The Big Switch: Australia’s Electric Future

by Saul Griffith

Australian rooftop solar is the envy of the world. A small band of advocates on the south coast developed installation techniques in the early days that they translated into certification and training programs, which greased the skids for low-cost installation. The underlying modules cost 0.25 cents per watt, and wind up being roughly $1 per watt installed, which is a kind of magical number where the electricity costs around 5–7 cents per kWh – cheaper than the cost of transmission and distribution on a regular network.12 For the regular grid, if you include transmission costs, distribution and metering, the cost averages 12–13 cents per kWh, not including the cost of generating the electricity. This is momentous, because it means rooftop-generated electricity will now always be your cheapest option, even if nuclear fusion or some fantasy technology were free! And if batteries get to ten cents per kWh per cycle of storage, which is predicted as soon as 2024, then the economics will forever be in favour of installing as much local rooftop solar and as much battery storage as you can fit. Want to know why traditional energy suppliers are trying to slow this trend down? Because it kills the business model that was so profitable for so long. Yet some of the studies are still underestimating rooftop potential; here are three reasons why it’s even better than we think: (1) solar will be so cheap that we’ll start using north-facing vertical surfaces as well as our rooftops; (2) s...