Can you fill up batteries at that time of day?
Yes, but:
It is not unlimited. A daily cap of 24kWh applies; the Australian Energy Regulator says that is equivalent to a day’s usage for a five-person household. Any use above that amount will be charged.
Would be a perfect time to charge your car, then put the rest of your 24kWh into a battery.
So you could buy a 24 kWh battery (still somewhat expensive) and essentially never pay for electricity again?
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Australian utilities have fixed daily charges for connectivity. You would still need to pay that.
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I may have missed it in the article, but I’m willing to wager this “free” tier is somewhat seasonal or weather dependent.
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Depending on how much you drive, run your AC, and what appliances are electric, this may not be enough. My all electric home uses closer to 40 kWh/d
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… If you’re at home with your car. Otherwise easy 24kW of Bitcoin mining.
For one hour.
Up to 3 hours, would need an ~8kW mining rig to fully utilize, which is gonna be beefy.
24 kW for one hour is 24 kilowatt-hours, which is the limit. “beeng” above specified “24kW of Bitcoin mining”.
Sorry, missed they dropped the h. My guess is typo, even a 8kW mining rig would look pretty comical in a home, 24 kW is just silly (and would require multiple dedicated circuits in a home?). And if you can only run it for even 3h/day, it’ll probably take aeons to pay for itself.
Maybe worth spinning up your otherwise idle 1kW-ish computer or underutilized home server to do some free mining, but I wouldn’t invest a ton of money in something that’ll be dormant for 21h/day.
Doesn’t seem worth it for me.
Here’s Red’s offer.
And here’s the best offer via energymadeeasy.gov.au
My home made 6kW battery would struggle to compensate I think, but I need to do some more sums to be sure.
Another thing to watch is that on Red’s plan above, peak exists every day, whereas on my current plan, the entire weekend is off peak. That’s a big non-obvious difference.
Also, I already have 5kW of solar panels, so on most days my three hours would already be free.
