Exclusive Analysis of Australia: Household Storage Profits Slide, Commercial and Industrial Storage Accelerates Start-up
On July 3, Australia's Federal Treasurer tabled the Australian Future Manufacturing Bill in Parliament, which plans to provide $3.2 billion over 10 years for renewable energy. A record 57,000 home storage systems were installed in Australian homes last year, totaling 656GWh of capacity, a 21% increase year-on-year, and this was driven by the addition of 2.9GW of rooftop PV system capacity throughout last year. With Australia's strict access certification, almost all of the existing household storage market has been carved up by some of the larger players that entered early. The trend in the first half of this year was a decline in wholesale solar panel prices and a slowdown in rooftop PV installation rates, resulting in a squeeze on household storage profits. Australia's inland areas of the grid extension Shen insufficient, more demand for commercial and industrial energy storage, utility projects to promote industrial and commercial energy storage, commercial and industrial energy storage quickly developed.
Relevant professional organizations statistics, as of the end of last year, the world's top five household storage market were Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States and Australia.
Australia benefits from tariff-free imports of Chinese batteries. Compared with the average cost of residential solar systems in the United States of $3.25 per watt, Australia is only 62 cents per watt, the price of household storage products is lower. Moreover, one-third of Australian households are already using rooftop solar, and distributed PV is developing faster, bringing more opportunities for household storage, and more household storage will be integrated into the local power grid next. Influenced by population distribution, Australia's household storage installed capacity is concentrated in the eastern region, Queensland and New Wales are the top two states for installed capacity, the market is summarized as a large number of market players and more intense competition. The wholesale price of its panels has also declined from A$0.6 in mid-2022 to A$0.3 now, with wholesaler margins squeezed as a direct result. The overall profitability of the Australian household storage market has declined for companies due to falling wholesale panel prices and a slowdown in rooftop PV installations.
In summary, the commercial and industrial energy storage market in Australia is being driven by the need for renewable energy integration, government investment in grid scale, and utility scale expansion. As a direct consequence of the surge in rooftop solar installations, power generation has repeatedly exceeded the grid's capacity to consume it. Wholesale daytime electricity prices have been falling in Australia, especially in Western Australia where peak demand exceeds 4.2GW.
WA, being a sparsely populated and remote region with an isolated grid that is unable to export or import power, is now considering the use of commercial and industrial energy storage batteries and the construction of commercial and industrial energy storage as an alternative or supplement to transmission infrastructure. Relevant organizations expect that by 2050, Australia's wind and solar power grid size will grow six-fold, requiring 49GW of distributed energy storage.
In terms of the market, Sunny Power has benefited more from commercial and industrial energy storage projects in Australia. Last year, it signed the largest independent energy storage order of 138MW/330MWh in South Australia through the Australian GPS grid connection license, and also signed a strategic agreement with Hive, an independent energy storage project in Australia, for which it will provide a 3GWh large-scale liquid-cooled storage system in the next three years. Australia is one of the important markets for Tesla. Relevant data show that the U.S. sales of Tesla Megapack accounted for 63%, and Australia accounted for 23%.