Swapping power with neighbours or trading energy from a battery in your garage on wholesale markets is the future for a stable Australian energy network, ACT entrepreneur Luke Osborne said.
The founder of Reposit Power explained how smart solar technology allowed households to reduce their power bill while improving energy security as the country transition from coal base load power to renewables.
"I believe Australian households can provide a cheap, bullet-proof solution to ensuring Australia's future energy stability by having improved and greater capacity battery storage," he said.
Mr Osborne's company Reposit Power developed the Grid Credits technology that allows solar panel owners to automatically maximise their profits.
His software works with a smart solar battery and is wired to determine a household's electricity usage patterns.
It is wired to determine a household's electricity usage patterns, gather weather predictions and monitor volatile markets to enable power to be sold back to the grid at peak times and bought as top-up energy when electricity is cheapest.
Total power outages in South Australia this September elevated concern about trading away energy stability as the country retired base load coal and integrates renewables.
Mr Osbourne said if smart solar battery systems were set up in the region at the time of the crisis their reserves could have been tapped to provide an emergency supply to the South Australian network.
Since establishing his clean power technology company in 2011 the electricity grid had evolved rapidly.
"We've come a long long way. In the last year we have seen tremendous change in our electricity system,"he said.
"South Australia has now retired all of its coal-fired power. Victoria is about to retire 25 per cent of it in one fell hit with the Hazelwood closure and NSW has closed a number as well."
But the game-changer has been the price reduction in high powered smart batteries with large companies such as Tesla, LG and now Samsung entering the Australian market.
"Our first customers the batteries they put in were subsidised by ARENA but cost us $30,000 to install.
He said now consumers could get a battery and solar system for close to a third of that price.
Mr Osbourne said while software to support peer-to-peer energy trading was still in development, it was clear consumers would be at the helm of Australia's energy future.
"We get quite a large proportion of our energy each day from household solar now and smaller systems on business roofs. They are now the biggest generator in our system by a long margin, about four times larger than the next biggest thing which is Loy Yang A power station."
The gap at this stage was bringing those 1.5 million homes and business "under control in a systems sense".
"What we need is for them to be responding to the wholesale market and we will have the best power station the world has ever seen," he said.
"It will be fast, bi-directional, able to consume and produce power at will, but for whole periods of the day it can go offline and look after itself as the solar from the roofs goes into homes and businesses."
After battling in the nascent renewables industry for years Mr Osbourne well subsidies and incentives meant the market was ripe, particularly in the ACT.
"The [ACT] government has bought power from wind and solar farms, over the years they have offered feed-in tariffs for small and larger scale businesses and now they are trying to balance it out by making our homes smarter," he said.
"It is positioning our businesses at the forefront of something that is going to be enormous. Australia is way ahead in this sort of technology and Canberra is leading that from a national perspective."