Many of the home batteries Australians are buying under the federal scheme won't pay for themselves. Jon Sibley says so plainly — and he's not against them. He designed rebate programs for a living, and bought one himself in 2017.
If the numbers don't explain why 450,000 households have done this, something else does. We buy what our neighbours have, what governments put money behind, what becomes a thing you have. Which raises a real question: are subsidies buying hardware, or buying legitimacy?
Then the part that does stack up. Time-of-use tariffs are "okay, but wrong most of the time." Dynamic pricing is better — but only with automation, because nobody thinks about their dishwasher at 4pm. And under a dynamic tariff, a car battery stops being an income stream and becomes a physical hedge against price spikes.
Jon Sibley is a consultant working on consumer energy resources integration.
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