What feijoas can teach us about solar export prices
Anyone that loves feijoas knows the pattern.
You walk past the trees and see the fruit swelling. Soon! Soon those delicious feijoas will be ready to eat. The anticipation mounts.
Then the first few fruit drop and it’s glorious. We haven’t had these since last season! So delicious, you eat them as fast as they ripen - even the weird-shaped ones. Every feijoa is like gold!
Soon, fruit bowls around the country are filling up faster than we can drain them. People start finding other uses for them - freezing them for smoothies or making feijoa crumble cakes and chutneys. Not because those things are better than eating them fresh, but because there are so many and you don’t want them to go to waste.
Too many feijoa - it’s not a bad problem to have
At some point in the season, the freezer is full of crumble and you can’t use them all. You start getting really picky and only eating the best ones, throwing the others in the compost.
And then you barely even bother collecting them. They rot on the ground and the whole back yard smells like feijoa cider.
Until next feijoa season, when your anticipation, along with those beautiful little fruit, starts to swell again.
Feijoas didn’t stop being delicious. Supply simply overwhelmed demand. If they ripened at a steady pace all year round you could spread out consumption and only plant as many trees as meets demand. But that’s not how nature works. So you have a choice - more trees and risk oversupply? Or fewer trees and risk undersupply?
The beginning of next year’s bounty
It’s the same with solar energy. The variability means perfectly matching supply and demand is unrealistic. Until recently we’ve had such limited amount of solar production that even at peak production, the national grid could find SOME use for the electricity - like making chutney and crumble. But as more rooftop solar and solar farms come online, peak supply will far outweigh demand and we won’t be able to use that energy at all - like letting those feijoas rot on the ground.
That’s why I have a suspicion that export prices that owners of solar arrays can earn from exporting to the national grid will decrease over time - the more solar production, the more supply will overwhelm demand during peak production (lovely sunny days). We can’t expect the power companies to pay for power they have no use for.
That’s not an argument for less solar production. It’s simply an acknowledgement that nature is variable and we would be wise to find as many uses of that solar energy as we can, before we let it go to waste.
That’s where SolarCharge comes in. If there are plug-in EVs able to be charged when there is ample supply of solar energy, let’s use it!
