Clarke and Dawe - The Energy Market Explained
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).
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.)
No you could not. For half the year the sun has set by 18:00.
It's not entirely due to the apparent size of the sun — refraction due to the atmosphere has a slightly greater effect.
(Singapore is also in the 'wrong' timezone. The sun sets around 7 pm every day, giving it effectively permanent daylight saving time.)
But regardless, Australia is not near the equator. The timezones are mostly ok. In most of the country (for most of the population anyway) the sun sets before 18:00 for roughly half the year. No amount of solar is going to power the evening peak demand without storage.
> 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.
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.
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...
Are they a hoarder of old car batteries and the like?
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.
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...
They are super economical in Australia and the government even offers discounts and interest free loan of 15k 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).
- home batteries cost more
- homeowners buying batteries are already pretty well off on average
- a large portion of the population (renters) is excluded from the policy.
- prices are falling anyway so the subsidy is just a waste of tax dollars, arguably
- grid scale batteries are more cost effective and benefit everyone via cheap prices broadly, instead of specific homeowners.
Etc. but pork barreling be pork barreling.
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.
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.
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?
Upthread: "interest free loan of 15k" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48904009
>>> 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.
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...
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...
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?
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
When you get money, you can choose to spend it on what's worth the most to you. Thus "strings attached" on the opposite.
…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:
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.
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%).
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?
Neither loans nor subsidies are dirty words IMHO.
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.
Yet people frequently don't. This assertion and reality disagree.
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.
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.
So the thing everyone correctly maligns because it's generally some form of corruption or inefficiency?
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.
It's just a treasonous level of corruption.
Voters opting to be extorted like this would have been stupid.
$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.
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...
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 ...
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...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
[2] https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/analysis/re-planting-the-...
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.
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.
(did you mean 20kwh per user, or 20GW overall?)
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.
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).
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.
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.
this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
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.
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
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.
[1] https://wattclarity.com.au/articles/2026/06/system-frequency...
> without any usage cap
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>
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
What is then the incentive to install (or repair/maintenance) solar panels?
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps had they used a napkin they would have agreed with you.
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.
Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
There is some impact on others, particularly those without ac.
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!
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.
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.
Instead of generate heat you could say they move heat if you like, from inside to outside.
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.
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.
You can get a sense of it if you look at the daily breakdown:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/nem/?range=1d&...
You can see the demand peaks around 12pm and 6pm.
The price goes negative around 2pm most days, in which case, as a solar only operator you're losing money to generate power, so quite often there's curtailment.
And then at 6pm, the sun is down so solar-only operators can't capitalise on the opportunity.
So unfortunately it's just a very limited opportunity to make a profit on your investment each day. More demand during the peak generation time would help!
In the US, these people are known as speculators riding on government subsidy or grant, often shadily awarded - and anyone who couldn’t see consumer panel and consumer power-storage tech hooting its inflection point simply didn’t have a good grasp on the technology.
All important factors for investors.
Coinciding with this, suppliers put daily connection charges up.
In practice, any profit-making enterprise will not want to miss out on the income they were previously getting, so will find other times and charges to load it onto. Also, they know some people will specifically choose an energy plan that seems to give them something free, so it's easy to take advantage by increasing the prices they pay less attention to.
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.
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.
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 can wash your clothes during this time to take advantage on this.
You can cook on the electric stove during this time to take advantage of this.
No battery is required to do this. I can't connect your logic to my reality.
Not Victoria which has bankrupted itself building roads and railways it cannot afford.
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...
basically a free IQ test.
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.
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.
Here in Germany, it is absolutely massive and an increasing number of people run their balcony solar with batteries that just feed into a regular Schuko Plug. It only allows to feed in 800W at a time, but there are workarounds for that as well
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 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.
Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.
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.
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.
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.
I imagine that this is not the target audience.
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...
Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course). It’s not hard to achieve this for any competent government. Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is also corrupt and inefficient).
This rollout of cheap solar in Australia is causing power prices during a global energy crisis and a datacenter build out to plummet.
And fwiw i don’t think Australia’s government is perfect. But it should set the bar to other nations of ‘what could be’. You could have falling power prices right now if you enabled a government to encourage what is currently by far the cheapest form of electricity (solar).
China is huge, and it does have huge solar farms, but the trouble is now you need a huge power transport infrastructure. Australia can move enough power from a desert where nobody lives to a small city 100 kilometres away on a few ordinary hundred kV pylons and be happy. China has huge cities, 2-3 thousand kilometres from those solar farms so it is building long chains of 1MV pylons which is the same idea but at this incredible scale.
China is adding around 10X Australia’s total installed solar power generation every single year. Half of the entire world’s deployed solar is in China.
And while Australia’s solar growth is impressive, it’s worth remembering that it’s only possible because of China. It was Chinese government policy that pushed to develop the huge solar industry that exists today and supplies vast quantities of cheap solar panels to the world.
Equally true is that Chinese manufacturing of solar cells is only partly possible because of Australian solar research and development. In 1983, a research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), invented the PERC silicon solar cell. This design fundamentally improved solar cell efficiency to capture sunlight more effectively and reduce electronic losses. Over several decades of refinement, the UNSW team continued to set global efficiency records, pushing cell efficiency from 18% in 1984 up to 25% by the early 2000s.
Today, PERC technology is the cheapest way to generate electricity using solar cells and is utilised in over 90% of solar panels manufactured globally. https://theconversation.com/how-an-aussie-invention-could-so...
The solar research group at UNSW trained over 120 PhD students who went on to establish solar manufacturing, particularly in China.
This is a remarkable stat that's the opposite of what I expected, but I suppose China is (a) starting from a lower base and (b) much, much larger in absolute population. Australia's population would fit in Chongqing.
Where people get misled on China’s rollout is total generation (since it’s a huge fraction of the worlds population) and the fact that they do large centralised rollouts rather than enabling rooftop solar. So they have some of the biggest solar farms. Rooftop solar is the way the countries that have shot past china have mostly achieved results - remove barriers to installation and grid connection and suddenly every citizen is invested in it since it saves them money. It’s the classic efficiency win from a massively motivated population vs a central bureaucracy. China’s showing everyone how NOT to enable solar.
When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water. Well, I could tell when they turned on the central heating plants for the winter because I finally had hot water showers again.
I reckon more Australians live in SFHs than apartment blocks (so have roofs where personal solar makes sense), and the major cities get more son than eastern Chinese cities do.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...
So countries are only behind Australia because of corruption? And the US is only behind because of Trump, specifically?
Man, must be nice to have such a basic view of the world; everything so sinpmy explained.
It's not all Trump, of course. It's also the people who put him in office twice, the folks who block upgrading the grid, etc. etc.
So yeah, Trump doesn't help, but in respect specifically of Solar you'd likely see pretty similar policies from many US regimes, including mainstream Democrats.
The generate more grid solar, more wind, more gas and more coal than other states.
They're still #2 to California when you include distributed solar though.
I remember when the first ones started appearing in the UK over 30 years ago and people were quick to complain about how ugly they looked. But actually, over time I think most people accept them now, and personally I think they're pretty cool. Most of the UK ones are actually off shore now - you can just about see them from the coast, but they're just small specks on the horizon at that distance. I think the biggest concern people have with them now is the belief that lots of birds get killed by them, but the reality is that actually many more birds die every year from flying into windows than get hit by turbine blades.
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.
Here's a £50k London parking space: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/136662200#/?channel=R...
While that's an extreme, I would expect the cost of any urban parking space with a low speed charger to be dominated by the land, then the charger one-off install price, and thereafter electricity use is a pretty trivial cost.
Sydney will also charge you 3,000 $AUS annually for central parking spaces: https://www.revenue.nsw.gov.au/taxes-duties-levies-royalties...
I'm in Washington where electricity is cheaper, so 29 cents per kWh is not much cheaper than Tesla's superchargers. The closest one to me is 31 cents in the middle of the day and goes as low as 20 cents per kWh at night. I pay 8 cents per kWh at home, which is where I charge (at much slower speeds) unless I'm on a road trip.
> I am not making any value judgement
Calling something "virtue signalling" is a value judgement.
Edit: should add, that's straight solar no battery
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.
We just got a very high efficiency wood stove, I expect we will now have no electricity bill each year.
I believe that incentivizing people to acquire batteries is precisely the purpose of the policy. It's good for the grid for there to be a lot of storage at the edges. As I understand it, the 24kWh cap is subject to annual review, with it being reduced/the policy being soft phased out once curtailment is no longer necessary.
You can't make a blanket statement like that because it depends on a lot of variables about their specific battery system and power needs. If you have just enough battery to get through a normal day so you're running them top to bottom every day then sure, those are likely to have a relatively short life. If you've set up your system with extra capacity to support extended total grid outages and/or bad weather now your normal days might only be cycling from 80% down to 60% and back. Of course battery chemistry is also relevant, and a home battery system doesn't need to care about energy density or peak charge/discharge rates in the same way an EV might.
On top of all that, now that we're over 15 years in to mass-produced EVs we've learned that our battery life expectations were generally pessimistic. As long as the batteries are kept within a reasonable temperature range and not otherwise abused they tend to be in pretty good condition even this far in to their expected service life. Home energy storage systems are a lot easier on batteries than automotive use so as a general rule they should last even longer even with similar cycle counts.
A sneaky tax that keeps rising. In the UK it pays for failed energy companies, people defaulting on their energy bills, energy bill subsidies... and supposedly for grid upgrades lol
It's risen far above inflation (responding to a sibling comment)
In general inflation is increasing everywhere so not completely unexpected. Also solar/battery powered networks are shaped differently than ones only powered by prime movers. The edges become thicker as power becomes generated at the edge.
Free energy is too good to be true, even if you aren't a physicist.
Ok, then why not take one plan with retailer A, and another plan with retailer B?
The government won't address this particular perverse situation with the embedded networks until the 2027–28 DMO period.
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.
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.
Plus, extra Internet points for using this Unicode char that I didn't know about: ↝
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.