Can you leave the grid? A couple of houses in the middle of Townsville already have. But Steve Blume, who has been banging on about load duration curves for forty years, thinks almost nobody will — because you can't buy 99.99% reliability at home at any sensible price. He calls the grid the Medicare of energy. We talk about why Australians started buying EVs the moment fuel prices jumped, why the Integrated System Plan is a set of scenarios rather than a plan, and who ends up paying for the network when the people who can afford solar, a battery and an EV need it less.
Steve warned utilities back in 2012 that their customers were becoming their competitors. Fourteen years on, he says most of them still haven't come to grips with it. And my favourite story of the conversation: a family on the Sunshine Coast who spent $78,000 on a lead-acid battery to avoid two or three hours of blackouts a year.
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