This article is misleading as it implies that Australian energy retailers must provide every household with 3 hours of free electricity.
This is not the case. From 1 July 2026, Australian energy retailers with more than 1,000 customers must offer at least one energy plan which includes 3 hours of free electricity, capped at 24kWh per day, to residential customers in 3 states - NSW, SE Queensland and South Australia.
https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer
Not all energy plans that the retailers offer have to include 3 hours of free electricity. In practice, most energy plans currently offered don’t include 3 hours of free electricity but some retailers such as Globird are offering more than one energy plan which includes ‘free’ electricity.
The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity.
Australian consumers can choose the retailer and energy plan their home or business is on and can change their plan at any time.
Wait, capped at 24 kWh a day? Our household consumed 8 kWh per day over the past week (gas cooking, no airco). So with a home battery that sinks 10 kWh during those 3 hours you have minimal energy costs?
This is what I am doing. 42 kWh battery, 6 kW solar and fully electrified house, 2x EVs. I am able to charge cars at work and so in the depths of winter I am able to run the house by charging during the 3 hour window. There have been just a couple of cold (~2-4 degC) days when the battery was depleted 1-2 hours before the window starts.
As the weather warms and we get more solar exposure we will easily be in excess. We get a very small export rate with a bonus for no energy consumption during peak evening hours which can offset the fixed daily charge.
There are a lot of gotchas that you need to be aware of. 42 kWh is nominal capacity not the actual usable capacity. House load, max grid import and export capacity, max inverter capacity, AC or DC coupled panels, battery charging profile, battery temp are all factors in how much you can charge in the window. For example I have max 15 kW grid draw, with a 10 kW inverter that can charge the battery. I can put in max ~30 kWh into the battery, so I also run other loads in the house to use the other 5 kW capacity. If I go over 5 kW house load the battery charge is clipped to maintain grid import limit.
Nice perk! Does you know who pays for the electricty? Is this "virtue signalling" by the company or landlord... or a subsidy from the local/state/national gov't? To be clear, I am not making any value judgement about providing free charging for EVs. It seems like good gov't policy to promote the adoption of EVs.
It costs $5-$10 for the electricity to charge a car using level 2 charging. It is a trivial "perk" for an employee that costs an order of magnitude more per hour of work.
We have a company fleet which is being slowly converted to EV where possible in line with company net zero policy so there is good charging infrastructure that is extended to all employees. We also have other initiatives such as solar and biogas generation.
throwaway account and "virtue signalling" plus a dig at so called subsidies. Oh and "no value judgement" except for the value judgement. You are not helpful here.
Forget 3hrs free. We lived in the tropics in Australia with a ~6kW system and often had negative quarterly invoices (i.e. got paid by our retailer) ... esp. in winter months. Aircon, pool, appliances all electric. At the very least the pool pump ran free all year round.
Edit: should add, that's straight solar no battery
We live in a deep valley where it snows a ton in Canada, and with 7.2kw of panels and no battery we only get a bill in winter. For the entire year our power bill is $500, and we have heat pump heat, and disconnected the natural gas.
We just got a very high efficiency wood stove, I expect we will now have no electricity bill each year.
Yes - the regulated offer is capped at 24 kWh per day but some retailers such as Globird and CovaU are offering plans which include up to 50 kWh per day of ‘free’ electricity. With a large enough battery and inverter you could just end up paying daily supply charges of $1.65-2.20 per day.
Critically, that cost excludes the amortized amount the batteries will be over that period. And if you're cycling them every day like this, they're not going to last more than 15~20 years.
Just for reference our fully electric household (including cooking, water and aircon). Highest usage this month on a very hot day was 25kWh.
(Disclaimer: I am not in Australia. Already cover most of it with roof solar. No battery yet)
I pay about 38c per kilowatt plus $1.70 per day for the connection fee. So by that maths, you'd save 8×0.38=$3.04 per day. A 10kWh battery is in the ballpark of $4000. So it'll take about 4 years to break even.
Then you'd just have to pay the connection fee, which seem to be increasing every year.
Moreover, apartment dwelling residential customers connected to embedded networks (many new apartment blocks in NSW, Victoria and Queensland) are not eligible for the Solar Share Offer because under section 6(3)(c), a consumer supplied through an embedded network is already excluded from the Commonwealth Electricity Retail Code’s definition of a «small customer».
The government won't address this particular perverse situation with the embedded networks until the 2027–28 DMO period.
I love being ripped off because I'm renting, so instead of having a direct relationship with my service providers, they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager who I'm sure in no shape way or form receives a kick-back.
So I'm stuck with an energy provider that is too incompetent to figure out how to bill me correctly, but puts a markup on what I'd pay as a home owner, and I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!
No IPv6, no gigabit Internet, no free solar electricity.
These are things where policy is set by government and so could be moved by your elected representatives. If you already have a preferred flavour of representative, try to get them to want to do this. If you don't, here's an issue that could make you prefer one over another, make sure they know that.
No, technically it can't. An individual writing to an MP is rarely sufficient by itself.
Australia’s embedded network landscape is a peculiarly intricate tangle of nuance, complexity and regulatory optimism. Note that the embedded networks are distinctly unique and different from retail utility providers.
Please bear with my lengthy explanation for a few rather long moments.
Embedded networks are private distribution systems sitting behind a single connection to the public grid (shopping malls, apartment blocks, retirement villages, camp and caravan sites etc). They all have, effectively, a single wire going into the site.
Originally, they were designed for incidental on-selling by site managers, and they are a regulatory exception allowing the operator to on-sell electricity and other services without becoming a fully authorised energy retailer or licenced distributor. The embedded networks typically bundle: 1) electricity, 2) centralised hot water, 3) cold water, 4) gas, 5) heating / cooling (air-conditioning) and 6) fibre to the premises (sometimes, not always). All those things are governed by separate statutes.
In theory as well as occasionally in practice, they should be cheaper for consumers because they are able to negotiate lower wholesale rates from the upstream supplier and because the customer churn is non-existent (the customer is locked into the network and has nowhere to go). In some cases, that is indeed true, but because the current legislation explicitly excludes the embedded networks from the government reporting, many embedded network operators have resorted to the insidious exploitation of their customers, and the government is clueless because the operators' imposed pricing is opaque.
Natiaonally, Australia does not have a single federal embedded-network statute. The principal framework is a cooperative national scheme comprising 7 government bodies (Australian Energy Market Commission, AER, Australian Energy Market Operator, National Electricity Law and Rules, National Energy Retail Law and Rules, Australian Consumer Law and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).
At the state level – so far – only Victoria has largely banned new embedded networks, with the remaining states either participating or not participating in the National Energy Customer Framework. Overall, NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and the national regulators are tightening the rules but they still have a way to go.
For a reform such as embedded-network regulation, the path looks closer to:
An MP may understand: «Residents in apartment towers are getting poor outcomes». They are highly unlikely to understand: a) market settlement arrangements, b) metering identifiers, c) distribution-loss factors, d) retailer-of-last-resort frameworks, e) exemption classes, f) embedded-network-manager functions, or g)interactions between state strata law and national electricity law.
Unsurprisingly and consequently, politicians become heavily dependent on: a) departmental advice, b) regulator advice, c) industry submissions, d) consultant reports, and e) lobby groups.
The people who understand the system – and especially those one who know how to work the system to their benefit – therefore acquire disproportionate influence over how the system evolves. That does not necessarily imply corruption, it is a structural feature of technical governance. Customers, however, refer to it as «rent seeking», even if they own an apartment.
Despite all that, elected representatives still do remain one of the few machineries capable of changing the underlying legal framework. The deeper issue is that modern regulatory states are neither pure democracies nor pure technocracies – they are hybrids. Formal authority remains democratic, but practical power is distributed among elected officials, bureaucracies, regulators, courts, industry participants, consultants, lobbyists and organised interest groups.
I have recently gone down the rabbit hole of the embedded networks and learned a bewildering number of things hence the fulmination.
Single customers having these issues don't really have any power to convince representatives. Historically, the only real way to enact change in this way is to have thousands of people contacting their representatives about it.
> I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!
Woah, this is crazy. Personally, I have read so much about the Aussie NBN (The Australian National Broadband Network) [1]. (Dear nerds: If you don't know about it, I highly recommend you read about it!) I am utterly jealous that you lot pulled it off! (Not perfect, but pretty damn good.) Can you share more details about why the building does not have high quality NBN connections? The whole dream sold to nerds about NBN was basically 1Gbit fibre for everyone in a big/mid-sized city (and suburbs) and "decent" Internet (100MBit+) for everyone else in the bush.
> […] why the building does not have high quality NBN connections?
Because their place of residence is connected to an embedded network that has eschewed the NBN Co and chosen to connect to a private fibre operator who sits outside the NBN. They probably also pay more compared to NBN for the same speed.
Not every embedded network supplies fibre, but some do, and that appears to be the case in their situation.
By the way, NBN has recently upgraded the network to 2Gbps, with 10 Gbps having been trialled but no availability date set as of yet.
At least part of the story is a cautionary tale about electing the LNP. The NBN was originally going to be as you describe, but then Tony Abbot came along, under instruction from his pal Rupert Murdoch, and threw a major spanner in the works.
He decided it was waaaaay too expensive and big-governmenty to do that and besides, Uncle Rupert had a satellite tv business to defend, we don't want him to have to compete with the likes of Netflix now do we? So he told Australia that it was too much money for a "glorified video delivery service" and that 25Mbit was enough for anyone for the foreseeable, and threw out the original plans.
The plan was downgraded to "Fibre in some places, we'll reuse copper where possible". This ended up taking longer and costing more than the original plan, delivered worse service, and we're only now getting towards where we should have been under the first plan. A lot of the work has had to be repeated due to the initial poor rollout and then needing to upgrade as that 25Mbit started looking woefully inadequate. Just last year a further $5 billion was pledged to replace more FTTN/Copper with FTTP.
It's still more expensive than other markets I'm aware of, a lot of people who aren't far from cities and major towns are on wireless connections (theoretical 400Mbit, actual ~150), and the real bush "Sky Muster" system tops at 100/5 (actual ~55-83) and is having its lunch eaten by starlink.
tl;dr the Liberal (conservative) party got in and fucked it up.
> […] they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager […]
The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation of wiring, air-conditioning, gas, hot water, and sometimes the internet – usually for free – and that happens before the strata comes into the picture. The strata is left with no choice but to inherit a fixed-term contract (typically 3-5 years), after which it can switch to… another embedded network.
The builders accept offers from embedded networks because it reduces their overall costs.
The NSW government has enacted the first tranche of regulations for embedded networks from the 1st of July this year, with the embedded networks price caps being introduced in early 2027 (that is the promise, anyway). If you live in NSW, IPART is the government body in charge of the regulation, and it is accepting submissions until the end of this month. Prepare and make your own submission whilst you can, as I have done.
> The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation
I got into a dispute with my embedded provider because of a bad meter and came to discover through friends and family in the construction industry as well as speaking to a former sales person in the industry that there is a lot of additional corruption in the process with straight up payments being made to win installs with developers.
When it came time to switch providers in our building, strata was promised electric vehicle chargers as part of signing a new deal with a new provider. They never delivered because they found an escape clause because of fire safety approval.
We're now locked in for years (again) and they've already increased rates once in the first year.
Nobody in the entire chain works in the interests of residents or owners. It's a completely broken system and a thorn in the side of otherwise advanced and progressive Australian energy policy. It needs to be abolished ASAP.
I still pay more for my single apartment living alone in electricity than what family and friends do in full large homes with air conditioning, 4-6 residents, heated pools, etc. It's astonishing.
«Mates rates» is a big problem in Australia, indeed. At best, it is collusion, but typically it is corruption.
I have recently gone through the entire chain of complaints, the ombudsman including, and I have gained plenty of insight into how insidious the current scheme is.
NSW has set out to do something about it, with price caps being introduced in 2027. If you live in NSW, make your submission to the regulator (IPART) ASAP – submissions are closing at the end of July.
First world problems but my Australian retail plan already offers a free period between 11am-2pm without any usage cap, so now with this policy introduction i'm worried my provider will introduce such a cap under the guise of 'its what the government says we can do'.
At the risk of Reddit-style mass downvoting, I strongly encourage you to borrow Oracle-level of debt (billions of USD) and build a Tesla Megapack battery "farm" and immediately begin mining Bitcoin. Of course, the battery "farm" will conveniently only be activated during these special hours. The only forseeable risk to ROI for this project would be AT&T- or Comcast-style of "double top secret" limitations over the "without any usage cap" clause.
Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.
I think it's less a question of batteries being economical, and more a question of the relative economics of batteries vs solar panels.
After all, if the highest demand is between 16:30 and 19:00 you could use batteries to store power at 12:00 and sell it at 18:00 - or in famously sunny Australia you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand.
If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.
(Also, from a politican's perspective, making batteries highly economical is how you get batteries built. And an awful lot of pro-environment policies involve raising taxes, banning things and creating new chores; it's nice to have some green policy announcements that actually benefit voters in the short term.)
Definitely so. Unless you are on the equator, the sun is up for less than 12 hours a day from the autumnal equinox to the spring equinox. The sun will set before 18:00 local solar time. So apart from funkiness with time zones and summer time (which extends a couple of weeks past the autumnal equinox in Aus), yes, roughly half the year.
You're not crazy in the broad sweep of your idea, but actually because the sun isn't a point of light you're also not strictly correct, for example in Singapore the day is always more than 12 hours long.
You won't get 12% return if your panels generate electricity which is only paid between 18 and 19, because there is already overcapacity between 16:30 and 18.
> If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.
Sorry, normally I hate this follow-up on HN, but can you share a source? I tried to Google for sources, but there is a pretty wild range of ROI in different countries/regions. My point: Ideally, can you provide personal/anecdotal experience, or something that is specific to a country or region?
EDIT
I forgot to say: I like your idea of intraday arbitrage using batteries! It is a very cool idea. Surely, this could be well modeled to know your expected ROI before investment/build-out.
One of my co-workers (I'm Australian) has 500 kilowatt-hours of storage at home...which is wild. Much more common is the 10-20 kilowatt-hours of domestic storage for a house.
My dad buys lead acids written off from storm damage to solar systems (The whole system gets replaced under insurance even if the batteries are just a bit worn) and then sells them to preppers in the middle of nowhere. For a while he had above 300KW/h of storage, basically completely off grid with few shutdowns. It was kind of nuts. His house did burn down, but it was arson.
Does he have a saltwater aquarium, or any other hobby that can make use of it? If not, I can highly recommend that he get into it, if he's into that kind of overkill :)
That's ~8 used EV batteries. Each cost less than 10k, maybe 6-8k AUD.
If you know your way around high voltage DC, got a tractor and appropriate emulator - not exactly difficult or super expensive to pull off.
Granted it's pretty uncommon setup as grid batteries themselves are pretty cheap too and used EV battery is simply too large for home user, too much hassle, liability, etc to save like $2-3k.
The more households that buy them, the less peak power generation is needed and less large scale battery deployments. If the ROI of a household battery was just 4%, you are better off economically paying higher power bills and sticking that money in an index fund. But if subsidies increase that ROI, more people buy batteries. The money the government contributes hopefully ends up less than they would need to spend on large scale battery deployments or on legacy power generation to power peak usage times. It also has the side effect of getting more citizens (literally) invested in sustainable power usage, and people get more interested in insulating their homes, buying more efficient appliances, moving away from gas etc.
> which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?
the gov't also offers interest free (but inflation indexed) loans to tertiary education.
Just because there's a subsidy, doesn't mean the tax payer is paying a price for inefficiency. The policy itself needs to be individually examined to determine whether it's an efficient use of funds, not simply that it's a subsidy (time frame needs to be taken into account too).
Is it so out of the ordinary that a government tries to help people save money or what's the question? Sounds like you've only had the American experience in life unfortunately.
If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless.
Meanwhile the government doesn't have any of its own money, so it can't really give you something that was yours to begin with, all it can do is take it from you and then give it back with strings attached. How is that helping you? Instead of subsidizing something you can make up your own mind about whether you want, they should just lower your taxes by the amount of the subsidy and let you use your money for that or something else at your choice.
> If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless.
Spoken as someone who never been poor. There is definitely a ton of stuff people with money can do to save more money, that is completely out of reach for the people who would actually benefit from those savings the most. Subsidies is quite literally about reaching these folks that others tend to forget about.
> all it can do is take it from you and then give it back with strings attached. How is that helping you?
Compared to "take it from you and not give it back to you", it's definitely helping people who have less money. Not sure how this needs explaining.
> Spoken as someone who never been poor. There is definitely a ton of stuff people with money can do to save more money, that is completely out of reach for the people who would actually benefit from those savings the most. Subsidies is quite literally about reaching these folks that others tend to forget about.
Except that there is no additional money, its just your own money but now there are strings.
On top of that, that still isn't necessary for things that save a non-trivial amount of money, because that's what loans are for. If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
> Compared to "take it from you and not give it back to you", it's definitely helping people who have less money. Not sure how this needs explaining.
Why would anybody want that either, instead of just not taking it from you to begin with?
Well that would apply to a lot of thing governments spend money on. I think the idea is that governments are better at allocating capital in certain cases (obviously one might disagree with that) than the people/companies who generate the most tax revenue. I mean on an individual level even if solar batteries are profitable people who have sufficient disposable income might chose to invest it into the US stock market (if it still offers better returns) amongst other things than into something that benefits the Australian economy or society.
The recipient doesn't necessarily know ahead of time how profitable the investment will be. Risk aversion will cause them to avoid investments that are profitable in expectation if they believe the chance of ending up worse off is too high. By offering interest-free loans, the government can pool that risk so that individual loan recipients hesitate less to make the positive-expectation investment.
>>> If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
This depends on whether you'll pay back the loan. Just because paying the loan back saves you $50 / month forever starting immediately doesn't mean you'll do it. You might be the kind of person who takes out a loan, spends all your money on something else, and lets the bills go unpaid.
If you aren't that kind of person, you probably do have some accumulated capital.
But if you are, just the fact that the loan is hugely profitable and you should be able to pay it back - if you were a completely different person - doesn't mean you'll be able to get the loan. You shouldn't be able to get the loan, because you won't pay it back.
... for purchases from "approved" "accredited" suppliers[]. AKA the interest differential is regressive tax to funnel money to favored suppliers. Notice there's no option for the poor to simply install it themselves, which would save them more money than an interest free loan, but wouldn't funnel money to rich government approved install contractors.
And there's your grift. As soon as the home owner wants to allocate the "profit" of install to themselves, it is a swift kick in the ass but that will go to our buddies, and thank you very much for your taxes.
> Except that there is no additional money, its just your own money but now there are strings.
I understand what you mean, and yeah, "it's just your money", but also, it really isn't. Poor people have to pay taxes, no way around it, getting them back as subsidies is still better for them than not getting it back at all. The choice isn't "Keep the money or have subsidies", the choice is "The money goes to other stuff or get subsidies".
> On top of that, that still isn't necessary for things that save a non-trivial amount of money, because that's what loans are for. If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
Are those interest-free or managed by for-profit entities? Because "loans" are vastly different things compared to subsidies, but I'm guessing you already knew this.
> Why would anybody want that either, instead of just not taking it from you to begin with?
Because "not taking it from you to begin with" isn't a practical and realistic alternative, that's not how the world, and especially taxes and government works...
> The choice isn't "Keep the money or have subsidies", the choice is "The money goes to other stuff or get subsidies".
That's the false dichotomy that happens in a broken government, but then why hold that out as something desirable?
> Are those interest-free or managed by for-profit entities?
Is the larger amount of mortgage or car loan debt they have to carry when they pay the extra money in tax?
> Because "not taking it from you to begin with" isn't a practical and realistic alternative, that's not how the world, and especially taxes and government works...
Your argument seems to be that lowering taxes on ordinary people is impossible?
> That's the false dichotomy that happens in a broken government, but then why hold that out as something desirable?
Personally I see it as stuff that happens in countries where the government care about the well-being of all, not just a select few (usually the ones with the most money). It's desirable that society improves, lots of that happens because of tax money. Subsidies usually means re-allocating funds, not raising taxes, although that might happen over time. Still, increasing taxes isn't inherently bad, especially when used for good. But I also know this is a somewhat controversial point of view in many hyper-capitalistic societies.
> Your argument seems to be that lowering taxes on ordinary people is impossible?
Yeah sure, I'm also clearly arguing for murdering children. Fun discussion, hope you'll enjoy the rest of your Tuesday :)
I'm honestly having trouble comprehending what your position is supposed to be here. It really seems to be that using the money to lower taxes on ordinary people rather than providing them with subsidies is a thing that could never happen. As if the prospect that their taxes could be lower than they are now, rather than only the same or higher, is something you can't even imagine.
Well off people do not allocate capital in a way that's socially or economically (on a national level) optimal. So the government has to do that for them (even if those who the majority of taxes personally benefit less from that than if they were allowed to keep that money).
I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. After all there are hardly any personal incentives for individuals to invest into infrastructure, education or healthcare of people who can't afford it and plenty of other areas even if that's what allowed them to accumulate a significant proportion of not the overwhelming majority of their wealth over the long term.
If there's hardly any individual desire, as you say, to fund the development of the poor then taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people (even if only roughly a majority or their representatives).
Given that most taxation done with the the advertised goal of helping the poor in Australia does happen with popular assent of individuals, I would theorize your position is false and that people do have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor -- for profit, humanitarian / charitable reasons, and a variety of other considerations.
> have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor
I never said that wasn't the case but historically that "some" was never sufficient. On average people are rational and selfish to a larger extent than they are altruistic.
> taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people
Well the whole concept of an organized society falls apart if individuals can personally freely chose which laws to obey and which taxes to pay. You have to have a balance based on a reasonable consensus, otherwise you end up with totalitarianism or anarchy (and in that case the people who have the means and resources to do that will establish alternative power structures and will end up subjugating those who do not AND also outcompete those how have the means but are unwilling to do the same).
No, I'm not talking about picking and choosing for a voted tax. I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor. Clearly under anything remotely resembling the Australian representation of what they claim their representative democracy is, the majority of people already decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure.
It can't simultaneously be true that most don't want to help the poor at their own cost while also the tax has been legitimized by the majority wanting to help the poor at their own cost. Only individuals or representatives elected by individuals can vote and if their incentive was to not help the poor then they'd vote not to and that would be that.
> I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor.
Or people have a tendence to perceive a system where everyone is required to pay their "fair share" as more just and are more willing to (often begrudgingly) participate in it. If the system was fully voluntary the average contribution would be significantly lower that it is now. Also a significant proportion might feel they benefit from this system more than they pay into it (or are risk averse and prefer having the safety net even if they contribute more than they benefit)
> decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure
Well I'm generally vaguely incentivized to help the poor and develop infrastructure. Would I be willing to voluntary give up 40% of my income to do that rather than a significantly lower proportion? No, of course not. When it comes to infrastructure I'd be willing to pay very little or nothing at all if I know my neighbour isn't contributing anything. I don't think the average person would behave particularly differently than me.
I can tell you you're absolutely wrong about the average person. I live in a place with no public infrastructure (I'm talking about, not even public roads, and not some rich HOA, a ~poor unorganized community without any infrastructure association) which has allowed me to view how average people react when there is no taxation based infrastructure. When it breaks, the neighbors help. I help maintain the roads for my poor neighbor. My other neighbor helped fix my water line when it broke. Sometimes I take my heavy equipment and donate labor to prepare for storms, etc. The infrastructure is literally donation based. We get it done for a tiny fraction of what the tax based system cost and everyone is far better off, even if the amount donated is less than what the taxes would be and some people "cheat" the system.
It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbor also pays, otherwise they can get fucked. This is very bizarre thinking. The people in my basically ancap-dystopia neighborhood don't even behave in this sadistic way. It honestly sounds more like a manufactured "gotcha" to win an argument than a way someone would think.
In reality the fraction people that would vote to tax themselves, are more than willing to donate in the case they don't get the tax, your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor just because some other guy didn't help too is relatively rare and not indicative of the mindset of most people who are voting to help the poor. I honestly think that most anyone who would vote for the tax, does not act that way when dropped in a neighborhood like mine, and you probably would not either.
> If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless.
…assuming people are good at math.
And given that most people probably don't have a bunch of cash just sitting there doing nothing, they will have to take out a loan and most folks probably don't like going into debt even though 'the math says' it's a good ROI.
The idea that 'ROI good, therefore people will do it' is the 'spherical cow' of economics. In reality there are all sorts of other motivations for human economic actions:
To be clear, this doesn't change the price floor for ROI calculations. A non "approved" contractor or DIY job non-subsidized is well cheaper than a piddly few percent interest rate arbitrage to a pre-approved list. This does nothing beyond let some rich contractors regressively allocate money from taxpayers to themselves by artificially appearing a bit less of a premium to the alternatives.
It looks more like to me some installers saw their industry was becoming commoditized and the government got together with them to figure out how to grift taxpayers into making the more connected ones command a premium while simultaneously being better positioned to eat the lunch of the small middle class "guy and a truck" who does cash jobs for cheap but has no resources to become "accredited" on a subsidization list.
It can work when the marginal cost of new capacity is high, compared to existing capacity.
E.g., if the marginal cost of supporting 1 kW of new capacity may be X, while the current averaged cost of 1 kW provided to existing customers may be Y, with Y < X.
The customer will calculate their ROI on a battery purchase based on the cost Y of kW to them, which may be poor (4%), while on the government level of the ROI may is closer to that implied by the cost X (say 10%). However, the government cannot easily pass on the "marginal cost" to customers as there is no specific kWh which is that marginal one across all customers.
In this case a subsidy directly picks out customers who can reduce their demand by buying a battery (e.g., a subsidy which raises the ROI to somewhere between 4% and 10%).
Because the individualized incentives do not take into account the community benefits.
The money saved is distributed across the community, for both those that directly benefit and those that can't (eg renters, apartments etc). The general benefit is of greater value than the individual savings.
Your attitude that somehow taxation is theft is a very silly Ayn Randian Objectivism outgrowth that has never been true, even in the most "free" US states.
> Because the individualized incentives do not take into account the community benefits.
Only if the utility company is pricing things incorrectly.
If the price of electricity is ~free during the day and expensive in the evening then the individualized incentives for installing a battery line right up.
> Your attitude that somehow taxation is theft is a very silly Ayn Randian Objectivism outgrowth that has never been true, even in the most "free" US states.
Whether it's theft or not doesn't change the arithmetic. When you're paying them the money they're paying you, it was your money to begin with.
Think about people who could not afford the initial investment. It's beneficial for society here if the government redistributes wealth for the benefit of all.
> Think about people who could not afford the initial investment.
This is what loans and installment plans are for, the payments for which come out of the savings on the utility bill.
> It's beneficial for society here if the government redistributes wealth for the benefit of all.
Which has nothing to do with batteries. If you want to do that then provide them with a refundable tax credit that allows for a negative tax rate in cases where that's deemed desirable.
And even that doesn't apply to the majority of people who are currently paying a non-negative amount of tax. Why attach strings to the money going to a middle class homeowner who should have just been allowed to keep that portion of their own salary?
But that's the point. It isn't. Electricity costs more in the evening than during the day and there is a technology that can profitably be used to arbitrage the difference. There is no coordination problem at all, people have the direct individual incentive to buy the technology, on credit if necessary, without any form of government subsidy or involvement whatsoever.
Yes. People can't always afford super economical things when the initial cost is high and the pay-off takes a while, but is easily worth it in the end.
Yeah this is why a lot of people were thinking that the Australian opposition asking for spending $40-50 billions for nuclear that would come online in 20-30 years and to keep using coal and gas till then were being stupid.
I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.
I am talking about the $30 billion that the opposition was making up. My point was that even those made up numbers for nuclear were still more expensive than installing solar and batteries.
They are, and they are being rapidly rolled out and the "post sunset" spikes are rapidly being flattened by both grid storage and "behind the meter" home batteries.
They've already burned at least $15bn on that disastrous Snowy Hydro "battery" project... Could've just rolled out consumer batteries on a large scale instead.
At current battery project prices, matching Snowy 2.0’s roughly 350 GWh of energy storage capacity with Tesla Megapacks would cost around AUD $218 billion [0] and require Tesla’s entire global Megapack production capacity redirected to a single client for five years.
$15 billion is far more than Snowy 2.0 should have cost. But it remains substantially cheaper than any lithium-ion battery build for bulk storage. Storage on this scale is essential in a post-coal electricity grid, and batteries are not (yet) plausible substitutes for bulk storage.
[0] This assumes linear scaling. In reality, placing an order like this would grossly distort supply and demand on many levels. Thus the cost would ultimately be superlinear.
Snowy 2.0 has major limitations on what it can supply, the headline number is very misleading.
And the comparison shouldn't be to batteries alone, but solar/wind and batteries. The former can be used directly and fill the batteries repeatedly on a timeline that is predictable.
It provides no extra value for the electricity to be stored long term if for the same money you can generate and store it short term.
Yeah the battery storage story has to acknowledge the fact that global production capacity simply isn't actually high enough to deliver that many batteries so we need alternative solutions to the problem as well.
The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from \(\$12\) billion to as high as \(\$42\) billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission). Originally announced in 2017 with a $2 billion price tag, the project has faced massive scale and logistical blowouts. The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from $12 billion to as high as $42 billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission).
That said , hydro systems have a LONG LIFESPAN - 100 YEARS ?
Batteries need to be replaced every X years.
So the ecomiomics of the comparisoan would need to be calculated ...
All the complexity has been in geotechnical issues, pockets of mud, sinkholes, then ultra hard rock, then loose shale, damage in blasting operations, needing to pump liquid nitrogen into the rock to deal with subterranean water flow, soluble limestone etc etc.
One of the scariest industrial deaths you can imagine: cutting into a pocket of shale and the TBM and crew just vanishing into the maw of the Midgard serpent and the whole tunnel filling.
That was exactly the point of the project though - it was designed by the conservative side of politics in our country to try and crowd out investment in batteries and other renewables while taking enough time to build to keep coal plants operating longer in the meantime.
It didn't work at all for that though - we had a lot of private investment in large-scale batteries anyway, because the cost came down quickly just as most people (apart from the conservatives) expected. Then the other side of Government got in and put a subsidy scheme to get hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, which has been multiple times better bang-for-buck than the Snowy 2.0 scheme, as well as taking far shorter a time. At the same time coal plants are shutting down as expected because they are increasingly unreliable given their old ages.
Snowy 2.0 be an expensive stranded asset basically, it will work and be somewhat useful but extremely uneconomical so basically relying on the cost being written off - if it had to recoup any investment then it couldn't run because it'd never be able to sell the power for high enough.
That sounds great at first, but just imaging having dynamic price contracts, like tibber, that also forward you the negative prices while still maintaining very low grid fees.
Edited to add: Clarification required in the title that the free energy is only between 11am and 2pm
Very interested to see how this turns out. Ultimately we want the transition to benefit both consumers and producers / distributors (the industry). The problem from the rapid uptake of solar in Australia has been an over-supply during this 10/11am to 2/3pm period. If that over-supply is suitably encouraged to be soaked up then hopefully consumers can reduce their power bills whilst the industry has less effort in managing the oversupply and less stress on infrastructure.
It's also about time that those who lack the means or situation to have solar panels of their own can get some advantage, in a 'herd immunity' kind of way.
I'm in the privileged position to have had solar panels for over a decade, and now have a battery as well, and it was very obvious to me at the time that, in regards to solar, it cost money to save money, so if you couldn't afford it then the savings are inaccessible.
This change hopefully helps those who need it, at least somewhat.
The change certainly brings in some weirdness too.
For instance, I'm looking at a new hot water system. Economically speaking, I'm better off buying an oversized tank using resistive heating that I only need to heat once per day. The grid provides free power and I buy a cheaper appliance. But environmentally it sucks, as more solar needs to be rolled out to cover the additional non-peak usage (guess about 6x the power usage of a smaller tank with heatpump).
To check I understand you: the smaller tank with heatpump would consume less energy outside the time window in which energy is free than the large tank with resistive heating, but has a higher capital cost which would outweigh the amount saved on energy?
If that's right, it's not obvious to me that building a suitably sized solar panel is environmentally worse than building a heat pump.
The smaller tank with heatpump will consume a lot less energy than the larger tank with resistive heat.
Economically to me, the larger tank is cheaper, because the appliance is cheaper, and I never pay for the power it uses.
Environmentally, yes, it is not obvious. The large tank requires many more solar panels to power it but no battery. The small tank and heatpump needs much less solar but battery for nighttime use.
But it is weird, because for decades heat pump tech has been pushed as the environmental choice and there are still a number of government subsidies to invest in heat pump hot water systems. And maybe that no longer makes sense, with the money saved buying cheaper and less efficient devices spent on more solar deployments.
But it’s also environmentally better for you to take the resistive heating thing. As long as you never need to heat it up outside of the noon-window that’s strictly positive. Because the “additional” solar panels will be necessary anyways to cover the night/late evening usage. The optimal buildout will always have superfluous energy at noon. That’s fine. We just need to get over the whole “energy costs anything” thing. That’s only true if you need to spend fuel to generate it
this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
so NSW and South Australia will be staggered in real time as they are in different time zones.
As for everybody in the same time zone .. they are all seeing the same sun angle at noon (more or less) and all sharing the same over supply of power from all the grid connected solar power rooftops and farms. It's free surplus power during that time frame.
Yeah i get that they're all seeing similar but you'd still want to align this new demand with the output curve in some form of approximated pattern. Plus also prevent the sharp spike you'd get from everyone turning on their stuff at a coordinated hour. You're gonna have a bunch of stuff on timers all hit this at the same time. That makes life hard for the people balancing the grid's supply & demand.
Bit like in the UK they had issues with everyone watching popular TV shows and then turning on the kettle after in a perfectly syncronized timing across the country
There's too much available power then (curtailment/negative prices are fairly common now on sunny days), and not enough during the evenings, so it's an incentive for those who don't have/can't get batteries (e.g. renters) to shift their habits. It also can be spun as a cost-of-living action.
I find it amusing that back when solar and wind were niche and expensive the coal + oil lobby would lobby for "let the free market decide what to build".
When solar + wind plunged in price they stopped saying it.
Now that the market has driven down the price of solar, wind and storage, market based mechanisms have become ideal for solving the problem of what to do with surplus electricity.
Many retailers have been offering this for ~6 months already. Very popular with home battery owners (which have taken off over the last 9 months thanks to subsidies), so much so that the effect of people turning on loads is suspected as the reason for an increasing dip in grid frequency at 11 am [1].
Related to this article, I recently saw this video on YouTube:
"I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes" [1]
It is wild how cheap are solar panels now. Really, bonkers cheap. A huge rooftop solar panel costs less than 100 USD. From everything that I read/see/watch, most of the cost associated with solar panel arrays is the labour required for installation. (No hate on those folks -- they are skilled labour!)
I've been on a GloBird plan with 3 free hours for a while. Works out very well as I have a 20 KWH battery and solar. Costs about $15 a month to run the house inc. cooking, heating/cooling, hot water, and charging my PHEV. To make the best of these sorts of plans you need to be home during that period and/or have a decent battery/inverter.
With 3 hours of free power, a 15kW inverter and a 42kWh battery, I could almost do away with my solar panels and just survive of free grid power. I do have a 15kW solar panel set up, but I get very little from selling anything back to the grid.
I have a 12 kW inverter (single phase) and 48 kWh battery. In Australia, 9 months of the year my 16 kW of solar fills the battery and covers all needs including cooking, heating and charging the EV.
In winter, I’ve been using Ovo’s 3 hours free for about a year now and that ensures the battery is filled up daily. My electricity bill returns a credit every month since I got the battery a year ago.
I was trying to understand how to do this, and I formed the opinion that most of the battery providers don’t really allow the degree of ‘on/off’ or ‘charge/discharge’ customisation as might be necessary to make this work? Or was I fooled by the packaged products that are aiming to turn me and my battery and panels into a residential power plant at the whim of the energy company?
The most popular batteries provide all the customization you need and more. Soo many features... it is exhausting. Even 'AI' modes trying to predict usage and solar generation using weather forecasts and top up from the grid at cheap rates if it thinks the power will probably be needed. A battery like Sigenergy's you can setup on a time based charging schedule (most popular for the free power plans), or have it pull Amber's live wholesale rates and put it into AI mode to avoid using their SmartShift VPP, or just hand over the keys to a VPP provider and let them drive.
We already get free power between 0am and 6am, so with free power between 11am and 2pm we’ll have a whopping 9 hours of free power to charge our car and heat our water storage.
What plan and what provider to get free power from midnight to 6am?
I'm in a plan that gets me $0.08/kWh during those hours, and I'm planning to switch to one that's just over half that, but I haven't come across any free power in that time span.
I am curious what interesting opportunities free power for a short time opens up.
I know crypto mining in TX can operate like this, but that's boring.
Desalination and carbon capture are both energy restricted, that sounds a lot more interesting. However, the deployed equipment has to be cheap if you only have 3hrs per day of free power, right?
The requirement is to accept time of use TOU variant charging and if you cannot shift enough load into 3 hours you may pay more overall for power in other times of day.
Demand shifting is good. Do not mistake this as free energy, it very much depends. Many people still don't have TOU meters and many people won't successfully move load into the window.
Fixed line costs are rising massively. Electricity should be significantly cheaper but the economics here favour incumbents and people like John Quiggin arguing for renationalisation are drowned out.
Yes, that's also being done. A critique I have seen is that this is empowering the rich to get richer. Renters are less likely to be able to adopt these strategies.
The rich certainly benefit more, like anything where an investment needs to be made (I expect the new plans will be like the existing 'free' power plans and be a poor choice without a battery). In this case, the poor still benefit a little bit as it should drive down peak period prices and the cost of fixed rate plans.
From the article; this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
So yeah, not universal yet. But the precedent means it's moving in that direction. If WA homes end up producing lots of solar at midday then this opens the door there as well.
You might check the rates on Tibber as well. A lot of companies that offer a "free" usage period tend to just move the cost around. If you're comfortable taking the risks associated with a wholesale supplier, then you can likely save a ton of money without even changing your consumption habits.
During this past month with the heatwave, my electricity bill was only about €50 despite running airco all day most days. I have 6 solar panels on my roof for reference (was 3k installed I believe). If I was willing to turn off the A/C at night, I could have easily cut the bill in half since most of the billed usage was between 18-21:00.
Solar generation is realitely cheap, much more storage is needed.
Storage (overnight and also for several days) is challenging - one reason being its more expensive. Then there is the new transmission lines needed.
it's much much more expensive, people like to repeat the line that solar is the cheapest form of energy while hand-waving away batteries and grid upgrades required.
I did the napkin math a while back but a battery bank for 10's of thousands of homes for 48 hours costed as much (more?) than just building a nuclear power plant.
The Australian scientific body, the CSIRO, did an extensive report on the full life costs of various energy strategies and concluded that nuclear made little to no economic sense in Australia.
Perhaps had they used a napkin they would have agreed with you.
The CSIRO aren't the group who have to cost, pay for, take on the financial risk of or be operationally involved in running a nuclear power plant. Their opinions are welcome but not in any way final. The Chinese might easily be willing to come in and build something as their industry matures, for example, at costs not currently anticipated.
The more pressing issue is the Australian government is a coven of luddites who have taken a bold and consistent stance against any form of advanced industrial progress taking root in Australia whatever and have identified nuclear power as high technology that therefore must be categorically banned. Leaving the whole question an academic one and leaving the CSIRO the only group taking an interest.
The CSIRO renewables plan factors in only 2-4 hours of battery capacity (way less, with some already built) with the rest of the backup coming from existing pumped hydro and an existing Natural Gas plant.
one of the reasons nuclear looked worse in the report is that they would have to actually build a nuclear power plant.
it might not make direct sense to build nuclear given what already physically exists, but apples to apples it's not quite as clear.
I think not everything that makes (purely) financially sense does make economically sense. There's much more to it that just money (e.g. where do you get the uran from for the next 30 years?).
Dynamic pricing and deployment of digital smart meters should by mandatory in all electric grids dominated by renewables. Large electric consumers are already buying electricity at dynamic prices, small consumers should have the same incentives to shift the demand to day hours.
I'm so on board for this. It would be kind of fun to wire all my appliances in to home assistant to have the dishwasher / dryer / etc all run during the free hours.
I imagine eventually we might end up with some thermal storage where during peak renewable production you heat/freeze a large tank of water and then utilize it to heat/cool your house for the rest of the day. A large tank of water is much cheaper than battery storage.
I don't have smart washers, but I did build a smart ESP32-based [0] zigbee numerical display. Then I use Home Assistant to send the current electricity price to that display when the price changes, and send a notification to all users' phones when electricity is cheap (< 0.05€/kWh) or expensive (> 0.15€/kWh). This helps me plan my laundry and dish washing, which are the only energy intensive appliances I have. I also try to avoid cooking complex meals in the stove+oven.
Storing energy in hot water is common is sunny regions, for example Turkey.
Some large cold storage facilities in Germany are trying to optimize electric demand to use cheap peak day electricity. But they have to observe limitations in range of temperatures and capacity of cooling devices.
Many of us with solar already do this manually, we run the appliances once the sun is up. Even the hotwater heater is programmed to only heat during the middle of the game.
I've been daydreaming about the tank of water idea as well, but the amount of panels you would need on the roof would be crazy.
Batteries are massively more expensive. Thats why the utility companies are just giving consumers free power over building their own grid scale batteries.
A tank of water is cheap, it’s just not possible to distribute hot water over the grid. But it’s very realistic to store it locally and use for heating and cooling. Which is the bulk of power usage anyway.
There are never designs coming into the market that support only, say, the fridge, and have the software to be time of day use metering aware, that won't totally break the bank.
Ideally, they should pay the EV owners because electricity price goes negative. The EV owners are spending their own money to create a scalable on-demand storage infrastructure. This saves CapEx/OpEx of BESS and also eliminates peaker natural gas plants. EV owners should be paid once for allowing storage, and paid again for using the power to supply back to the grid (V2G).
The EVs with V2G are just big batteries, nothing special. You certainly can charge your battery on the free power and sell it back during peak periods, and people are doing just that today. Just mostly using their 50 kWh household batteries rather than their EVs though, because V2G is still mostly science fiction unless you buy one of the few models of car that actually support it and have a compatible charger and inverter.
It’s very cool to see what happens where there are simply so many residential solar installs. Power price goes negative during peak sunshine hours so they just give it away.
Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
As an Australian, the lack of anxiety and guilt you get when you're using 10-12 hours of air conditioning in the middle of summer and not paying for a cent of it because your solar panels are covering is worth more than anything
Yeah totally, nice to be able to put the AC/heater on "for free". I even got a negative power bill once!
In my specific case, I barely use much power so home solar covers basically all of the usage, my bill is dominated by the daily charge, so the usage component is practically irrelevant to me.
Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world?
Yes, grid scale deployments are cheaper, but I'm generally guessing a lot of the grid scale solar deployments do not price in the grid infrastructure adaptation costs, and I'm not even talking about grid storage.
Consumer rooftop solar is fundamentally democratic: it reduces reliance on centralized institutions for power delivery, Make society a lot more resilient in bad weather and other emergency situations, insulates everyday people from wild variations and petroleum and other consumable energy availability.
Combined with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, it would enable electrification of 80 and 90% of daily driving without grid infrastructure costs.
> Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world?
Here in Sweden nearly all of the electricity bill you pay is concentrated on the winter months when there is literally zero sunshine. Even then solar is popular here. I calculated that installing solar would take around 10 years or more to pay for itself, but I have very little hope to stay in the same house all that time so for me it seemed like a bad investment.
That said, if you live in places where it’s sunny most of the time even in winter, like Australia, then solar is absolutely great, just don’t assume most places are like that.
Wow your current electricity must be really expensive... or your solar setup is?? Also the calculation was done by the company selling it, I'm pretty sure that was far too optimistic.
With a calculation like that I'd buy solar in a heart beat!
But as I said, my main concern is my winter bill, which I know by asking people who own solar in the region, is almost the same with solar since there's no sun at all (it's not that it's cloudy, it's that the entire day duration is like 4 hours - under which you barely feel any sun heat and in practice the solar output is exactly zero on the worst month and near zero for 4 or so months). Hence the very long ROI here, but I agree that for Queensland, 10 years would be a bit too long if you dimension the solar array properly.
Sure if building density is low in your area and you have no nearby neighbours it probably doesn’t matter, you’d just be heating your surroundings a little.
If you’re using rooftop solar then presumably the net heat generated by your aircon is the same as the amount your roof is no longer absorbing. Otherwise you just described a perpetual motion machine?
I imagine that absorption by the roof or panels is around the same - however the aircon moves heat from inside to outside, so you are moving heat outside for other people to deal with. In an isolated house it makes little difference. If every building has aircon in a city it does impact outside temperatures and adds to the heat island effect.
Right, but energy that would have heated the roof goes towards powering the aircon (which likely is on the roof itself), which then emits the same amount of heat, no?
Say a roof is absorbing 10000 watts. You install solar panels that absorb 2000 watts, used to power an airco. You now have your roof absorbing 8000 watts (released as heat) and ann airco absorbing (using) 2000 watts (also released as heat). Am I wrong? Seems like a conservation of energy problem. And you get a cooler roof so less airco demand too!
Or, we could lobby politicians to actually improve the lives of their constituents by making climate control appliances so affordable and ubiquitous that it's no longer an issue and we can stop accidental deaths attributed to heat. More green spaces can also help mitigate the impact.
The reality is that a lot of old western europe was built for a climate that no longer exists. Houses are built to prioritize holding on to heat and rebuilding entire cities is definitely not possible if we're already bickering so much about adding heat pumps.
Yes, heat pumps may create a rise in temperatures in cities, but there are other things we can do as a society to also lower temperatures as to create a net-neutral impact.
No, air conditioning units generate heat (that is how they cool!) and do contribute to local warming. Without AC the house reaches equilibrium with outside. With AC the house is cooled and that heat has to go somewhere.
They don't generate heat in the sense that heat is generated from nothing. If the AC is being powered by solar, then the energy that is powering the heat pump has already hit the earth and has become part of that system. The energy that would otherwise have hit the roofing and been radiated is more focused around the radiators, but as soon as that dissipates into the air the difference to the local climate isn't any different.
If the roof was white and reflective then a lot more of that light would be reflected, but most roofing isn't.
Your logic isn't really compatible with the laws of thermodynamics.
Right, but assuming conservation of energy holds then the net should stay the same, right? Unless solar panels have lower albedo than the roof they’re sitting on (considering how many roofs are flat black tar that seems unlikely…)
Yeah, it's been great to see the uptake of rooftop solar in Australia.
One downside is that large scale solar projects aren't profitable any more. It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech, that they aren't getting a good payoff.
The good news is that co-located solar and battery projects are still profitable, but capital costs are higher and payback period of batteries aren't as good.
Co-located PV/BESS or Wind/BESS is the best grid solution anyway. The REZs with transmission infrastructure (subsidized by government) will also add to the return.
The good thing is that even with over a decade of conservative government trying to kill it, renewables are now commercially the only choice for Australia and we will benefit from the rapid advances in storage as well.
Grid level plants are starting to also incorporate synthetic condensers and other FCAS services to make our grid more resilient and reliable, even as our clapped out coal plants move closer to shut down.
The new plans are mostly to charge the hundreds of thousands of household batteries that have been installed over the last few years, which are an economical way to store energy for night time usage (ROI about 8% over 20 years, probably more with the new plans).
The fundamental costs and margin requirements in the system haven't changed.
This is a government-mandated electricity plan (a default market offer) that competitive electricity retailers are now required to offer. Those retailers still have network costs, environmental costs, energy costs, and administration costs to recover, and so prices at other times of day necessarily go up.
Some consumers may be better off on this plan (generally at the expense of other consumers), and some will be worse off.
The payback time was already well in excess of 10 years, but now that power is free during the day, you can't count those hours as helping pay down your investment. Payback time will be 30 + years at least. You are much better just enjoying your neighbors solar rather than paying for your own.
(Feed-in is about 3c now I think. Was 12c when many people bought their panels.)
Note: My state 100% renewable energy so reduction of carbon footprint has not bearing on my solar decisions.
This also feels like a fairly heavy handed way to encourage investments in batteries. But in the famous words of George W, "can't fool me again". As soon as there are too many batteries and the grid companies are not making enough money, they will introduce fees to have the batteries, or increase connection fees.
You need a battery to take advantage: then you may as well use a direct to market option like Amber. Which benefits grid stability too. 3 hrs without a battery is useless in Australia. As you generally use electricity for heating/cooling and need it longer than that esp. cooling.
To be fair, in a modern Maslow’s Aussie Hierarchy of Needs energy is a foundational Physiological Need, whereas energy for crypto mining is a luxury item best placed out past the outhouse of the main pyramid.
My home is in London UK and is relatively small and efficient, but 8kWh may be higher than our peak demand ever over more than 20 years in this house...
UK appliances cap out at 13A, or 3.1kW. Electric cookers may be on higher current wiring, but seem to be rated at 3kW max anyway.
I think the only way most people could get to 8kW continuous without an EV would be to turn on their electric oven, grill, and all spots on their electric hob. And the kettle.
My Danish electricity supplier lets me download my smart meter records since 2022.
It's by hour, and the highest times are probably when I was cooking with both the oven and the hob, and perhaps had the washing machine running too. The highest hour used 2.9kWh.
Plenty of cheap (e.g. rental) homes in the UK have crappy electric shows, which are usually rated at 6-8kW — but rarely used for a whole hour.
I think this is another of those weird "Electricity as fuel" metaphors where non-owners don't understand that an EV, like their phone, isn't a thing you specifically "fill up" like you would a petrol car.
Victoria has had smart meters rolled out for over a decade.
The rest of the states in the NEM are aiming for 2030 to complete their rollouts.
Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.
It's still worth it if you have a lot of load you can shift to the middle of the day (like a pool heater or battery), but for most 9-5 workers you just end up paying more at the times you're actually home.
Smart meters are free, most people already have one.
I thought most Australians had different pricing for peak/off-peak. I'm paying 39c/kWh for peak (3pm to 9pm) and 20c/kWh for off-peak (9pm to 3pm the next day).
Sure, a battery isn't available to everyone. But I is available for many.
One would have to do the math, cost of battery versus 24kw free daily. But clearly for lots of people the math will work.
A side effect of policies like this is effectively getting people to invest capital to time-shift elec usage. That's good policy. Reducing the peaks in consumption solves other problems.
The utilities don't really want to sell you the cheap solar. They'd rather write op-eds about how too much solar is flooding the grid and beg for more money to invest in the grid elements they can make money from.
The government is having to force them to reflect the abundance of cheap, clean energy at these times in at least one of their tariff offerings.
They can bend the rules slightly by adding other daily charges or limitations and upping the price at other times to reduce uptake and move us all slightly further from the global optimum but maximize their profits.
I miss having Griddy in Texas. Direct access to the wholesale market is probably not good for the lower end of the consumer segment, but for people with some functional marbles it can make a big difference on the demand side of the grid.
I feel like they had to kill griddy before all the powerwall solutions started showing up. We simply cannot empower the peasants with both things at once. The ability to store energy makes access to wholesale prices substantially more effective.
I'll never forget the days where we would get push notifications about negative prices. I'd throw the dryer and oven on every time to try and unwind the meter a bit.
This article is misleading as it implies that Australian energy retailers must provide every household with 3 hours of free electricity.
This is not the case. From 1 July 2026, Australian energy retailers with more than 1,000 customers must offer at least one energy plan which includes 3 hours of free electricity, capped at 24kWh per day, to residential customers in 3 states - NSW, SE Queensland and South Australia. https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer
Not all energy plans that the retailers offer have to include 3 hours of free electricity. In practice, most energy plans currently offered don’t include 3 hours of free electricity but some retailers such as Globird are offering more than one energy plan which includes ‘free’ electricity.
The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity.
Australian consumers can choose the retailer and energy plan their home or business is on and can change their plan at any time.
This page on the Energy Consumers Australia website has more details about the Solar Sharer Offer and a similar Victorian Government scheme which starts on 1 October. https://energyconsumersaustralia.com.au/news/solar-sharer-of...
Wait, capped at 24 kWh a day? Our household consumed 8 kWh per day over the past week (gas cooking, no airco). So with a home battery that sinks 10 kWh during those 3 hours you have minimal energy costs?
This is what I am doing. 42 kWh battery, 6 kW solar and fully electrified house, 2x EVs. I am able to charge cars at work and so in the depths of winter I am able to run the house by charging during the 3 hour window. There have been just a couple of cold (~2-4 degC) days when the battery was depleted 1-2 hours before the window starts.
As the weather warms and we get more solar exposure we will easily be in excess. We get a very small export rate with a bonus for no energy consumption during peak evening hours which can offset the fixed daily charge.
There are a lot of gotchas that you need to be aware of. 42 kWh is nominal capacity not the actual usable capacity. House load, max grid import and export capacity, max inverter capacity, AC or DC coupled panels, battery charging profile, battery temp are all factors in how much you can charge in the window. For example I have max 15 kW grid draw, with a 10 kW inverter that can charge the battery. I can put in max ~30 kWh into the battery, so I also run other loads in the house to use the other 5 kW capacity. If I go over 5 kW house load the battery charge is clipped to maintain grid import limit.
It costs $5-$10 for the electricity to charge a car using level 2 charging. It is a trivial "perk" for an employee that costs an order of magnitude more per hour of work.
We have a company fleet which is being slowly converted to EV where possible in line with company net zero policy so there is good charging infrastructure that is extended to all employees. We also have other initiatives such as solar and biogas generation.
> Is this "virtue signalling"
> I am not making any value judgement
Calling something "virtue signalling" is a value judgement.
throwaway account and "virtue signalling" plus a dig at so called subsidies. Oh and "no value judgement" except for the value judgement. You are not helpful here.
Forget 3hrs free. We lived in the tropics in Australia with a ~6kW system and often had negative quarterly invoices (i.e. got paid by our retailer) ... esp. in winter months. Aircon, pool, appliances all electric. At the very least the pool pump ran free all year round.
Edit: should add, that's straight solar no battery
It's got nothing to do with the hemisphere.
Most likely the aircon is running less in winter so they don't use as much power. There is not much of a winter in the tropics.
Winter is the cold one down here too mate
What are some direct solar appliances or equipment you've found that you like?
We live in a deep valley where it snows a ton in Canada, and with 7.2kw of panels and no battery we only get a bill in winter. For the entire year our power bill is $500, and we have heat pump heat, and disconnected the natural gas.
We just got a very high efficiency wood stove, I expect we will now have no electricity bill each year.
Yes - the regulated offer is capped at 24 kWh per day but some retailers such as Globird and CovaU are offering plans which include up to 50 kWh per day of ‘free’ electricity. With a large enough battery and inverter you could just end up paying daily supply charges of $1.65-2.20 per day.
Critically, that cost excludes the amortized amount the batteries will be over that period. And if you're cycling them every day like this, they're not going to last more than 15~20 years.
Just for reference our fully electric household (including cooking, water and aircon). Highest usage this month on a very hot day was 25kWh. (Disclaimer: I am not in Australia. Already cover most of it with roof solar. No battery yet)
I pay about 38c per kilowatt plus $1.70 per day for the connection fee. So by that maths, you'd save 8×0.38=$3.04 per day. A 10kWh battery is in the ballpark of $4000. So it'll take about 4 years to break even. Then you'd just have to pay the connection fee, which seem to be increasing every year.
Also, many energy retailers increased the daily 'connection service fee' to compensate. My dad's daily fee went up an extra 55c~, or +$200/year.
Moreover, apartment dwelling residential customers connected to embedded networks (many new apartment blocks in NSW, Victoria and Queensland) are not eligible for the Solar Share Offer because under section 6(3)(c), a consumer supplied through an embedded network is already excluded from the Commonwealth Electricity Retail Code’s definition of a «small customer».
The government won't address this particular perverse situation with the embedded networks until the 2027–28 DMO period.
I love being ripped off because I'm renting, so instead of having a direct relationship with my service providers, they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager who I'm sure in no shape way or form receives a kick-back.
So I'm stuck with an energy provider that is too incompetent to figure out how to bill me correctly, but puts a markup on what I'd pay as a home owner, and I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!
No IPv6, no gigabit Internet, no free solar electricity.
What is the limiting factor in getting NBN? Getting fiber to the premises is that hard part, and that's already done.
These are things where policy is set by government and so could be moved by your elected representatives. If you already have a preferred flavour of representative, try to get them to want to do this. If you don't, here's an issue that could make you prefer one over another, make sure they know that.
No, technically it can't. An individual writing to an MP is rarely sufficient by itself.
Australia’s embedded network landscape is a peculiarly intricate tangle of nuance, complexity and regulatory optimism. Note that the embedded networks are distinctly unique and different from retail utility providers.
Please bear with my lengthy explanation for a few rather long moments.
Embedded networks are private distribution systems sitting behind a single connection to the public grid (shopping malls, apartment blocks, retirement villages, camp and caravan sites etc). They all have, effectively, a single wire going into the site.
Originally, they were designed for incidental on-selling by site managers, and they are a regulatory exception allowing the operator to on-sell electricity and other services without becoming a fully authorised energy retailer or licenced distributor. The embedded networks typically bundle: 1) electricity, 2) centralised hot water, 3) cold water, 4) gas, 5) heating / cooling (air-conditioning) and 6) fibre to the premises (sometimes, not always). All those things are governed by separate statutes.
In theory as well as occasionally in practice, they should be cheaper for consumers because they are able to negotiate lower wholesale rates from the upstream supplier and because the customer churn is non-existent (the customer is locked into the network and has nowhere to go). In some cases, that is indeed true, but because the current legislation explicitly excludes the embedded networks from the government reporting, many embedded network operators have resorted to the insidious exploitation of their customers, and the government is clueless because the operators' imposed pricing is opaque.
Natiaonally, Australia does not have a single federal embedded-network statute. The principal framework is a cooperative national scheme comprising 7 government bodies (Australian Energy Market Commission, AER, Australian Energy Market Operator, National Electricity Law and Rules, National Energy Retail Law and Rules, Australian Consumer Law and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).
At the state level – so far – only Victoria has largely banned new embedded networks, with the remaining states either participating or not participating in the National Energy Customer Framework. Overall, NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and the national regulators are tightening the rules but they still have a way to go.
For a reform such as embedded-network regulation, the path looks closer to:
An MP may understand: «Residents in apartment towers are getting poor outcomes». They are highly unlikely to understand: a) market settlement arrangements, b) metering identifiers, c) distribution-loss factors, d) retailer-of-last-resort frameworks, e) exemption classes, f) embedded-network-manager functions, or g)interactions between state strata law and national electricity law.Unsurprisingly and consequently, politicians become heavily dependent on: a) departmental advice, b) regulator advice, c) industry submissions, d) consultant reports, and e) lobby groups.
The people who understand the system – and especially those one who know how to work the system to their benefit – therefore acquire disproportionate influence over how the system evolves. That does not necessarily imply corruption, it is a structural feature of technical governance. Customers, however, refer to it as «rent seeking», even if they own an apartment.
Despite all that, elected representatives still do remain one of the few machineries capable of changing the underlying legal framework. The deeper issue is that modern regulatory states are neither pure democracies nor pure technocracies – they are hybrids. Formal authority remains democratic, but practical power is distributed among elected officials, bureaucracies, regulators, courts, industry participants, consultants, lobbyists and organised interest groups.
I have recently gone down the rabbit hole of the embedded networks and learned a bewildering number of things hence the fulmination.
Ok, this post has to be a Top 10 HN of all time for me. Massively informative. Thank you. +9000
Plus, extra Internet points for using this Unicode char that I didn't know about: ↝
Single customers having these issues don't really have any power to convince representatives. Historically, the only real way to enact change in this way is to have thousands of people contacting their representatives about it.
Unless I misunderstood them, this is a common problem so there's no reason that wouldn't happen though.
If it's a common problem then change will happen without you. A difference of one is no difference at all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
> […] why the building does not have high quality NBN connections?
Because their place of residence is connected to an embedded network that has eschewed the NBN Co and chosen to connect to a private fibre operator who sits outside the NBN. They probably also pay more compared to NBN for the same speed.
Not every embedded network supplies fibre, but some do, and that appears to be the case in their situation.
By the way, NBN has recently upgraded the network to 2Gbps, with 10 Gbps having been trialled but no availability date set as of yet.
At least part of the story is a cautionary tale about electing the LNP. The NBN was originally going to be as you describe, but then Tony Abbot came along, under instruction from his pal Rupert Murdoch, and threw a major spanner in the works.
He decided it was waaaaay too expensive and big-governmenty to do that and besides, Uncle Rupert had a satellite tv business to defend, we don't want him to have to compete with the likes of Netflix now do we? So he told Australia that it was too much money for a "glorified video delivery service" and that 25Mbit was enough for anyone for the foreseeable, and threw out the original plans.
The plan was downgraded to "Fibre in some places, we'll reuse copper where possible". This ended up taking longer and costing more than the original plan, delivered worse service, and we're only now getting towards where we should have been under the first plan. A lot of the work has had to be repeated due to the initial poor rollout and then needing to upgrade as that 25Mbit started looking woefully inadequate. Just last year a further $5 billion was pledged to replace more FTTN/Copper with FTTP.
It's still more expensive than other markets I'm aware of, a lot of people who aren't far from cities and major towns are on wireless connections (theoretical 400Mbit, actual ~150), and the real bush "Sky Muster" system tops at 100/5 (actual ~55-83) and is having its lunch eaten by starlink.
tl;dr the Liberal (conservative) party got in and fucked it up.
> […] they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager […]
The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation of wiring, air-conditioning, gas, hot water, and sometimes the internet – usually for free – and that happens before the strata comes into the picture. The strata is left with no choice but to inherit a fixed-term contract (typically 3-5 years), after which it can switch to… another embedded network.
The builders accept offers from embedded networks because it reduces their overall costs.
The NSW government has enacted the first tranche of regulations for embedded networks from the 1st of July this year, with the embedded networks price caps being introduced in early 2027 (that is the promise, anyway). If you live in NSW, IPART is the government body in charge of the regulation, and it is accepting submissions until the end of this month. Prepare and make your own submission whilst you can, as I have done.
> The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation
I got into a dispute with my embedded provider because of a bad meter and came to discover through friends and family in the construction industry as well as speaking to a former sales person in the industry that there is a lot of additional corruption in the process with straight up payments being made to win installs with developers.
When it came time to switch providers in our building, strata was promised electric vehicle chargers as part of signing a new deal with a new provider. They never delivered because they found an escape clause because of fire safety approval.
We're now locked in for years (again) and they've already increased rates once in the first year.
Nobody in the entire chain works in the interests of residents or owners. It's a completely broken system and a thorn in the side of otherwise advanced and progressive Australian energy policy. It needs to be abolished ASAP.
I still pay more for my single apartment living alone in electricity than what family and friends do in full large homes with air conditioning, 4-6 residents, heated pools, etc. It's astonishing.
«Mates rates» is a big problem in Australia, indeed. At best, it is collusion, but typically it is corruption.
I have recently gone through the entire chain of complaints, the ombudsman including, and I have gained plenty of insight into how insidious the current scheme is.
NSW has set out to do something about it, with price caps being introduced in 2027. If you live in NSW, make your submission to the regulator (IPART) ASAP – submissions are closing at the end of July.
I feel like this is still relevant today:
Clarke and Dawe - The Energy Market Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELaBzj7cn14
Still describes the current state of affairs perfectly. I'd love to see them on snowy 2 today.
> I'd love to see them on snowy 2 today.
I can only imagine the comment warnings on that segment considering that, sadly, John Clarke passed away nine years ago.
First world problems but my Australian retail plan already offers a free period between 11am-2pm without any usage cap, so now with this policy introduction i'm worried my provider will introduce such a cap under the guise of 'its what the government says we can do'.
At the risk of Reddit-style mass downvoting, I strongly encourage you to borrow Oracle-level of debt (billions of USD) and build a Tesla Megapack battery "farm" and immediately begin mining Bitcoin. Of course, the battery "farm" will conveniently only be activated during these special hours. The only forseeable risk to ROI for this project would be AT&T- or Comcast-style of "double top secret" limitations over the "without any usage cap" clause.
</sacasm>
Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.
Grid scale batteries and household batteries are being widely deployed.
Australia is the third largest market in the world for grid scale batteries, and has the highest per-capita capacity in the world; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/10/21/australia-becomes-wor...
Not to mention more than 200k new household batteries installed in 2025 (out of roughly 10 million households).
I think it's less a question of batteries being economical, and more a question of the relative economics of batteries vs solar panels.
After all, if the highest demand is between 16:30 and 19:00 you could use batteries to store power at 12:00 and sell it at 18:00 - or in famously sunny Australia you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand.
If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.
(Also, from a politican's perspective, making batteries highly economical is how you get batteries built. And an awful lot of pro-environment policies involve raising taxes, banning things and creating new chores; it's nice to have some green policy announcements that actually benefit voters in the short term.)
> you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand
No you could not. For half the year the sun has set by 18:00.
I mean in the dead of winter, yes. For six months of the year? Definitely not.
Definitely so. Unless you are on the equator, the sun is up for less than 12 hours a day from the autumnal equinox to the spring equinox. The sun will set before 18:00 local solar time. So apart from funkiness with time zones and summer time (which extends a couple of weeks past the autumnal equinox in Aus), yes, roughly half the year.
You're not crazy in the broad sweep of your idea, but actually because the sun isn't a point of light you're also not strictly correct, for example in Singapore the day is always more than 12 hours long.
You won't get 12% return if your panels generate electricity which is only paid between 18 and 19, because there is already overcapacity between 16:30 and 18.
EDIT
I forgot to say: I like your idea of intraday arbitrage using batteries! It is a very cool idea. Surely, this could be well modeled to know your expected ROI before investment/build-out.
One of my co-workers (I'm Australian) has 500 kilowatt-hours of storage at home...which is wild. Much more common is the 10-20 kilowatt-hours of domestic storage for a house.
More details please, do they have a website that explains their setup?
Are they a hoarder of old car batteries and the like?
What is their fire suppression setup like??? Granted I guess they could be doing pumped hydro storage lol
If they're in a rural / industrial area setting it could quite literally be a fire break around the battery area (bare dirt and no overhanging trees).
Fire control in Australia is first and foremost about limiting spread - the bush in Australia goes off if it catches hard.
"Mini" pumped hydro is a thing here (in places): https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-01/australian-first-mini...
My dad buys lead acids written off from storm damage to solar systems (The whole system gets replaced under insurance even if the batteries are just a bit worn) and then sells them to preppers in the middle of nowhere. For a while he had above 300KW/h of storage, basically completely off grid with few shutdowns. It was kind of nuts. His house did burn down, but it was arson.
Does he have a saltwater aquarium, or any other hobby that can make use of it? If not, I can highly recommend that he get into it, if he's into that kind of overkill :)
That's ~8 used EV batteries. Each cost less than 10k, maybe 6-8k AUD.
If you know your way around high voltage DC, got a tractor and appropriate emulator - not exactly difficult or super expensive to pull off.
Granted it's pretty uncommon setup as grid batteries themselves are pretty cheap too and used EV battery is simply too large for home user, too much hassle, liability, etc to save like $2-3k.
> but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical
They are super economical in Australia and the government even offers discounts and interest free loan of 15k to buy them.
They are super economical… which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?
The more households that buy them, the less peak power generation is needed and less large scale battery deployments. If the ROI of a household battery was just 4%, you are better off economically paying higher power bills and sticking that money in an index fund. But if subsidies increase that ROI, more people buy batteries. The money the government contributes hopefully ends up less than they would need to spend on large scale battery deployments or on legacy power generation to power peak usage times. It also has the side effect of getting more citizens (literally) invested in sustainable power usage, and people get more interested in insulating their homes, buying more efficient appliances, moving away from gas etc.
> which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?
the gov't also offers interest free (but inflation indexed) loans to tertiary education.
Just because there's a subsidy, doesn't mean the tax payer is paying a price for inefficiency. The policy itself needs to be individually examined to determine whether it's an efficient use of funds, not simply that it's a subsidy (time frame needs to be taken into account too).
Is it so out of the ordinary that a government tries to help people save money or what's the question? Sounds like you've only had the American experience in life unfortunately.
If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless.
Meanwhile the government doesn't have any of its own money, so it can't really give you something that was yours to begin with, all it can do is take it from you and then give it back with strings attached. How is that helping you? Instead of subsidizing something you can make up your own mind about whether you want, they should just lower your taxes by the amount of the subsidy and let you use your money for that or something else at your choice.
> If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless.
Spoken as someone who never been poor. There is definitely a ton of stuff people with money can do to save more money, that is completely out of reach for the people who would actually benefit from those savings the most. Subsidies is quite literally about reaching these folks that others tend to forget about.
> all it can do is take it from you and then give it back with strings attached. How is that helping you?
Compared to "take it from you and not give it back to you", it's definitely helping people who have less money. Not sure how this needs explaining.
> Spoken as someone who never been poor. There is definitely a ton of stuff people with money can do to save more money, that is completely out of reach for the people who would actually benefit from those savings the most. Subsidies is quite literally about reaching these folks that others tend to forget about.
Except that there is no additional money, its just your own money but now there are strings.
On top of that, that still isn't necessary for things that save a non-trivial amount of money, because that's what loans are for. If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
> Compared to "take it from you and not give it back to you", it's definitely helping people who have less money. Not sure how this needs explaining.
Why would anybody want that either, instead of just not taking it from you to begin with?
Well that would apply to a lot of thing governments spend money on. I think the idea is that governments are better at allocating capital in certain cases (obviously one might disagree with that) than the people/companies who generate the most tax revenue. I mean on an individual level even if solar batteries are profitable people who have sufficient disposable income might chose to invest it into the US stock market (if it still offers better returns) amongst other things than into something that benefits the Australian economy or society.
> that's what loans are for
Upthread: "interest free loan of 15k" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48904009
Loans for non-trivially profitable investments don't require government interest subsidies.
The recipient doesn't necessarily know ahead of time how profitable the investment will be. Risk aversion will cause them to avoid investments that are profitable in expectation if they believe the chance of ending up worse off is too high. By offering interest-free loans, the government can pool that risk so that individual loan recipients hesitate less to make the positive-expectation investment.
Well...
>>> If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
This depends on whether you'll pay back the loan. Just because paying the loan back saves you $50 / month forever starting immediately doesn't mean you'll do it. You might be the kind of person who takes out a loan, spends all your money on something else, and lets the bills go unpaid.
If you aren't that kind of person, you probably do have some accumulated capital.
But if you are, just the fact that the loan is hugely profitable and you should be able to pay it back - if you were a completely different person - doesn't mean you'll be able to get the loan. You shouldn't be able to get the loan, because you won't pay it back.
... for purchases from "approved" "accredited" suppliers[]. AKA the interest differential is regressive tax to funnel money to favored suppliers. Notice there's no option for the poor to simply install it themselves, which would save them more money than an interest free loan, but wouldn't funnel money to rich government approved install contractors.
And there's your grift. As soon as the home owner wants to allocate the "profit" of install to themselves, it is a swift kick in the ass but that will go to our buddies, and thank you very much for your taxes.
[] https://www.energy.nsw.gov.au/households/grants-rebates/home...
> Except that there is no additional money, its just your own money but now there are strings.
I understand what you mean, and yeah, "it's just your money", but also, it really isn't. Poor people have to pay taxes, no way around it, getting them back as subsidies is still better for them than not getting it back at all. The choice isn't "Keep the money or have subsidies", the choice is "The money goes to other stuff or get subsidies".
> On top of that, that still isn't necessary for things that save a non-trivial amount of money, because that's what loans are for. If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it.
Are those interest-free or managed by for-profit entities? Because "loans" are vastly different things compared to subsidies, but I'm guessing you already knew this.
> Why would anybody want that either, instead of just not taking it from you to begin with?
Because "not taking it from you to begin with" isn't a practical and realistic alternative, that's not how the world, and especially taxes and government works...
> The choice isn't "Keep the money or have subsidies", the choice is "The money goes to other stuff or get subsidies".
That's the false dichotomy that happens in a broken government, but then why hold that out as something desirable?
> Are those interest-free or managed by for-profit entities?
Is the larger amount of mortgage or car loan debt they have to carry when they pay the extra money in tax?
> Because "not taking it from you to begin with" isn't a practical and realistic alternative, that's not how the world, and especially taxes and government works...
Your argument seems to be that lowering taxes on ordinary people is impossible?
> That's the false dichotomy that happens in a broken government, but then why hold that out as something desirable?
Personally I see it as stuff that happens in countries where the government care about the well-being of all, not just a select few (usually the ones with the most money). It's desirable that society improves, lots of that happens because of tax money. Subsidies usually means re-allocating funds, not raising taxes, although that might happen over time. Still, increasing taxes isn't inherently bad, especially when used for good. But I also know this is a somewhat controversial point of view in many hyper-capitalistic societies.
> Your argument seems to be that lowering taxes on ordinary people is impossible?
Yeah sure, I'm also clearly arguing for murdering children. Fun discussion, hope you'll enjoy the rest of your Tuesday :)
I'm honestly having trouble comprehending what your position is supposed to be here. It really seems to be that using the money to lower taxes on ordinary people rather than providing them with subsidies is a thing that could never happen. As if the prospect that their taxes could be lower than they are now, rather than only the same or higher, is something you can't even imagine.
Well off people do not allocate capital in a way that's socially or economically (on a national level) optimal. So the government has to do that for them (even if those who the majority of taxes personally benefit less from that than if they were allowed to keep that money).
I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. After all there are hardly any personal incentives for individuals to invest into infrastructure, education or healthcare of people who can't afford it and plenty of other areas even if that's what allowed them to accumulate a significant proportion of not the overwhelming majority of their wealth over the long term.
If there's hardly any individual desire, as you say, to fund the development of the poor then taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people (even if only roughly a majority or their representatives).
Given that most taxation done with the the advertised goal of helping the poor in Australia does happen with popular assent of individuals, I would theorize your position is false and that people do have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor -- for profit, humanitarian / charitable reasons, and a variety of other considerations.
> have some individual incentives to develop services offered to the poor
I never said that wasn't the case but historically that "some" was never sufficient. On average people are rational and selfish to a larger extent than they are altruistic.
> taxes in that pursuit are illegitimate under a theory taxation happens by the assent of the people
Well the whole concept of an organized society falls apart if individuals can personally freely chose which laws to obey and which taxes to pay. You have to have a balance based on a reasonable consensus, otherwise you end up with totalitarianism or anarchy (and in that case the people who have the means and resources to do that will establish alternative power structures and will end up subjugating those who do not AND also outcompete those how have the means but are unwilling to do the same).
No, I'm not talking about picking and choosing for a voted tax. I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor. Clearly under anything remotely resembling the Australian representation of what they claim their representative democracy is, the majority of people already decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure.
It can't simultaneously be true that most don't want to help the poor at their own cost while also the tax has been legitimized by the majority wanting to help the poor at their own cost. Only individuals or representatives elected by individuals can vote and if their incentive was to not help the poor then they'd vote not to and that would be that.
> I'm saying it can't be true most people don't want to help fund the poor if the majority are voting to tax themselves to fund the poor.
Or people have a tendence to perceive a system where everyone is required to pay their "fair share" as more just and are more willing to (often begrudgingly) participate in it. If the system was fully voluntary the average contribution would be significantly lower that it is now. Also a significant proportion might feel they benefit from this system more than they pay into it (or are risk averse and prefer having the safety net even if they contribute more than they benefit)
> decided they individually are incentivized to help the poor develop infrastructure
Well I'm generally vaguely incentivized to help the poor and develop infrastructure. Would I be willing to voluntary give up 40% of my income to do that rather than a significantly lower proportion? No, of course not. When it comes to infrastructure I'd be willing to pay very little or nothing at all if I know my neighbour isn't contributing anything. I don't think the average person would behave particularly differently than me.
I can tell you you're absolutely wrong about the average person. I live in a place with no public infrastructure (I'm talking about, not even public roads, and not some rich HOA, a ~poor unorganized community without any infrastructure association) which has allowed me to view how average people react when there is no taxation based infrastructure. When it breaks, the neighbors help. I help maintain the roads for my poor neighbor. My other neighbor helped fix my water line when it broke. Sometimes I take my heavy equipment and donate labor to prepare for storms, etc. The infrastructure is literally donation based. We get it done for a tiny fraction of what the tax based system cost and everyone is far better off, even if the amount donated is less than what the taxes would be and some people "cheat" the system.
It's actually quite rare to find someone who says I will help the poor, but only if my neighbor also pays, otherwise they can get fucked. This is very bizarre thinking. The people in my basically ancap-dystopia neighborhood don't even behave in this sadistic way. It honestly sounds more like a manufactured "gotcha" to win an argument than a way someone would think.
In reality the fraction people that would vote to tax themselves, are more than willing to donate in the case they don't get the tax, your sadistic MAD view where you punish the poor just because some other guy didn't help too is relatively rare and not indicative of the mindset of most people who are voting to help the poor. I honestly think that most anyone who would vote for the tax, does not act that way when dropped in a neighborhood like mine, and you probably would not either.
> If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless.
…assuming people are good at math.
And given that most people probably don't have a bunch of cash just sitting there doing nothing, they will have to take out a loan and most folks probably don't like going into debt even though 'the math says' it's a good ROI.
The idea that 'ROI good, therefore people will do it' is the 'spherical cow' of economics. In reality there are all sorts of other motivations for human economic actions:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
To be clear, this doesn't change the price floor for ROI calculations. A non "approved" contractor or DIY job non-subsidized is well cheaper than a piddly few percent interest rate arbitrage to a pre-approved list. This does nothing beyond let some rich contractors regressively allocate money from taxpayers to themselves by artificially appearing a bit less of a premium to the alternatives.
It looks more like to me some installers saw their industry was becoming commoditized and the government got together with them to figure out how to grift taxpayers into making the more connected ones command a premium while simultaneously being better positioned to eat the lunch of the small middle class "guy and a truck" who does cash jobs for cheap but has no resources to become "accredited" on a subsidization list.
It can work when the marginal cost of new capacity is high, compared to existing capacity.
E.g., if the marginal cost of supporting 1 kW of new capacity may be X, while the current averaged cost of 1 kW provided to existing customers may be Y, with Y < X.
The customer will calculate their ROI on a battery purchase based on the cost Y of kW to them, which may be poor (4%), while on the government level of the ROI may is closer to that implied by the cost X (say 10%). However, the government cannot easily pass on the "marginal cost" to customers as there is no specific kWh which is that marginal one across all customers.
In this case a subsidy directly picks out customers who can reduce their demand by buying a battery (e.g., a subsidy which raises the ROI to somewhere between 4% and 10%).
Because the individualized incentives do not take into account the community benefits.
The money saved is distributed across the community, for both those that directly benefit and those that can't (eg renters, apartments etc). The general benefit is of greater value than the individual savings.
Your attitude that somehow taxation is theft is a very silly Ayn Randian Objectivism outgrowth that has never been true, even in the most "free" US states.
> Because the individualized incentives do not take into account the community benefits.
Only if the utility company is pricing things incorrectly.
If the price of electricity is ~free during the day and expensive in the evening then the individualized incentives for installing a battery line right up.
> Your attitude that somehow taxation is theft is a very silly Ayn Randian Objectivism outgrowth that has never been true, even in the most "free" US states.
Whether it's theft or not doesn't change the arithmetic. When you're paying them the money they're paying you, it was your money to begin with.
Think about people who could not afford the initial investment. It's beneficial for society here if the government redistributes wealth for the benefit of all.
> Think about people who could not afford the initial investment.
This is what loans and installment plans are for, the payments for which come out of the savings on the utility bill.
> It's beneficial for society here if the government redistributes wealth for the benefit of all.
Which has nothing to do with batteries. If you want to do that then provide them with a refundable tax credit that allows for a negative tax rate in cases where that's deemed desirable.
And even that doesn't apply to the majority of people who are currently paying a non-negative amount of tax. Why attach strings to the money going to a middle class homeowner who should have just been allowed to keep that portion of their own salary?
Why should they? In my mind it's all a coordination problem. Sometimes loans work better, sometimes subsidies work better.
Neither loans nor subsidies are dirty words IMHO.
> In my mind it's all a coordination problem.
But that's the point. It isn't. Electricity costs more in the evening than during the day and there is a technology that can profitably be used to arbitrage the difference. There is no coordination problem at all, people have the direct individual incentive to buy the technology, on credit if necessary, without any form of government subsidy or involvement whatsoever.
That cow is looking too spherical for my tastes. Credit is another thing which is highly intertwined with goverment involvement.
"If something actually saves money then it doesn't require a subsidy because people would be doing it regardless."
Yet people frequently don't. This assertion and reality disagree.
Think of it as a giant corporate tax break, but for the little people.
> Think of it as a giant corporate tax break
So the thing everyone correctly maligns because it's generally some form of corruption or inefficiency?
I know people who would purchase solar panels and batteries, but they do not have enough capital to do so.
In Australia? The houses are like 30x-100x more expensive than a battery, how would this be possible?
The government loan changes the calculus. Allows for short term thinking and a long term benefit.
Yes. People can't always afford super economical things when the initial cost is high and the pay-off takes a while, but is easily worth it in the end.
They are, but they still take time to build, and loans to finance.
Here are two of SA's (which has the most renewable generation): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve https://web.archive.org/web/20220523164905/https://www.elect...
Yeah this is why a lot of people were thinking that the Australian opposition asking for spending $40-50 billions for nuclear that would come online in 20-30 years and to keep using coal and gas till then were being stupid.
It wasn’t $40-50 billion. It was estimated to cost $116-$600 billion to build 7 nuclear reactors https://smartenergy.org.au/nuclear-fallout-116-600-billion-t...
I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.
I am talking about the $30 billion that the opposition was making up. My point was that even those made up numbers for nuclear were still more expensive than installing solar and batteries.
It's not stupid if they are paid off by the people selling the coal and gas.
It's just a treasonous level of corruption.
Voters opting to be extorted like this would have been stupid.
They are, and they are being rapidly rolled out and the "post sunset" spikes are rapidly being flattened by both grid storage and "behind the meter" home batteries.
Maybe they just don't work? Otherwise someone's leaving tons of money on the table. Which implies nobody is.
They've already burned at least $15bn on that disastrous Snowy Hydro "battery" project... Could've just rolled out consumer batteries on a large scale instead.
At current battery project prices, matching Snowy 2.0’s roughly 350 GWh of energy storage capacity with Tesla Megapacks would cost around AUD $218 billion [0] and require Tesla’s entire global Megapack production capacity redirected to a single client for five years.
$15 billion is far more than Snowy 2.0 should have cost. But it remains substantially cheaper than any lithium-ion battery build for bulk storage. Storage on this scale is essential in a post-coal electricity grid, and batteries are not (yet) plausible substitutes for bulk storage.
[0] This assumes linear scaling. In reality, placing an order like this would grossly distort supply and demand on many levels. Thus the cost would ultimately be superlinear.
Snowy 2.0 has major limitations on what it can supply, the headline number is very misleading.
And the comparison shouldn't be to batteries alone, but solar/wind and batteries. The former can be used directly and fill the batteries repeatedly on a timeline that is predictable.
It provides no extra value for the electricity to be stored long term if for the same money you can generate and store it short term.
Article on the various restrictions on Snowy 2.0:
https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-cost-blowouts-might-be...
Yes Snowy 2.0 just won't have enough water for many of the years in out future.
Yeah the battery storage story has to acknowledge the fact that global production capacity simply isn't actually high enough to deliver that many batteries so we need alternative solutions to the problem as well.
From Australlian ABC news...
The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from \(\$12\) billion to as high as \(\$42\) billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission). Originally announced in 2017 with a $2 billion price tag, the project has faced massive scale and logistical blowouts. The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from $12 billion to as high as $42 billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission).
That said , hydro systems have a LONG LIFESPAN - 100 YEARS ?
Batteries need to be replaced every X years.
So the ecomiomics of the comparisoan would need to be calculated ...
All the complexity has been in geotechnical issues, pockets of mud, sinkholes, then ultra hard rock, then loose shale, damage in blasting operations, needing to pump liquid nitrogen into the rock to deal with subterranean water flow, soluble limestone etc etc.
One of the scariest industrial deaths you can imagine: cutting into a pocket of shale and the TBM and crew just vanishing into the maw of the Midgard serpent and the whole tunnel filling.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/tunnel-boring-machine...
Dinorwig[1] was opened in 1984, and is looking at a £1B refurbishment shortly for “at least another 25 years” lifespan.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
[2] https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/analysis/re-planting-the-...
That was exactly the point of the project though - it was designed by the conservative side of politics in our country to try and crowd out investment in batteries and other renewables while taking enough time to build to keep coal plants operating longer in the meantime.
It didn't work at all for that though - we had a lot of private investment in large-scale batteries anyway, because the cost came down quickly just as most people (apart from the conservatives) expected. Then the other side of Government got in and put a subsidy scheme to get hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, which has been multiple times better bang-for-buck than the Snowy 2.0 scheme, as well as taking far shorter a time. At the same time coal plants are shutting down as expected because they are increasingly unreliable given their old ages.
Snowy 2.0 be an expensive stranded asset basically, it will work and be somewhat useful but extremely uneconomical so basically relying on the cost being written off - if it had to recoup any investment then it couldn't run because it'd never be able to sell the power for high enough.
You can do similar math with building above ground oil storage tank capacity aaaaaand giving everyone free gas cans.
And you can get out every drop. And it’s always ready to go. Do need to cycle your inventory.
Fire departments probably wouldn’t be happy about it.
Affordability is always relative. Australia can't afford that much battery storage, it has to spend $368bn on nuclear submarines. /s
(did you mean 20kwh per user, or 20GW overall?)
The submarines will be in port so much of the time, we may as well hook up their nukes to power the grid.
That sounds great at first, but just imaging having dynamic price contracts, like tibber, that also forward you the negative prices while still maintaining very low grid fees.
Edited to add: Clarification required in the title that the free energy is only between 11am and 2pm
Very interested to see how this turns out. Ultimately we want the transition to benefit both consumers and producers / distributors (the industry). The problem from the rapid uptake of solar in Australia has been an over-supply during this 10/11am to 2/3pm period. If that over-supply is suitably encouraged to be soaked up then hopefully consumers can reduce their power bills whilst the industry has less effort in managing the oversupply and less stress on infrastructure.
It's also about time that those who lack the means or situation to have solar panels of their own can get some advantage, in a 'herd immunity' kind of way.
I'm in the privileged position to have had solar panels for over a decade, and now have a battery as well, and it was very obvious to me at the time that, in regards to solar, it cost money to save money, so if you couldn't afford it then the savings are inaccessible.
This change hopefully helps those who need it, at least somewhat.
The change certainly brings in some weirdness too.
For instance, I'm looking at a new hot water system. Economically speaking, I'm better off buying an oversized tank using resistive heating that I only need to heat once per day. The grid provides free power and I buy a cheaper appliance. But environmentally it sucks, as more solar needs to be rolled out to cover the additional non-peak usage (guess about 6x the power usage of a smaller tank with heatpump).
To check I understand you: the smaller tank with heatpump would consume less energy outside the time window in which energy is free than the large tank with resistive heating, but has a higher capital cost which would outweigh the amount saved on energy?
If that's right, it's not obvious to me that building a suitably sized solar panel is environmentally worse than building a heat pump.
The smaller tank with heatpump will consume a lot less energy than the larger tank with resistive heat.
Economically to me, the larger tank is cheaper, because the appliance is cheaper, and I never pay for the power it uses.
Environmentally, yes, it is not obvious. The large tank requires many more solar panels to power it but no battery. The small tank and heatpump needs much less solar but battery for nighttime use.
But it is weird, because for decades heat pump tech has been pushed as the environmental choice and there are still a number of government subsidies to invest in heat pump hot water systems. And maybe that no longer makes sense, with the money saved buying cheaper and less efficient devices spent on more solar deployments.
But it’s also environmentally better for you to take the resistive heating thing. As long as you never need to heat it up outside of the noon-window that’s strictly positive. Because the “additional” solar panels will be necessary anyways to cover the night/late evening usage. The optimal buildout will always have superfluous energy at noon. That’s fine. We just need to get over the whole “energy costs anything” thing. That’s only true if you need to spend fuel to generate it
Surprised they’re putting everyone on same timeslot. Would have expected some staggering to be helpful
From elsewhere:
so NSW and South Australia will be staggered in real time as they are in different time zones.As for everybody in the same time zone .. they are all seeing the same sun angle at noon (more or less) and all sharing the same over supply of power from all the grid connected solar power rooftops and farms. It's free surplus power during that time frame.
Yeah i get that they're all seeing similar but you'd still want to align this new demand with the output curve in some form of approximated pattern. Plus also prevent the sharp spike you'd get from everyone turning on their stuff at a coordinated hour. You're gonna have a bunch of stuff on timers all hit this at the same time. That makes life hard for the people balancing the grid's supply & demand.
Bit like in the UK they had issues with everyone watching popular TV shows and then turning on the kettle after in a perfectly syncronized timing across the country
There's too much available power then (curtailment/negative prices are fairly common now on sunny days), and not enough during the evenings, so it's an incentive for those who don't have/can't get batteries (e.g. renters) to shift their habits. It also can be spun as a cost-of-living action.
I find it amusing that back when solar and wind were niche and expensive the coal + oil lobby would lobby for "let the free market decide what to build".
When solar + wind plunged in price they stopped saying it.
Now that the market has driven down the price of solar, wind and storage, market based mechanisms have become ideal for solving the problem of what to do with surplus electricity.
Many retailers have been offering this for ~6 months already. Very popular with home battery owners (which have taken off over the last 9 months thanks to subsidies), so much so that the effect of people turning on loads is suspected as the reason for an increasing dip in grid frequency at 11 am [1].
[1] https://wattclarity.com.au/articles/2026/06/system-frequency...
Related to this article, I recently saw this video on YouTube: "I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes" [1]
It is wild how cheap are solar panels now. Really, bonkers cheap. A huge rooftop solar panel costs less than 100 USD. From everything that I read/see/watch, most of the cost associated with solar panel arrays is the labour required for installation. (No hate on those folks -- they are skilled labour!)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy-wFixuRVU
I've been on a GloBird plan with 3 free hours for a while. Works out very well as I have a 20 KWH battery and solar. Costs about $15 a month to run the house inc. cooking, heating/cooling, hot water, and charging my PHEV. To make the best of these sorts of plans you need to be home during that period and/or have a decent battery/inverter.
With 3 hours of free power, a 15kW inverter and a 42kWh battery, I could almost do away with my solar panels and just survive of free grid power. I do have a 15kW solar panel set up, but I get very little from selling anything back to the grid.
I have a 12 kW inverter (single phase) and 48 kWh battery. In Australia, 9 months of the year my 16 kW of solar fills the battery and covers all needs including cooking, heating and charging the EV.
In winter, I’ve been using Ovo’s 3 hours free for about a year now and that ensures the battery is filled up daily. My electricity bill returns a credit every month since I got the battery a year ago.
I was trying to understand how to do this, and I formed the opinion that most of the battery providers don’t really allow the degree of ‘on/off’ or ‘charge/discharge’ customisation as might be necessary to make this work? Or was I fooled by the packaged products that are aiming to turn me and my battery and panels into a residential power plant at the whim of the energy company?
The most popular batteries provide all the customization you need and more. Soo many features... it is exhausting. Even 'AI' modes trying to predict usage and solar generation using weather forecasts and top up from the grid at cheap rates if it thinks the power will probably be needed. A battery like Sigenergy's you can setup on a time based charging schedule (most popular for the free power plans), or have it pull Amber's live wholesale rates and put it into AI mode to avoid using their SmartShift VPP, or just hand over the keys to a VPP provider and let them drive.
Yes. With the 'free' power plans, you are better off not installing solar and investing the savings in a larger battery.
There is a 24KWh/day fair use
Grid power is already cheap. Making things free actually makes people use more power. Its called the rebound effect.
We already get free power between 0am and 6am, so with free power between 11am and 2pm we’ll have a whopping 9 hours of free power to charge our car and heat our water storage.
What plan and what provider to get free power from midnight to 6am?
I'm in a plan that gets me $0.08/kWh during those hours, and I'm planning to switch to one that's just over half that, but I haven't come across any free power in that time span.
I am curious what interesting opportunities free power for a short time opens up.
I know crypto mining in TX can operate like this, but that's boring.
Desalination and carbon capture are both energy restricted, that sounds a lot more interesting. However, the deployed equipment has to be cheap if you only have 3hrs per day of free power, right?
Seems like a good idea. Slightly tweaked consumer behavior can achieve what would take a hell of a lot of batteries
The requirement is to accept time of use TOU variant charging and if you cannot shift enough load into 3 hours you may pay more overall for power in other times of day.
Demand shifting is good. Do not mistake this as free energy, it very much depends. Many people still don't have TOU meters and many people won't successfully move load into the window.
Fixed line costs are rising massively. Electricity should be significantly cheaper but the economics here favour incumbents and people like John Quiggin arguing for renationalisation are drowned out.
Or buy a subsidized battery to store the free power and use it whenever you like.
Yes, that's also being done. A critique I have seen is that this is empowering the rich to get richer. Renters are less likely to be able to adopt these strategies.
The rich certainly benefit more, like anything where an investment needs to be made (I expect the new plans will be like the existing 'free' power plans and be a poor choice without a battery). In this case, the poor still benefit a little bit as it should drive down peak period prices and the cost of fixed rate plans.
Australia, excluding Western Australia as we are on a separate electricity grid.
From the article; this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
So yeah, not universal yet. But the precedent means it's moving in that direction. If WA homes end up producing lots of solar at midday then this opens the door there as well.
It applies in Victoria as well.
Victoria deregulated its market before NSW/SA/Qld.
All of the eastern states (SA/QLD/NSW/VIC/Tas) are part of a single market, with interconnects and wholesale prices set every 5 minutes.
Victoria has its own "default offer" and regulator of the retail market, which is also offering similar "free power" hours.
WA could be part of the NEM with some HVDC across the Nullabor, not sure if it would be economically worthwhile though.
> WA could be part of the NEM with some HVDC across the Nullabor, not sure if it would be economically worthwhile though.
Part of the motive of moving the WEM to 5 minute intervals was to eventually leave this option open.
The largest renewable project in the world is being planned in this area[0] so it's feasible that it all may be connected one day
[0] https://wgeh.com.au/overview/
WA will be in 2027.
Incidentally the Netherlands has this too, at least with some providers (Budget Energy for one). I get free electric from 12:00 to 17:00 on weekends.
Link? I never heard of this and I'm very interested
You might check the rates on Tibber as well. A lot of companies that offer a "free" usage period tend to just move the cost around. If you're comfortable taking the risks associated with a wholesale supplier, then you can likely save a ton of money without even changing your consumption habits.
During this past month with the heatwave, my electricity bill was only about €50 despite running airco all day most days. I have 6 solar panels on my roof for reference (was 3k installed I believe). If I was willing to turn off the A/C at night, I could have easily cut the bill in half since most of the billed usage was between 18-21:00.
Ah that looks awesome, thanks!
https://www.budgetthuis.nl/energie/gratis-stroom
You do pay taxes.
There's also the electricity transport costs. We're talking about the pure electricity cost here.
Yeah, I guess this is covered by "grid charge" which keeps going up with more solar.
Well, sure, but that goes without saying?
It actually alludes to a significant problem.
Solar generation is realitely cheap, much more storage is needed. Storage (overnight and also for several days) is challenging - one reason being its more expensive. Then there is the new transmission lines needed.
it's much much more expensive, people like to repeat the line that solar is the cheapest form of energy while hand-waving away batteries and grid upgrades required. I did the napkin math a while back but a battery bank for 10's of thousands of homes for 48 hours costed as much (more?) than just building a nuclear power plant.
The Australian scientific body, the CSIRO, did an extensive report on the full life costs of various energy strategies and concluded that nuclear made little to no economic sense in Australia.
Perhaps had they used a napkin they would have agreed with you.
The CSIRO aren't the group who have to cost, pay for, take on the financial risk of or be operationally involved in running a nuclear power plant. Their opinions are welcome but not in any way final. The Chinese might easily be willing to come in and build something as their industry matures, for example, at costs not currently anticipated.
The more pressing issue is the Australian government is a coven of luddites who have taken a bold and consistent stance against any form of advanced industrial progress taking root in Australia whatever and have identified nuclear power as high technology that therefore must be categorically banned. Leaving the whole question an academic one and leaving the CSIRO the only group taking an interest.
The CSIRO renewables plan factors in only 2-4 hours of battery capacity (way less, with some already built) with the rest of the backup coming from existing pumped hydro and an existing Natural Gas plant. one of the reasons nuclear looked worse in the report is that they would have to actually build a nuclear power plant. it might not make direct sense to build nuclear given what already physically exists, but apples to apples it's not quite as clear.
I think not everything that makes (purely) financially sense does make economically sense. There's much more to it that just money (e.g. where do you get the uran from for the next 30 years?).
I actually built a calculator around this to help someone figure out if they would save money by switching to 3 hour free plan.
https://solarsharercalculator.com.au/
Dynamic pricing and deployment of digital smart meters should by mandatory in all electric grids dominated by renewables. Large electric consumers are already buying electricity at dynamic prices, small consumers should have the same incentives to shift the demand to day hours.
I'm so on board for this. It would be kind of fun to wire all my appliances in to home assistant to have the dishwasher / dryer / etc all run during the free hours.
I imagine eventually we might end up with some thermal storage where during peak renewable production you heat/freeze a large tank of water and then utilize it to heat/cool your house for the rest of the day. A large tank of water is much cheaper than battery storage.
I don't have smart washers, but I did build a smart ESP32-based [0] zigbee numerical display. Then I use Home Assistant to send the current electricity price to that display when the price changes, and send a notification to all users' phones when electricity is cheap (< 0.05€/kWh) or expensive (> 0.15€/kWh). This helps me plan my laundry and dish washing, which are the only energy intensive appliances I have. I also try to avoid cooking complex meals in the stove+oven.
[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010546076391.html
Storing energy in hot water is common is sunny regions, for example Turkey.
Some large cold storage facilities in Germany are trying to optimize electric demand to use cheap peak day electricity. But they have to observe limitations in range of temperatures and capacity of cooling devices.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/cold-storage-facilities...
" Compared to conventional cold storage systems, renewable energy-driven cold storage demonstrates a 10–35 % reduction in energy losses"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...
Many of us with solar already do this manually, we run the appliances once the sun is up. Even the hotwater heater is programmed to only heat during the middle of the game.
I've been daydreaming about the tank of water idea as well, but the amount of panels you would need on the roof would be crazy.
Or plug them into a UPS that charges when it's free but you can run them whenever.
Batteries are massively more expensive. Thats why the utility companies are just giving consumers free power over building their own grid scale batteries.
A tank of water is cheap, it’s just not possible to distribute hot water over the grid. But it’s very realistic to store it locally and use for heating and cooling. Which is the bulk of power usage anyway.
There are never designs coming into the market that support only, say, the fridge, and have the software to be time of day use metering aware, that won't totally break the bank.
Victoria has had smart meters for two decades. The rollout started in 2006 and was basically complete a decade later.
The other states are aiming for a 100% rollout by 2030.
I am so building an arc furnace in my yard.
https://theshovel.com.au/2025/11/05/electricians-prepare-for...
Ideally, they should pay the EV owners because electricity price goes negative. The EV owners are spending their own money to create a scalable on-demand storage infrastructure. This saves CapEx/OpEx of BESS and also eliminates peaker natural gas plants. EV owners should be paid once for allowing storage, and paid again for using the power to supply back to the grid (V2G).
The EVs with V2G are just big batteries, nothing special. You certainly can charge your battery on the free power and sell it back during peak periods, and people are doing just that today. Just mostly using their 50 kWh household batteries rather than their EVs though, because V2G is still mostly science fiction unless you buy one of the few models of car that actually support it and have a compatible charger and inverter.
They could just sidestep it, by making the electricity free but the transport or cable use more expensive, no?
That's what is happening, the daily supply charge has been bumped up as well as the $/kWh during the other periods.
But it will still have the desired effect of shifting usage patterns, especially for people with rooftop solar and/or batteries and/or EVs.
We have a very large penetration of rooftop solar (due to government subsidies) and now home batteries as well.
There's definitely been a shift in the market "after sunset" when the coal "baseload" and gas peakers used to make their money.
The batteries are flattening out those spikes dramatically.
It’s very cool to see what happens where there are simply so many residential solar installs. Power price goes negative during peak sunshine hours so they just give it away.
Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
As an Australian, the lack of anxiety and guilt you get when you're using 10-12 hours of air conditioning in the middle of summer and not paying for a cent of it because your solar panels are covering is worth more than anything
Yeah totally, nice to be able to put the AC/heater on "for free". I even got a negative power bill once!
In my specific case, I barely use much power so home solar covers basically all of the usage, my bill is dominated by the daily charge, so the usage component is practically irrelevant to me.
Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world?
Yes, grid scale deployments are cheaper, but I'm generally guessing a lot of the grid scale solar deployments do not price in the grid infrastructure adaptation costs, and I'm not even talking about grid storage.
Consumer rooftop solar is fundamentally democratic: it reduces reliance on centralized institutions for power delivery, Make society a lot more resilient in bad weather and other emergency situations, insulates everyday people from wild variations and petroleum and other consumable energy availability.
Combined with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, it would enable electrification of 80 and 90% of daily driving without grid infrastructure costs.
> Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world?
Here in Sweden nearly all of the electricity bill you pay is concentrated on the winter months when there is literally zero sunshine. Even then solar is popular here. I calculated that installing solar would take around 10 years or more to pay for itself, but I have very little hope to stay in the same house all that time so for me it seemed like a bad investment.
That said, if you live in places where it’s sunny most of the time even in winter, like Australia, then solar is absolutely great, just don’t assume most places are like that.
10 year ROI is what I got quoted on a solar setup. I live in Queensland. It’s very sunny here.
Wow your current electricity must be really expensive... or your solar setup is?? Also the calculation was done by the company selling it, I'm pretty sure that was far too optimistic.
That actually sounds pessimistic to me. My ROI for 18kW solar plus 42kWh battery will be under 3 years.
- Expensive electricity
- Government subsidy for solar and battery
- Much sunshine
- 3 hours free charging daily
Nearly $5000 yearly bill gone. $14000 installation cost post rebate.
With a calculation like that I'd buy solar in a heart beat!
But as I said, my main concern is my winter bill, which I know by asking people who own solar in the region, is almost the same with solar since there's no sun at all (it's not that it's cloudy, it's that the entire day duration is like 4 hours - under which you barely feel any sun heat and in practice the solar output is exactly zero on the worst month and near zero for 4 or so months). Hence the very long ROI here, but I agree that for Queensland, 10 years would be a bit too long if you dimension the solar array properly.
You should still feel some guilt for the heat pollution your air conditioning causes for those outside your house, esp. in an urban area.
Can you please elaborate more on pollution from air conditioning equipment and heat pumps. I was thinking they are closed systems.
Sorry autocorrect changed heat pollution to ‘what pollution’, I’ve fixed that now.
There is some impact on others, particularly those without ac.
In a country like Australia where building density is extremely low that’s a negligible problem?!
Sure if building density is low in your area and you have no nearby neighbours it probably doesn’t matter, you’d just be heating your surroundings a little.
If you’re using rooftop solar then presumably the net heat generated by your aircon is the same as the amount your roof is no longer absorbing. Otherwise you just described a perpetual motion machine?
I imagine that absorption by the roof or panels is around the same - however the aircon moves heat from inside to outside, so you are moving heat outside for other people to deal with. In an isolated house it makes little difference. If every building has aircon in a city it does impact outside temperatures and adds to the heat island effect.
Right, but energy that would have heated the roof goes towards powering the aircon (which likely is on the roof itself), which then emits the same amount of heat, no?
Say a roof is absorbing 10000 watts. You install solar panels that absorb 2000 watts, used to power an airco. You now have your roof absorbing 8000 watts (released as heat) and ann airco absorbing (using) 2000 watts (also released as heat). Am I wrong? Seems like a conservation of energy problem. And you get a cooler roof so less airco demand too!
Ah, unless you refer to shifting the release of heat from inside to outside earlier in the day?
Or, we could lobby politicians to actually improve the lives of their constituents by making climate control appliances so affordable and ubiquitous that it's no longer an issue and we can stop accidental deaths attributed to heat. More green spaces can also help mitigate the impact.
The reality is that a lot of old western europe was built for a climate that no longer exists. Houses are built to prioritize holding on to heat and rebuilding entire cities is definitely not possible if we're already bickering so much about adding heat pumps.
Yes, heat pumps may create a rise in temperatures in cities, but there are other things we can do as a society to also lower temperatures as to create a net-neutral impact.
Schemes like the Paris central cooling one are interesting here - there are other possible solutions in cities too.
And sure yes combined with other measures AC can be a net good.
This is heat that would have escaped the house anyway
No, air conditioning units generate heat (that is how they cool!) and do contribute to local warming. Without AC the house reaches equilibrium with outside. With AC the house is cooled and that heat has to go somewhere.
They don't generate heat in the sense that heat is generated from nothing. If the AC is being powered by solar, then the energy that is powering the heat pump has already hit the earth and has become part of that system. The energy that would otherwise have hit the roofing and been radiated is more focused around the radiators, but as soon as that dissipates into the air the difference to the local climate isn't any different.
If the roof was white and reflective then a lot more of that light would be reflected, but most roofing isn't.
Your logic isn't really compatible with the laws of thermodynamics.
Right, but assuming conservation of energy holds then the net should stay the same, right? Unless solar panels have lower albedo than the roof they’re sitting on (considering how many roofs are flat black tar that seems unlikely…)
Yeah, it's been great to see the uptake of rooftop solar in Australia.
One downside is that large scale solar projects aren't profitable any more. It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech, that they aren't getting a good payoff.
The good news is that co-located solar and battery projects are still profitable, but capital costs are higher and payback period of batteries aren't as good.
What makes large scale solar no longer profitable? Distribution costs have outpaced the efficiency gains of the large scale installation?
Co-located PV/BESS or Wind/BESS is the best grid solution anyway. The REZs with transmission infrastructure (subsidized by government) will also add to the return.
The good thing is that even with over a decade of conservative government trying to kill it, renewables are now commercially the only choice for Australia and we will benefit from the rapid advances in storage as well.
Grid level plants are starting to also incorporate synthetic condensers and other FCAS services to make our grid more resilient and reliable, even as our clapped out coal plants move closer to shut down.
Free isn't free.
Coinciding with this, suppliers put daily connection charges up.
It kinda is since wholesale energy prices are often negative in these markets during the day
Australia should deploy vertical solar massively. Adds a few more hours of production.
Its because they have NO economical way to store it to sell for night time usage.
The new plans are mostly to charge the hundreds of thousands of household batteries that have been installed over the last few years, which are an economical way to store energy for night time usage (ROI about 8% over 20 years, probably more with the new plans).
Translation: “you will just pay more for electricity at other times of day”
Not really.
The fundamental costs and margin requirements in the system haven't changed.
This is a government-mandated electricity plan (a default market offer) that competitive electricity retailers are now required to offer. Those retailers still have network costs, environmental costs, energy costs, and administration costs to recover, and so prices at other times of day necessarily go up.
Some consumers may be better off on this plan (generally at the expense of other consumers), and some will be worse off.
It's good politics and only so-so policy.
This will kill new household solar instillation.
The payback time was already well in excess of 10 years, but now that power is free during the day, you can't count those hours as helping pay down your investment. Payback time will be 30 + years at least. You are much better just enjoying your neighbors solar rather than paying for your own.
(Feed-in is about 3c now I think. Was 12c when many people bought their panels.)
Note: My state 100% renewable energy so reduction of carbon footprint has not bearing on my solar decisions.
This also feels like a fairly heavy handed way to encourage investments in batteries. But in the famous words of George W, "can't fool me again". As soon as there are too many batteries and the grid companies are not making enough money, they will introduce fees to have the batteries, or increase connection fees.
If the connection fees get too high, people will disconnect. Then they’ll probably ban it.
When it's hardly needed!
40c outside during summer in these times.. yeah.. hardly needed.
You need a battery to take advantage: then you may as well use a direct to market option like Amber. Which benefits grid stability too. 3 hrs without a battery is useless in Australia. As you generally use electricity for heating/cooling and need it longer than that esp. cooling.
Some parts of Australia.
Not Victoria which has bankrupted itself building roads and railways it cannot afford.
Bullshit.
Victoria's default offer will include the same offer from October [1].
Victoria has a separate regulator because it deregulated its electricity grid before the other states.
[1] https://www.energy.vic.gov.au/households/save-energy-and-mon...
Impolite.
The fine print is interesting, theres a cap, fair use provisions and it requires a smart meter. Smart meters are still a bit contentious.
Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.
To be fair, in a modern Maslow’s Aussie Hierarchy of Needs energy is a foundational Physiological Need, whereas energy for crypto mining is a luxury item best placed out past the outhouse of the main pyramid.
A 24 kWh cap per day seems very reasonable. Drawing 8 kW is quite a lot.
My home is in London UK and is relatively small and efficient, but 8kWh may be higher than our peak demand ever over more than 20 years in this house...
UK appliances cap out at 13A, or 3.1kW. Electric cookers may be on higher current wiring, but seem to be rated at 3kW max anyway.
I think the only way most people could get to 8kW continuous without an EV would be to turn on their electric oven, grill, and all spots on their electric hob. And the kettle.
My Danish electricity supplier lets me download my smart meter records since 2022.
It's by hour, and the highest times are probably when I was cooking with both the oven and the hob, and perhaps had the washing machine running too. The highest hour used 2.9kWh.
Plenty of cheap (e.g. rental) homes in the UK have crappy electric shows, which are usually rated at 6-8kW — but rarely used for a whole hour.
It's not enough to charge a car fully.
Then charge the car partially.
How often do you discharge a car fully?
I think this is another of those weird "Electricity as fuel" metaphors where non-owners don't understand that an EV, like their phone, isn't a thing you specifically "fill up" like you would a petrol car.
Victoria has had smart meters rolled out for over a decade.
The rest of the states in the NEM are aiming for 2030 to complete their rollouts.
Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G.
> Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.
I imagine that this is not the target audience.
Its a time honored Australian tradition to review new government programs and absolutely milk them dry.
basically they give you a few hours free electricity in exchange for significantly higher electricity prices for the rest of the day.
basically a free IQ test.
Can you elaborate on the higher elec prices for the benefit of those of us not in Aus? Is that because of the smart meter requirement?
Before: 25c/kwh all day
After: 30c/kwh most of the day, 0c from 11-2
It's still worth it if you have a lot of load you can shift to the middle of the day (like a pool heater or battery), but for most 9-5 workers you just end up paying more at the times you're actually home.
Smart meters are free, most people already have one.
Ahh, so the 30c rate is locked in for everyone? So they've basically price-shifted the elec so it follows production cost better?
Even if you're not home I'm thinking there are a number of ways to make use of the free elec. Hot water geyser seems like the obvious first candidate.
I'd also think heating (in winter), cooling in summer. Even if you're not there in those times, the effects will be evident for many hours after.
For those who have programmable washer/dryers or dishwashers it's also good. Even ovens on occasion.
I get that not everyone is best placed to take advantage of this, but equally improvements don't have to be an "everyone or no one" option.
No it's optional, the retailers just have to offer it.
I thought most Australians had different pricing for peak/off-peak. I'm paying 39c/kWh for peak (3pm to 9pm) and 20c/kWh for off-peak (9pm to 3pm the next day).
Flat rate plans are still popular and the best choice if you can't shift your power usage out of peak times.
Yeah just a simplified example, I pay 33/16/10 peak/off-peak/midday.
Get a battery
45% of us either rent or live in apartments.
Sure, a battery isn't available to everyone. But I is available for many.
One would have to do the math, cost of battery versus 24kw free daily. But clearly for lots of people the math will work.
A side effect of policies like this is effectively getting people to invest capital to time-shift elec usage. That's good policy. Reducing the peaks in consumption solves other problems.
The utilities don't really want to sell you the cheap solar. They'd rather write op-eds about how too much solar is flooding the grid and beg for more money to invest in the grid elements they can make money from.
The government is having to force them to reflect the abundance of cheap, clean energy at these times in at least one of their tariff offerings.
They can bend the rules slightly by adding other daily charges or limitations and upping the price at other times to reduce uptake and move us all slightly further from the global optimum but maximize their profits.
wow
I miss having Griddy in Texas. Direct access to the wholesale market is probably not good for the lower end of the consumer segment, but for people with some functional marbles it can make a big difference on the demand side of the grid.
I feel like they had to kill griddy before all the powerwall solutions started showing up. We simply cannot empower the peasants with both things at once. The ability to store energy makes access to wholesale prices substantially more effective.
I'll never forget the days where we would get push notifications about negative prices. I'd throw the dryer and oven on every time to try and unwind the meter a bit.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/griddy-energy-charged-9000-powe...
> Direct access to the wholesale market is probably not good for the lower end of the consumer segment
Not everything is for everyone. At no point did I feel like I was getting scammed as a customer. I was using them during the winter event.
Amber offers that in Australia.
https://www.amber.com.au/