Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
lenergy.com.au288 points by i2oc 3 days ago
288 points by i2oc 3 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...
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?
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).
The bits of China where most of its people live are pretty mediocre for solar power. Like, Southern France at best, not Australia, not even California.
China is huge, and it does have huge solar farms, but the trouble is now you need a huge power transport infrastructure. Australia can move enough power from a desert where nobody lives to a small city 100 kilometres away on a few ordinary hundred kV pylons and be happy. China has huge cities, 2-3 thousand kilometres from those solar farms so it is building long chains of 1MV pylons which is the same idea but at this incredible scale.
> ”Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course).”
China is adding around 10X Australia’s total installed solar power generation every single year. Half of the entire world’s deployed solar is in China.
And while Australia’s solar growth is impressive, it’s worth remembering that it’s only possible because of China. It was Chinese government policy that pushed to develop the huge solar industry that exists today and supplies vast quantities of cheap solar panels to the world.
This is true - without Chinese manufacturing of solar cells and panels, solar energy would not be as cheap as it is today.
Equally true is that Chinese manufacturing of solar cells is only partly possible because of Australian solar research and development. In 1983, a research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), invented the PERC silicon solar cell. This design fundamentally improved solar cell efficiency to capture sunlight more effectively and reduce electronic losses. Over several decades of refinement, the UNSW team continued to set global efficiency records, pushing cell efficiency from 18% in 1984 up to 25% by the early 2000s.
Today, PERC technology is the cheapest way to generate electricity using solar cells and is utilised in over 90% of solar panels manufactured globally. https://theconversation.com/how-an-aussie-invention-could-so...
The solar research group at UNSW trained over 120 PhD students who went on to establish solar manufacturing, particularly in China.
And our solar market regulator is corrupt AF, its just a giant money spinner for battery and solar makers/installer.
> Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course)
This is a remarkable stat that's the opposite of what I expected, but I suppose China is (a) starting from a lower base and (b) much, much larger in absolute population. Australia's population would fit in Chongqing.
Chinas solar rollout is absolutely pathetic. Netherlands is a close second to Australia in case anyone wants to argue latitude or population density alone is a cause. Germany’s up there too. In fact on a per capita basis China’s way down the list.
Where people get misled on China’s rollout is total generation (since it’s a huge fraction of the worlds population) and the fact that they do large centralised rollouts rather than enabling rooftop solar. So they have some of the biggest solar farms. Rooftop solar is the way the countries that have shot past china have mostly achieved results - remove barriers to installation and grid connection and suddenly every citizen is invested in it since it saves them money. It’s the classic efficiency win from a massively motivated population vs a central bureaucracy. China’s showing everyone how NOT to enable solar.
How would rooftop solar even work in China, especially in Chinese cities? Is the assumption that SFHs or at least row homes are as common in China as they are in other countries?
SFH's are rare in China outside the villages; big cities are all high-rises (in Beijing, and I believe other large cities, it's illegal to build SFH's within the city limits, though the few remaining "hutongs" are exempted for historical reasons)
Yes, I think most of us know that, so I find the statement to be confusing that China is behind on personal solar. Of course they are! It is never going to be much of a thing as urbanization continues to accelerate, because people just don't live in those kinds of houses where you have your own roof to put solar panels on. You are much more likely to see community solar instead, or solar plants (along with wind farms) in western china sending energy to eastern china via transmission lines. And you better bet that in rural china the 农民 are using whatever free electricity they can get (I've seen water wheels in the weirdest of places).
When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water. Well, I could tell when they turned on the central heating plants for the winter because I finally had hot water showers again.
> When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water
was that recently? I lived there from 2011-2017 and solar power was virtually unheard of, much less powering any buildings. But yeah, China is that kind of place that the city decides when you get heating in your apartment (Nov 15 IIRC, so early Nov could be _really_ cold inside; we wore our coats).