Australia, where household energy bills are to fall 10% from 1 July 2026, is executing an industrial slaughter of legacy gas peakers
>In 1st quarter of 2026, battery systems tripled their daytime-to-evening energy shifting compared to last year. Batteries surged 1,115 MW of clean power into the evening peak, hitting a record discharge of 3,556 MW
>Batteries became the grid's primary price-setting mechanism, dictating terms in 32% of all trading intervals
>Gas-powered generation collapsed to its lowest quarterly average since 1999 (dropping to an average of just 712 MW). It's in terminal structural decline
>Average wholesale electricity spot prices plummeted by 12% y-on-y to AU$73/MWh
>In Victoria, wholesale prices crashed by 28% to an average of just AU$43/MWh
>Four million households and businesses are now generating free power, acting as the biggest power plant in the country
>One in every 25 homes has a battery today, with 415,000 active residential storage systems
>Because of this unstoppable wave of clean energy and storage, residents in Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia will receive 100% free  electricity from 11:00am to 2:00pm starting next month
>Australia’s battery capacity additions surged by nearly 8 GW in a single year, a nine-fold increase. Utility-scale systems skyrocketed to 4.2 GW, while behind-the-meter household storage hit 3.4 GW
>Battery storage now commands a massive 18% of all installed dispatchable capacity in Australia (China is at 7%, the US at 5%, and Europe at 4%
Storing free solar during the day and dumping it into the evening peak has permanently flattened the daily price curve, bringing down forward electricity contract prices and passing the savings directly to consumers
Every solar + battery is a national security shield

freediver wrote on Jun 3^rd, 2026 at 8:30pm:


We could have acquired a few nuclear reactors with the money we spent on Snowy Hydro 2.0 which is way behing schedule.
Snowy 2.0 doesn't produce power factor in efficiency losses it consumes power.

Friends in the US get really cheap off peak power thanks to nuclear you can't throttle it back so elctric companies drop the price to encourage people to use it.
Cheap off peak would be great here for heating in winter and AC in summer along with recharging EVs while you sleep.

Asked ChatGp to compare wind solar and nuclear from plants that are up and running over 60 years into $AUD nuclear is a clear winner.

Germany is paying households to charge their EVs at night — and using 4 million car batteries as a single giant grid storage asset.

The concept is called Vehicle-to-Grid, and Germany is deploying it at a scale that makes every previous trial look like a proof of concept.
Under Germany's amended Energy Industry Act, EV owners can register their vehicle's battery as a grid asset — allowing the grid operator to draw power from the car during peak demand periods and charge it during surplus periods, automatically, without driver involvement.
In exchange, the owner receives payments that offset a significant portion of their electricity costs.

Volkswagen's bidirectional charging system — deployed across its ID. series vehicles from 2023 — supports up to 11 kilowatts of Vehicle-to-Grid discharge.
A single ID.4 with a 77-kilowatt-hour battery can discharge enough electricity to power an average German home for three days.
Four million such vehicles — the number of EVs on German roads by 2025 — represent a theoretical grid storage asset of 308,000 megawatt-hours.
That is more storage than all of Germany's dedicated grid-scale battery installations combined, distributed across the country, plugged in every night when electricity demand is lowest and renewables are most abundant.
The economics compound the physics.
German EV owners who participate in Vehicle-to-Grid schemes buy electricity at off-peak rates — as low as €0.08 per kilowatt-hour at night — and sell it back during peak periods at rates that can reach €0.35 per kilowatt-hour.
The car earns money while the owner sleeps.
The grid gets storage it did not have to build.
The renewable energy that would otherwise be curtailed finds a use.
Every party in the transaction wins simultaneously. Germany is not building a battery storage network.
It is discovering that it already has one, parked in 4 million driveways.

Germany's grid-scale battery storage fleet produced a market behaviour in 2024 that economic modellers had not anticipated — batteries began actively destabilising the business case for gas peaker plants so effectively that two German gas peaker operators announced decommissioning of 800 MW of capacity that still had 15 years of design life remaining, writing off assets worth €340 million rather than continuing to lose money competing against storage.

The mechanism is the wholesale electricity market's intraday price structure.
Gas peakers earn revenue by starting quickly when electricity prices spike during demand peaks — typically morning and evening on weekdays.
The start cost of a gas turbine — fuel, maintenance wear, and start permit — means peakers require prices above €150/MWh to justify operation.
German grid-scale batteries, which have near-zero variable costs and can discharge within 200 milliseconds, systematically bid into every price spike below €150/MWh, capturing the revenue window before gas turbines can profitably respond.

AI trading algorithms running the battery storage fleet have become so sophisticated at predicting German intraday price spikes that they consistently pre-position discharge before the spike materialises — further reducing the duration and magnitude of price events that gas peakers depend on.
The AI is not just competing with gas peakers in the market. It is eliminating the market conditions that make gas peakers viable.
The two decommissioned plants — one in Bavaria, one in North Rhine-Westphalia — represent the first commercial acknowledgement that battery storage has made gas peak generation structurally uneconomic in the German market, not just occasionally competitive.

The AI did not beat gas peakers in a fair fight. It changed the game rules entirely.