OPINION 

Dai Le

Let’s be clear – the Albanese Labor government’s “community battery” announcement is not a solution. It’s a hollow political stunt.

The government claims it’s reducing electricity costs, but the reality in South West Sydney tells a very different story. Bills keep climbing. Families are under financial stress. Small businesses are struggling to stay afloat. I’ve spoken to families and business owners in our community whose power bills have jumped by 30 per cent.

And now we’re being told a small community battery owned and operated by energy distribution companies – is the answer. Do they take us for fools?

Let’s be honest about how this battery works. It takes excess solar power from your home, pays you 3c a kilowatt hour, stores it, then sells it to your neighbour for 40c. There’s nothing community-minded about that. It’s not free, not fair and certainly not designed to help struggling families.

These batteries are tiny around 400kWh capacity. In the event of a blackout, they would be drained in seconds. They wouldn’t keep the lights on across Canley Vale Rd, In fact, they would delay a blackout across the area for just nine to 10 seconds. That’s it. No backup. No security. Just a marketing stunt disguised as a solution.

Instead of helping families or providing real energy resilience, these batteries are designed to “strengthen the grid” in ways that benefit energy distributors not residents. This is taxpayer money being used to subsidise private infrastructure, funnelling profits to corporations already raking it in from rising prices.

If the government were serious about lowering energy bills, they’d support household solar battery systems. Thousands of families in Fowler have already invested in rooftop solar. But when they feed power back into the grid, they receive almost nothing.

They deserve the ability to store and use their own energy to take control of their bills, not be exploited by a system that gives with one hand and takes with the other.

I call on Chris Bowen: no more hollow energy promises just real relief from rising bills. Families are hurting, trust is broken. It’s time for genuine and honest politics and policies.

Dai Le is independent MP for Fowler

 

Source: Bowen’s batteries won’t do the job | The Daily Telegraph