite widely, because it’s in everyone’s interest – the whole industry, not just us – that people understand and have a level of trust in VPPs … it’s on all of us to make sure that happens.”
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
