Ian Verender

And because there's being less mineral input used, they're becoming more efficient in the way they use the minerals to actually make the batteries.

So the price of batteries is falling.

And as a result, we've seen an overwhelming response from Australian households to install these batteries.

And that's had a huge impact on the way electricity is not just generated here, but distributed through the system.

And so one of the big problems we've had with solar power, rooftop solar power, is that in the middle of the day, you get this enormous amount of electricity flooding back into the grid, which then would crash the price of electricity, sometimes to below zero.

which would then make the coal-fired generators, which can't just switch off.

They're operating at a loss.

And then at nighttime, there'd be a shortage of power.

And the way that we got around that was to have gas basically coming into the system with gas-fired generators.

The reason gas is so critical is because you can press a button and it goes on.

You can press a button and it goes off.

It is immediate.

Unlike coal...

which can't be turned on or off.

It takes months to do both of those processes.

So gas filled that breach.

If you get a sudden drop off in power at nighttime, you press the gas generator, on it goes, problem solved.

What's been happening though now in the past 12 months is that the sudden increase in the amount of battery space we've got, both grid scale and household batteries, means that households are storing the energy rather than sending it back into the system during the day.

Yeah.

you can now have what's known as a virtual power plant in your home.