What blackout? Home batteries power through Queensland coal plant calamity

One Step Off The Grid

The massive network outages across Queensland on Tuesday afternoon triggered by an explosion and fire at the Callide coal plant have already raised the question of whether more grid-scale big battery storage on the National Electricity Market could have changed the outcome.

But for many households in the state, the benefits of small-scale battery storage paired with rooftop solar were made crystal clear during the crisis.

Social media platforms have lit up with the experiences of Queenslanders who powered through the coal plant calamity using their solar charged home batteries, some of them reporting that they didn’t even notice what was going on until they heard from anxious neighbours.

“There will no doubt be much analysis to come of today’s power system events in Queensland and the implications for the future,” wrote Andrew Wilson on LinkedIn, the director of energy and renewables at KPMG and the former head of energy and sustainability at the University of Queensland.

“At the local level though, it provided the first real test for the backup functionality of my home solar + battery system (Tesla Powerwall 2), which performed flawlessly!”

Jeremy Mansfield, the national sustainability operations manager and regional sustainability manager QLD/NT at Lend Lease, responded to Wilson’s comment with his own success story and Powerwall “back-up history” screenshot:

“Household didn’t know there was an outage until the neighbours were [complaining] of being out…. I had it on self-powered mode anyway, so house wasn’t using the grid. At other times, looking fwd to energy trading on peak pricing, to help quickly pay off battery .”

For more on this story, please read the original story at our sister-site, One Step Off The Grid and also you can listen to the podcast interview here.