Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

https://lenergy.com.au/free-daytime-electricity-is-coming-heres-how-it-actually-works/

by i2oc • 9 days ago

291 409 9 days ago

lenergy.com.au

BLKNSLVR6• 9 days ago

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.

Havoc3• 9 days ago

Surprised they’re putting everyone on same timeslot. Would have expected some staggering to be helpful

defrost4• 9 days ago

From elsewhere:

   this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.

so NSW and South Australia will be staggered in real time as they are in different time zones.

As for everybody in the same time zone .. they are all seeing the same sun angle at noon (more or less) and all sharing the same over supply of power from all the grid connected solar power rooftops and farms. It's free surplus power during that time frame.

aragilar• 9 days ago

There's too much available power then (curtailment/negative prices are fairly common now on sunny days), and not enough during the evenings, so it's an incentive for those who don't have/can't get batteries (e.g. renters) to shift their habits. It also can be spun as a cost-of-living action.

pydry• 9 days ago

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.

stubish12• 9 days ago

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).

penteract• 9 days ago

To check I understand you: the smaller tank with heatpump would consume less energy outside the time window in which energy is free than the large tank with resistive heating, but has a higher capital cost which would outweigh the amount saved on energy?

If that's right, it's not obvious to me that building a suitably sized solar panel is environmentally worse than building a heat pump.

pornel• 8 days ago

I get that it makes less efficient resistive heating more economical, but the tank size seems like a red herring. If you go for a heat pump you can have a larger tank anyway, and heat it during the solar peak too. A larger tank will allow you to store water at a lower temperature (instead of hotter water to be diluted). Smaller delta makes heat pump more efficient and heat loss slower.

Arjunsureshh• 9 days ago

wow

protocolture5• 9 days ago

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.

nharada• 9 days ago

A 24 kWh cap per day seems very reasonable. Drawing 8 kW is quite a lot.

DamonHD2• 9 days ago

My home is in London UK and is relatively small and efficient, but 8kWh may be higher than our peak demand ever over more than 20 years in this house...

Animats• 9 days ago

It's not enough to charge a car fully.

worthless-trash3• 9 days ago

Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.

I imagine that this is not the target audience.

protocolture5• 9 days ago

Its a time honored Australian tradition to review new government programs and absolutely milk them dry.

defrost4• 9 days ago

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.

rswail13• 9 days ago

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.

protocolture5• 8 days ago

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.

Eh I sit on the fence on this one. Take your pick as to who is going to abuse the data. Corps or the government to taste.

Consider this very proposal, incentives to use power at certain times are good. But that incentive structure could instead be very anti consumer. Higher prices when we need electricity would be a horrid state of affairs when rents have doubled in 5 years and a lot of people are barely holding on.

russelg• 9 days ago

Australia, excluding Western Australia as we are on a separate electricity grid.

bruce5114• 9 days ago

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.

rswail13• 9 days ago

It applies in Victoria as well.

Victoria deregulated its market before NSW/SA/Qld.

All of the eastern states (SA/QLD/NSW/VIC/Tas) are part of a single market, with interconnects and wholesale prices set every 5 minutes.

Victoria has its own "default offer" and regulator of the retail market, which is also offering similar "free power" hours.

WA could be part of the NEM with some HVDC across the Nullabor, not sure if it would be economically worthwhile though.

nutjob22• 9 days ago

WA will be in 2027.

tw19842• 9 days ago

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.

bruce5114• 9 days ago

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?

kaelwd5• 9 days ago

Before: 25c/kwh all day

After: 30c/kwh most of the day, 0c from 11-2

It's still worth it if you have a lot of load you can shift to the middle of the day (like a pool heater or battery), but for most 9-5 workers you just end up paying more at the times you're actually home.

Smart meters are free, most people already have one.

ZeroGravitas6• 9 days ago

The utilities don't really want to sell you the cheap solar. They'd rather write op-eds about how too much solar is flooding the grid and beg for more money to invest in the grid elements they can make money from.

The government is having to force them to reflect the abundance of cheap, clean energy at these times in at least one of their tariff offerings.

They can bend the rules slightly by adding other daily charges or limitations and upping the price at other times to reduce uptake and move us all slightly further from the global optimum but maximize their profits.

andrewstuart2• 9 days ago

Some parts of Australia.

Not Victoria which has bankrupted itself building roads and railways it cannot afford.

rswail13• 9 days ago

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...

andrewstuart2• 8 days ago

Impolite.

mchusma• 9 days ago

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.

3stacks• 9 days ago

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.

Scoundreller• 9 days ago

You can do similar math with building above ground oil storage tank capacity aaaaaand giving everyone free gas cans.

And you can get out every drop. And it’s always ready to go. Do need to cycle your inventory.

Fire departments probably wouldn’t be happy about it.

asdefghyk4• 9 days ago

From Australlian ABC news...

The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from $\$12$ billion to as high as $\$42$ billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission). Originally announced in 2017 with a $2 billion price tag, the project has faced massive scale and logistical blowouts. The cost of the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project is estimated to range from $12 billion to as high as $42 billion depending on the scope of costs included (such as direct construction, interest, and broader transmission).

That said , hydro systems have a LONG LIFESPAN - 100 YEARS ?

Batteries need to be replaced every X years.

So the ecomiomics of the comparisoan would need to be calculated ...

simondotau2• 9 days ago

At current battery project prices, matching Snowy 2.0’s roughly 350 GWh of energy storage capacity with Tesla Megapacks would cost around AUD $218 billion [0] and require Tesla’s entire global Megapack production capacity redirected to a single client for five years.

$15 billion is far more than Snowy 2.0 should have cost. But it remains substantially cheaper than any lithium-ion battery build for bulk storage. Storage on this scale is essential in a post-coal electricity grid, and batteries are not (yet) plausible substitutes for bulk storage.

[0] This assumes linear scaling. In reality, placing an order like this would grossly distort supply and demand on many levels. Thus the cost would ultimately be superlinear.

stephen_g• 9 days ago

That was exactly the point of the project though - it was designed by the conservative side of politics in our country to try and crowd out investment in batteries and other renewables while taking enough time to build to keep coal plants operating longer in the meantime.

It didn't work at all for that though - we had a lot of private investment in large-scale batteries anyway, because the cost came down quickly just as most people (apart from the conservatives) expected. Then the other side of Government got in and put a subsidy scheme to get hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, which has been multiple times better bang-for-buck than the Snowy 2.0 scheme, as well as taking far shorter a time. At the same time coal plants are shutting down as expected because they are increasingly unreliable given their old ages.

Snowy 2.0 be an expensive stranded asset basically, it will work and be somewhat useful but extremely uneconomical so basically relying on the cost being written off - if it had to recoup any investment then it couldn't run because it'd never be able to sell the power for high enough.

jeeeb• 9 days ago

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).

Walf• 9 days ago

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...

michaelt• 9 days ago

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.)

danmaz74• 9 days ago

You won't get 12% return if your panels generate electricity which is only paid between 18 and 19, because there is already overcapacity between 16:30 and 18.

perilunar4• 9 days ago

you could build enough solar panels that solar output at 18:00 matches power demand

No you could not. For half the year the sun has set by 18:00.

throwaway20379• 9 days ago

    > If batteries have a solid 9% return on investment, but solar panels have an even better 12% return on investment, panels will outpace batteries even though the batteries are a decent investment.

Sorry, normally I hate this follow-up on HN, but can you share a source? I tried to Google for sources, but there is a pretty wild range of ROI in different countries/regions. My point: Ideally, can you provide personal/anecdotal experience, or something that is specific to a country or region?

EDIT

I forgot to say: I like your idea of intraday arbitrage using batteries! It is a very cool idea. Surely, this could be well modeled to know your expected ROI before investment/build-out.

marcosdumay3• 8 days ago

If you build enough solar that the output at 18:00 matches the demand, it will not have the same ROI as if you are using batteries.

josephcooney3• 9 days ago

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.

jondwillis• 9 days ago

What is their fire suppression setup like??? Granted I guess they could be doing pumped hydro storage lol

BLKNSLVR6• 9 days ago

More details please, do they have a website that explains their setup?

Are they a hoarder of old car batteries and the like?

dzhiurgis• 9 days ago

That's ~8 used EV batteries. Each cost less than 10k, maybe 6-8k AUD.

If you know your way around high voltage DC, got a tractor and appropriate emulator - not exactly difficult or super expensive to pull off.

Granted it's pretty uncommon setup as grid batteries themselves are pretty cheap too and used EV battery is simply too large for home user, too much hassle, liability, etc to save like $2-3k.

fnordian_slip• 9 days ago

Does he have a saltwater aquarium, or any other hobby that can make use of it? If not, I can highly recommend that he get into it, if he's into that kind of overkill :)

protocolture5• 9 days ago

My dad buys lead acids written off from storm damage to solar systems (The whole system gets replaced under insurance even if the batteries are just a bit worn) and then sells them to preppers in the middle of nowhere. For a while he had above 300KW/h of storage, basically completely off grid with few shutdowns. It was kind of nuts. His house did burn down, but it was arson.

pjc505• 9 days ago

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?)

angry_octet3• 8 days ago

The submarines will be in port so much of the time, we may as well hook up their nukes to power the grid.

numpad0• 9 days ago

Maybe they just don't work? Otherwise someone's leaving tons of money on the table. Which implies nobody is.

jofzar• 9 days ago

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.

ghiculescu3• 9 days ago

They are super economical… which is why there’s a subsidy required for people to buy them?

xbmcuser2• 9 days ago

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.

ZeroGravitas6• 9 days ago

It's not stupid if they are paid off by the people selling the coal and gas.

It's just a treasonous level of corruption.

Voters opting to be extorted like this would have been stupid.

thedays4• 9 days ago

It wasn’t $40-50 billion. It was estimated to cost $116-$600 billion to build 7 nuclear reactors https://smartenergy.org.au/nuclear-fallout-116-600-billion-t...

I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.

rswail13• 9 days ago

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.

christina97• 8 days ago

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).

thatsit2• 7 days ago

Well, i can only be cheaper to shift demand to high production hours then building a battery. Especially as you don’t only need an inverter for the battery but also the charger or MPPT to suck up the peak solar power which is only lasts for about 3 hours. So you can save building a lot of excess batteries

flgb• 9 days ago

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.

testing223212• 9 days ago

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.

oliyoung2• 9 days ago

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

AtlasBarfed4• 9 days ago

Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world?

Yes, grid scale deployments are cheaper, but I'm generally guessing a lot of the grid scale solar deployments do not price in the grid infrastructure adaptation costs, and I'm not even talking about grid storage.

Consumer rooftop solar is fundamentally democratic: it reduces reliance on centralized institutions for power delivery, Make society a lot more resilient in bad weather and other emergency situations, insulates everyday people from wild variations and petroleum and other consumable energy availability.

Combined with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, it would enable electrification of 80 and 90% of daily driving without grid infrastructure costs.

dhotson3• 9 days ago

Yeah totally, nice to be able to put the AC/heater on "for free". I even got a negative power bill once!

In my specific case, I barely use much power so home solar covers basically all of the usage, my bill is dominated by the daily charge, so the usage component is practically irrelevant to me.

grey-area10• 9 days ago

You should still feel some guilt for the heat pollution your air conditioning causes for those outside your house, esp. in an urban area.

dhotson3• 9 days ago

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.

rswail13• 9 days ago

Co-located PV/BESS or Wind/BESS is the best grid solution anyway. The REZs with transmission infrastructure (subsidized by government) will also add to the return.

The good thing is that even with over a decade of conservative government trying to kill it, renewables are now commercially the only choice for Australia and we will benefit from the rapid advances in storage as well.

Grid level plants are starting to also incorporate synthetic condensers and other FCAS services to make our grid more resilient and reliable, even as our clapped out coal plants move closer to shut down.

Leherenn• 8 days ago

What makes large scale solar no longer profitable? Distribution costs have outpaced the efficiency gains of the large scale installation?

DANmode2• 8 days ago

It kind of sucks for the investors that adopted green tech

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.

thinkcontext2• 8 days ago

"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.

asdefghyk4• 9 days ago

Its because they have NO economical way to store it to sell for night time usage.

stubish12• 9 days ago

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).

tencentshill• 7 days ago

Every individual household can. There are many programs where you can get a free/discounted home battery and get paid to export to the grid when needed. The economics will make it work.

leonidasrup2• 9 days ago

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.

Gigachad2• 9 days ago

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.

fragmede3• 9 days ago

Or plug them into a UPS that charges when it's free but you can run them whenever.

leonidasrup2• 9 days ago

Storing energy in hot water is common is sunny regions, for example Turkey.

Some large cold storage facilities in Germany are trying to optimize electric demand to use cheap peak day electricity. But they have to observe limitations in range of temperatures and capacity of cooling devices.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/cold-storage-facilities...

" Compared to conventional cold storage systems, renewable energy-driven cold storage demonstrates a 10–35 % reduction in energy losses"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...

jay_kyburz2• 9 days ago

Many of us with solar already do this manually, we run the appliances once the sun is up. Even the hotwater heater is programmed to only heat during the middle of the game.

I've been daydreaming about the tank of water idea as well, but the amount of panels you would need on the roof would be crazy.

lopis3• 9 days ago

I don't have smart washers, but I did build a smart ESP32-based [0] zigbee numerical display. Then I use Home Assistant to send the current electricity price to that display when the price changes, and send a notification to all users' phones when electricity is cheap (< 0.05€/kWh) or expensive (> 0.15€/kWh). This helps me plan my laundry and dish washing, which are the only energy intensive appliances I have. I also try to avoid cooking complex meals in the stove+oven.

[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010546076391.html

rswail13• 9 days ago

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.

thelastgallon4• 9 days ago

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).

stubish12• 9 days ago

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.

thelastgallon4• 8 days ago

For V2G, its a simple feature that enables a car to participate and make money in the energy ecosystem. Govts have to standardize it for cars, just like mandating usb-c.

bob10292• 9 days ago

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.

Retz4o4• 9 days ago

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/griddy-energy-charged-9000-powe...

bob10292• 9 days ago

Direct access to the wholesale market is probably not good for the lower end of the consumer segment

Not everything is for everyone. At no point did I feel like I was getting scammed as a customer. I was using them during the winter event.

rswail13• 9 days ago

Amber offers that in Australia.

https://www.amber.com.au/

CalRobert11• 9 days ago

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.

ctenb• 9 days ago

Link? I never heard of this and I'm very interested

CalRobert11• 9 days ago

https://www.budgetthuis.nl/energie/gratis-stroom

yurishimo2• 9 days ago

You might check the rates on Tibber as well. A lot of companies that offer a "free" usage period tend to just move the cost around. If you're comfortable taking the risks associated with a wholesale supplier, then you can likely save a ton of money without even changing your consumption habits.

During this past month with the heatwave, my electricity bill was only about €50 despite running airco all day most days. I have 6 solar panels on my roof for reference (was 3k installed I believe). If I was willing to turn off the A/C at night, I could have easily cut the bill in half since most of the billed usage was between 18-21:00.

superjan• 9 days ago

You do pay taxes.

CalRobert11• 9 days ago

Well, sure, but that goes without saying?

lopis3• 9 days ago

There's also the electricity transport costs. We're talking about the pure electricity cost here.

thelastgallon4• 9 days ago

Australia should deploy vertical solar massively. Adds a few more hours of production.

abstractspoon• 9 days ago

When it's hardly needed!

worthless-trash3• 9 days ago

40c outside during summer in these times.. yeah.. hardly needed.

hahahaa2• 9 days ago

You need a battery to take advantage: then you may as well use a direct to market option like Amber. Which benefits grid stability too. 3 hrs without a battery is useless in Australia. As you generally use electricity for heating/cooling and need it longer than that esp. cooling.

jay_kyburz2• 9 days ago

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.

perilunar4• 9 days ago

If the connection fees get too high, people will disconnect. Then they’ll probably ban it.

abrookewood3• 9 days ago

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.

hsb3• 9 days ago

Grid power is already cheap. Making things free actually makes people use more power. Its called the rebound effect.

discordance2• 9 days ago

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.

robbiep• 9 days ago

I was trying to understand how to do this, and I formed the opinion that most of the battery providers don’t really allow the degree of ‘on/off’ or ‘charge/discharge’ customisation as might be necessary to make this work? Or was I fooled by the packaged products that are aiming to turn me and my battery and panels into a residential power plant at the whim of the energy company?

abrookewood3• 8 days ago

Pretty much what I am doing exactly, bar the credit. We don't have gas in my area, throw in a pool, kids who love air con, way too many computers and we burn through a lot of power.

tihsllub• 9 days ago

There is a 24KWh/day fair use

stubish12• 9 days ago

Yes. With the 'free' power plans, you are better off not installing solar and investing the savings in a larger battery.

polski-g• 6 days ago

For people without that, they can treat their house as a battery by lowering the AC down to 65deg between 11am-2pm, and hopefully not need to run AC the rest of the day.

tiew9Vii• 9 days ago

Free isn't free.

Coinciding with this, suppliers put daily connection charges up.

nikcub3• 8 days ago

It kinda is since wholesale energy prices are often negative in these markets during the day

abanana• 8 days ago

That's the theory. Others in this thread are reporting the reality.

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.

DANmode2• 8 days ago

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?

L-four• 9 days ago

I am so building an arc furnace in my yard.

jaza• 9 days ago

https://theshovel.com.au/2025/11/05/electricians-prepare-for...

aetherspawn3• 9 days ago

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.

BLKNSLVR6• 8 days ago

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.

aetherspawn3• 8 days ago

I’m with Powershop currently, but it was a hard toss-up between Powershop and Ovo. Sorry you’re right, it’s not “free” with Powershop (4.99 cents per kWhr), but it’s cheap enough that it’s basically free compared to the cost of living and what we were spending before.

Havoc3• 9 days ago

Seems like a good idea. Slightly tweaked consumer behavior can achieve what would take a hell of a lot of batteries

SockThief• 9 days ago

I feel like this is still relevant today:

Clarke and Dawe - The Energy Market Explained

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELaBzj7cn14

ra• 9 days ago

Still describes the current state of affairs perfectly. I'd love to see them on snowy 2 today.

entrope• 9 days ago

I'd love to see them on snowy 2 today.

I can only imagine the comment warnings on that segment considering that, sadly, John Clarke passed away nine years ago.

TheChaplain• 9 days ago

They could just sidestep it, by making the electricity free but the transport or cable use more expensive, no?

rswail13• 9 days ago

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.

thedays4• 9 days ago

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...

chicken-stew• 9 days ago

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?

thedays4• 9 days ago

Yes - the regulated offer is capped at 24 kWh per day but some retailers such as Globird and CovaU are offering plans which include up to 50 kWh per day of ‘free’ electricity. With a large enough battery and inverter you could just end up paying daily supply charges of $1.65-2.20 per day.

som2• 9 days ago

Forget 3hrs free. We lived in the tropics in Australia with a ~6kW system and often had negative quarterly invoices (i.e. got paid by our retailer) ... esp. in winter months. Aircon, pool, appliances all electric. At the very least the pool pump ran free all year round.

Edit: should add, that's straight solar no battery

canpan• 9 days ago

Just for reference our fully electric household (including cooking, water and aircon). Highest usage this month on a very hot day was 25kWh. (Disclaimer: I am not in Australia. Already cover most of it with roof solar. No battery yet)

rulesilol• 9 days ago

I pay about 38c per kilowatt plus $1.70 per day for the connection fee. So by that maths, you'd save 8×0.38=$3.04 per day. A 10kWh battery is in the ballpark of $4000. So it'll take about 4 years to break even. Then you'd just have to pay the connection fee, which seem to be increasing every year.

reyoz3• 9 days ago

This is what I am doing. 42 kWh battery, 6 kW solar and fully electrified house, 2x EVs. I am able to charge cars at work and so in the depths of winter I am able to run the house by charging during the 3 hour window. There have been just a couple of cold (~2-4 degC) days when the battery was depleted 1-2 hours before the window starts.

As the weather warms and we get more solar exposure we will easily be in excess. We get a very small export rate with a bonus for no energy consumption during peak evening hours which can offset the fixed daily charge.

There are a lot of gotchas that you need to be aware of. 42 kWh is nominal capacity not the actual usable capacity. House load, max grid import and export capacity, max inverter capacity, AC or DC coupled panels, battery charging profile, battery temp are all factors in how much you can charge in the window. For example I have max 15 kW grid draw, with a 10 kW inverter that can charge the battery. I can put in max ~30 kWh into the battery, so I also run other loads in the house to use the other 5 kW capacity. If I go over 5 kW house load the battery charge is clipped to maintain grid import limit.

AnotherGoodName3• 8 days ago

Quite simply put this is what they ask you to do. To the point that the Australian government will heavily subsidise (30%) home battery installation.

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).

Tuna-Fish• 8 days ago

The Australian grid presently curtails ~7-18% of production every single day between 11:00 and 14:00.

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.

beAbU• 8 days ago

An ev charging at 7kw will consume 21 of the 24kWh. Now, if you don't drive massive distances every day then this might not be the best deal, but I can see how this might be worth it for someone commuting 200km a day for example. Taxi drivers, and the like will also probably benefit.

AndrewDavis• 8 days ago

While I can't speak for other states (though I'd be surprised if they were different), power bills in Victoria are split into supply and usage. Eg each day costs 90c, then 30c per kw/h.

So you could eliminate the usage costs, but not the supply charge.

The whole reason for this is Australia's power grid is a market, where suppliers put in bids for how much they can produce, and at what price. And AEMO then selects the cheapest way to meet demand (paying the marginal price), but also expects residential rooftop solar a given.

As a result we often have an excess of power driving wholesale pricing into the negatives.

The free power is a way to increase usage at times when we're most likely to have negative pricing, and encourage use of high energy appliances like dishwashers etc to be run during that period to reduce demand the rest of the time.

manarth• 8 days ago

Given that energy prices are negative during this period (because of surplus solar which needs to be drained into a load to keep the grid balanced) – this is effectively consumers providing "free" balancing-services to the grid.

With sufficient take-up and consumers funding the cost of battery storage, this could replace an amount of commercial balancing services and reduce the overall cost of grid-management.

inkyoto5• 9 days ago

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.

jiggawatts4• 9 days ago

I love being ripped off because I'm renting, so instead of having a direct relationship with my service providers, they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager who I'm sure in no shape way or form receives a kick-back.

So I'm stuck with an energy provider that is too incompetent to figure out how to bill me correctly, but puts a markup on what I'd pay as a home owner, and I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!

No IPv6, no gigabit Internet, no free solar electricity.

Bockit• 9 days ago

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.

amelius2• 8 days ago

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?

pjc505• 8 days ago

Does anywhere in the world let you have multiple electricity plans on the same meter at the same time?

pfortuny• 8 days ago

Unbelievable: I read the title and the only thought I got was that households get 3h free energy in Australia.

giantg2• 8 days ago

"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.

deckar01• 8 days ago

I thought there was so much excess solar generation that even the utility company couldn’t store it all. There is a perverse incentive to dump the excess power to prevent the price from going negative and prop up demand for their generation services. There are lots of examples in economics where it is more cost effective to destroy a worthless product than to give it away. When the government subsidized the generation infrastructure and some of that power is generated by residential solar, it makes sense to step in force the utilities to behave in the people’s best interest.

ggm2• 9 days ago

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.

nutjob22• 9 days ago

Or buy a subsidized battery to store the free power and use it whenever you like.

ggm2• 9 days ago

Yes, that's also being done. A critique I have seen is that this is empowering the rich to get richer. Renters are less likely to be able to adopt these strategies.

berofeev• 9 days ago

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/

gravelc• 9 days 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.

consumer451• 9 days ago

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?

asdefghyk4• 9 days ago

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.

NothingAboutAny2• 9 days ago

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.

defrost4• 9 days ago

The Australian scientific body, the CSIRO, did an extensive report on the full life costs of various energy strategies and concluded that nuclear made little to no economic sense in Australia.

Perhaps had they used a napkin they would have agreed with you.

a10c• 9 days ago

First world problems but my Australian retail plan already offers a free period between 11am-2pm without any usage cap, so now with this policy introduction i'm worried my provider will introduce such a cap under the guise of 'its what the government says we can do'.

throwaway20379• 8 days ago

    > 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>

throwaway20379• 9 days ago

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

rappatic• 9 days ago

Translation: “you will just pay more for electricity at other times of day”

gfxfan2• 8 days ago

And the total will go up, measured statistically due to increased complexity but also due to any work this change will incur.

reyoz3• 8 days ago

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...

dannyw• 7 days ago

24 kWh free for the three hours seems like a reasonable amount anyway.

Abimelex• 8 days ago

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.

N_Lens• 8 days ago

How’s that privatisation working out for Australian electric grids?

ralfd• 8 days ago

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?

thinkcontext2• 8 days ago

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.

swiftcoder• 8 days ago

Damn, we need this in Spain. Market prices go negative basically every daytime, but consumer prices stay exactly the same...

drew870mitchell• 8 days ago

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.

didgetmaster2• 8 days ago

Renewable power tends to be sporadic. When the wind is blowing or the sun is shining brightly, they produce a lot of cheap power.

People think the solution is to build huge battery packs to store all that excess power during peak periods and drain them down during off-peak times.

That is certainly a solution, even if it is an expensive one. Perhaps a cheaper one is to get everyone to consume the power while it is being produced. Running air conditioners at full blast. Washing clothes and dishes. Charging electric vehicles. There are many things that can be shifted to those peak times, if the incentives are there.

ukd1• 8 days ago

This won't work. Just do air-conditioning whilst power is being produced? LOL, you know it's hot in someplaces outside of that?

didgetmaster2• 8 days ago

I didn't say only do air conditioning during the peak times. You can definitely adjust the AC so that it runs on full during the peak times and cools things down a few degrees below ideal, then back it off and allow the temperature to rise a few degrees once electricity becomes more expensive.

Again, if the incentives are there, people will adjust.

thatsit2• 7 days ago

Australia is in fact primed to go all-in on all-electric. They have an hyperabundance of solar and wind (+land where it can be installed) and have the purchasing power to buy cheap panels and electric cars from China. Even the mining industry is going electric as it is plainly cheaper to operate mining trucks on solar PV. They couldn’t care less about that strait of hormuz disaster. Energy to cheap to meter at last!

Swannie2• 7 days ago

Except agriculture and almost all logistics, rely heavily on imported liquid fuel.

And whilst EV's or Hybrds are about 50% of new vehicles, there are a lot of existing ICE domestic vehicles.

So, yeah, we actually care.

Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

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