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?
"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."
Free energy is too good to be true, even if you aren't a physicist.
> 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.
Ok, then why not take one plan with retailer A, and another plan with retailer B?
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.
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.)
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.
One issue with grid scale batteries is that the solar is predominantly generated in the suburbs, but the grid wasn’t built for a huge “generator” in the suburbs. It requires retrofitting the grid for this huge excess. It would be better to instead store it in the suburbs in household batteries (which they are also building out like crazy).
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.
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.
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).
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].
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.
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'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.
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!)
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.
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.
Electric battery storage is a better option, but also your home is a very leaky battery storage for conditioned air. At my last place i got a plan that was nearly free on overnights and ran the HVAC all night, turning it off during the peak period. This was in the worst part of summer when the overnight lows were 80F or above so natural ventilation couldn't help much.
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 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?
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.
> No solar panels required. No need to own your home. You just need a smart meter and to opt in through your retailer to have access to free daytime electricity. The scheme is called the Solar Sharer Offer.
What is then the incentive to install (or repair/maintenance) solar panels?
That's the point, the grid operator does not want more solar. They have an excess of solar available during those 3 hours that would otherwise go to waste and not enough later in the day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
"Free" electricity is an indication that the economics are out of balance. If the power provider isn't getting paid for those 3 hours, it means they'll need to be paid more at other times. It also means the grid needs to spend more on storage and less on new solar. Its cool if you have the ability to load shift but in general it means costs go up.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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."
Free energy is too good to be true, even if you aren't a physicist.
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.
Unbelievable: I read the title and the only thought I got was that households get 3h free energy in Australia.
> 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.
Ok, then why not take one plan with retailer A, and another plan with retailer B?
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 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.
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.)
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.
One issue with grid scale batteries is that the solar is predominantly generated in the suburbs, but the grid wasn’t built for a huge “generator” in the suburbs. It requires retrofitting the grid for this huge excess. It would be better to instead store it in the suburbs in household batteries (which they are also building out like crazy).
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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?)
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).
Surprised they’re putting everyone on same timeslot. Would have expected some staggering to be helpful
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...
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>
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.
Yes. With the 'free' power plans, you are better off not installing solar and investing the savings in a larger battery.
Grid power is already cheap. Making things free actually makes people use more power. Its called the rebound effect.
There is a 24KWh/day fair use
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.
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
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.
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.
Electric battery storage is a better option, but also your home is a very leaky battery storage for conditioned air. At my last place i got a plan that was nearly free on overnights and ran the HVAC all night, turning it off during the peak period. This was in the worst part of summer when the overnight lows were 80F or above so natural ventilation couldn't help much.
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.
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 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?
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.
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 do pay taxes.
Seems like a good idea. Slightly tweaked consumer behavior can achieve what would take a hell of a lot of batteries
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/
> No solar panels required. No need to own your home. You just need a smart meter and to opt in through your retailer to have access to free daytime electricity. The scheme is called the Solar Sharer Offer.
What is then the incentive to install (or repair/maintenance) solar panels?
That's the point, the grid operator does not want more solar. They have an excess of solar available during those 3 hours that would otherwise go to waste and not enough later in the day.
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.
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...
Amber offers that in Australia.
https://www.amber.com.au/
Damn, we need this in Spain. Market prices go negative basically every daytime, but consumer prices stay exactly the same...
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.
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.
I am so building an arc furnace in my yard.
https://theshovel.com.au/2025/11/05/electricians-prepare-for...
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, 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.
"Free" electricity is an indication that the economics are out of balance. If the power provider isn't getting paid for those 3 hours, it means they'll need to be paid more at other times. It also means the grid needs to spend more on storage and less on new solar. Its cool if you have the ability to load shift but in general it means costs go up.
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
As far as line-items on an invoice are concerned, power always seemed egregiously overpriced, and the infrastructure costs seemed wildly understated.
So, maybe this is a correction?
How’s that privatisation working out for Australian electric grids?
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.
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).
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.
Translation: “you will just pay more for electricity at other times of day”
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...
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?
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.
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.
wow