Marc White
Yeah, essentially because the spot market’s going negative in the middle of the day in terms of pricing because there’s so much solar energy hitting the market. And so to soak that up, the market regulator’s trying to change behavior because the batteries aren’t being built quick enough to soak that energy up.
Leon Compton
So our solar power lovers, and there’s bazillions of them in Tasmania, love using an app or just heading around to the little wall unit to see how much solar they’re producing, are concerned that the flip side of that might be their feed-in tariff will be dropped significantly. Is that a risk as part of this deal?
Marc White
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve seen feed-in tariffs around the country go to zero cents a kilowatt hour for large customers and certainly that’s sort of heading that way for the regulated small feed-in tariffs as well.
Leon Compton
Marc, we’ve talked to you and people within Goanna Energy a lot, concerned that things on the mainland might evolve in ways that make the situation change here in Tasmania. Wasn’t part of the argument for Marinus Link and Battery of the Nation that we would be able to buy free power or very cheap power at times like the middle of the day for pumped hydro and storage? Like is this any threat or am I overstating it? Is this any threat to our plans to play our part in the national electricity grid?
Marc White
Yeah, I think the rollout of renewables is so fast that when Marinus is connected, there will certainly still be greater influence in Tassie on those negative prices. So that’s the effect of connecting Tassie to Vic with a bigger pipe. We both get the lower pricing in the middle of the day from solar, but unfortunately we’ll also get the much higher pricing at dinner time. So we’ll be greater exposed.
Leon Compton
Okay, but that is also when we might have the opportunity to sell into markets on the mainland and profit there. Marc White, final question. Could Tasmania sign up to this? It’s being offered apparently from June or July next year. New South Wales, South East Queensland, South Australia, could Tasmania be offering free electricity from say 11 till 2?
Marc White
It’s certainly heading in that direction, but what I would say is the times outside of that are getting far more expensive. So for instance, you know, TasNetworks has introduced an 18 cent a kilowatt hour tariff from 7am till 10pm, sorry, 7am till 10am and then sort of 8 cents between 10am to 4 and then back to the high 18 cents from 4 till 9. So you can see that that network business is still going to recover its full allowable revenue even though the pricing in the middle of the day is going down, but that will push up the other sides.