The second biggest solar company in the United States SunPower Corporation is to use Australia as a testing ground for a major development in solar power, using battery storage.
SunPower has announced Australia will be used for the location of a solar pilot storage testing program that will use battery and solar PV which could provide a next generation model for power supply.
The southern state of Victoria has been chosen by SunPower as one of two worldwide locations to test a pilot project looking to store solar power produced in a domestic situation.
Currently residential solar PV is sold into the grid at a rate as low as eight cents kw/hour and sold back to the domestic home at a rate of up to around 30 cents kw/hour, for power usage after dark as required.
SunPower’s model aims to store solar power produced residentially for later use within the home, giving homeowners the ability to manipulate power usage to effectively control electricity costs.
“Consumers will go from being essentially passive to having total control of your energy bill within five to ten years,” Tom Werner, SunPower chief executive said.
Last month, SunPower entered into an agreement with global search engine giant Google to invest $269 million for the lease of solar PV systems to residents in the US at a lower rate than their current power bills.
Although SunPower has not released the leasing program in Australia, the company says the format could work here also.
“We find all over the world people pay their energy bills. It’s pretty intuitive that it should work well here,” Mr Werner said.
SunPower currently has an agreement in Australia with Community First Credit Union, which provides solar PV loans at 7.1 per cent.
Australia has the world’s greatest penetration of solar photovoltaic panels (PV).
By the end of 2013, more than 3000 megawatts of small-scale solar was installed across 1.1 million households, with the average system now 3.9 kilowatts in size.
Mr Werner said; “Think of transitions like wired phones to cell phones to smart phones, it’s going to take a while, but in the next 10 years the way we get electricity will be considerably different.
“To say that the landscape will look a lot different in the next five to ten years is virtually certain, I think the disruptive nature of cost effective renewable has already happened, and it’s very hard to put that genie back in the bottle, so to speak”.
