Until last week, the parents of U10 football were the angriest Australians I had ever seen.
I was the referee. Not because I know anything about football. Because no one else would raise their hand, even though half of those parents were die-hard football tragics. I grew up playing rugby league. My “Was that a foul?” Judgment is based on league standards, which meant I didn’t stop play unless a kid fired a flying karate kick at the opponent.
The parents did not share my interpretation of the rules.
I’ve thought for years that this was as angry as Australians could get. Then this week happened.
July 1st came and new fixed daily charges for electricity connections were added and I followed the reaction online.
Turns out the soccer parents were amateurs.
So what has everyone so excited? To explain it, I have to rewind.
Comparing electricity tariffs used to be easy
For many years, optimizing your electricity plan as a solar homeowner was easy. Find the retailer with the highest feed-in tariff. As long as you haven’t been charged the other fees, these feed-in payments have brought your bill down to zero or a nice credit.
For this reason, I have developed a plan comparison tool that allows you to sort by the highest solar feed-in tariff with just one click. It took years for Energy Made Easy to catch up.
Then solar energy became so popular that wholesale prices plummeted during the day. They now become negative more often on a sunny day. Nobody will pay you much to export solar energy if the grid is drowning in it.
So people bought batteries to store enough excess solar energy to get through the night. And on cloudy and wintry days when your panels can’t fill the battery, you can charge from the grid during these cheap or free daylight hours. Since you almost never pay for grid power, your bill becomes your daily utility fee, minus the meager daytime feed-in tariff you receive for solar exports once your battery is full.
The really savvy large battery owners took it a step further. They signed up for premium evening feed-in tariffs, some as high as 45 cents per kWh, and exported some of their stored solar energy to the grid during the evening peak. Charge for free during the day, sell expensively at night.
Then the surveys noticed that “free” surveys were good. So every retailer was required to offer three free hours in the middle of the day. The Solar Sharer Program. Most people cheered. Sincerely, he raised his hand and said, wait. What impact will this have on daily utility charges? What impact will it have on peak prices? Retailers don’t give away free electricity out of the goodness of their hearts. They grab it back somewhere. Nobody listened. I was told that I was just trying to kill solar pioneers and that I opposed mandatory free energy because it dampens demand for solar energy. This was a neat trick considering I had already sold SolarQuotes.
Solar Sharer goes online
July 1st rolled around this week. The Solar Sharer offers have gone online. And there they were: breathtaking daily fees and corresponding peak tariffs per kWh.
Give a signal to the angry mob. Such anger online really shocked me. My advice to the disgruntled: If you find a retailer that’s still offering a daily fee that’s closer to $1 than $2, jump out. But when every retailer increases daily fees at the same time, that’s saying something in a competitive market (in most parts of Australia). They do it because the economy dictates it. The mandatory free window has to be paid for, and much of it ends up in the fixed fee.
The game for the highest daily feed-in tariff has long since ended. If you have a large solar and battery system, the new game is to look for the lowest fixed charge plan that will allow you to charge your battery cheaply or for free during the day and not be knocked out the odd evening when you need peak power from the grid. As I type, the team is updating the SQ comparison tool to do just that.
And don’t stop there. Use every lever you have. If you regularly have spare battery capacity in the evenings, looking for a premium evening FiT may still be worth it.
Your bill doesn’t tell the whole story
Most importantly, you’ll stop staring at the total amount of your bill.
Look at what you’re actually paying for per kWh all the energy you use. That’s the number that counts. As we electrify our homes and cars, I think it’s a pretty good place to be if, thanks to a decent solar/battery system, you can power your entire life for single-digit cents per kWh, get no gas bill, don’t buy gas, pollute a lot less, and still maintain the 99.99% reliable electric grid as a backup.
Even the soccer parents couldn’t be bothered about it.
Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column from SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to have it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.
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