Another of Australia’s major housing developers, the Melbourne-Based group Metricon, will offer rooftop solar and storage as an optional extra in a range of its new-build homes in Queensland, via a new partnership with local installer and Tesla battery reseller CSR Bradford.
CSR Bradford – whose NSW-based company started in insulation more than 80 years ago, and has since expanded into energy efficiency and solar and storage through Bradford Solar – is an accredited Tesla Powerwall reseller, and has been watching the growth of the battery storage market closely over the past few years.
The deal with Metricon, announced this week, takes the company one step closer to its vision of solar and battery storage being included as a standard feature in all newly built houses in Australia – something the company’s managing director, Anthony Tannous has predicted will be the norm in just a few years’ time.
According to the Metricon website, Queensland customers who upgrade to the builder’s “luxury living” offer will get CSR Bradford’s a 5-6kW Solar ChargePack, which includes solar panels, a SolarEdge inverter and Tesla’s 14kWh Powerall 2 lihtiu-ion battery pack.
As Tesla has itself claimed, the Metricon 5kW offer promise to give the average house of four up to 90 per cent electricity self sufficiency on an average day, while the 6kW solar offer is said to give the average Australian family “little or no reliance on the grid.”
In financial terms, households choosing the Luxury Living” upgrade – which costs $1,999 for a single story home and $4,999 for a double story home – is expected to save the Metricon households $2,100 a year on energy costs.
CSR Bradford has similar packages being offered in Victoria, through Arden Homes, and in New South Wales with Mojo Homes.
“I have a vision that every house built in a few years time will have a battery installed, it just makes so much sense,” Tannous told One Step Off The Grid in an interview last month.
“We’ve been working with most of the major builders across Australia and a lot of them are starting to include storage as standard… while others offer it as an upgrade,” he said.
“And that will just gain more momentum.”
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
This post was published on April 5, 2017 11:19 am
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I wonder who gets to control the controller, if a builder is involved as well?
The control algorithm for optimal economics just for a household (if they cannot access the wholesale markets via an aggregator) on a flat rate is "use any excess PV above consumption to charge batteries, then export any surplus, use batteries if consumption is more than PV generation". If a ToU rate then the algorithm is more complicated, but if aggregation is possible then there are two optimal algorithms - one for the householder, one for the aggregator. Which is used, I wonder? And if there is a builder involved as well, what are their incentives?
I think the builder 'incentive' is the gimmick and a commission from the supply company ... generation - via viable roof - will be the issue
The person who will end up paying through the nose will be the home-owner; the elephant in the room is that such a small number of houses are designed to be energy efficient - which includes a significant solar catching roof facing true north - that a hotch-potch of house designs plonked on a small block of land will easily translate into a 5kW system (that most houses use - energy wise - in non-peak sun hours), will most likely generate about half that.
So what is the real ROI on such a solar power system?