Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity
https://lenergy.com.au/free-daytime-electricity-is-coming-heres-how-it-actually-works/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...
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.)
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).
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?
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 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.
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?
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 ...
[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.
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.
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.
Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not Victoria which has bankrupted itself building roads and railways it cannot afford.
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.
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.