Cheaper, greener power is on the way

NOT that long ago, Mark Purcell, a retired rear admiral in the Australian navy, was paying about A$250 (S$214) a month for electricity in his roomy family home on the Queensland coast.

Today, he says he makes as much as A$300 a month from the electricity he makes, stores and sells with his solar panels and batteries. “This is the future,” he told me. “This is what the energy transition could look like for a lot of folks.”

Purcell is one of the 58,000-plus customers of Amber Electric, an eight-year-old Melbourne business that gives householders access to real-time wholesale power prices, so they can use power when it is cheap and sell what is stored in their batteries when it is expensive.