Power bills have become a growing source of stress for Aussie families and businesses. Many families are forced to make impossible choices: three in 10 parents are struggling to afford basics like food, electricity and insurance. Government rebates provided some relief, but this was only a band-aid solution.
Those lucky enough to own their own homes (or more realistically, have a mortgage) at least have access to solar panels and as of recently, batteries.
Those two combined have the ability to drastically reduce one’s utility bills to near-0.
For everyone else stuck paying rent, short of having a decent landlord willing to invest in their property, is shit out of luck.
We are living in two drastically different Australia’s.
It’s not quite that simple, if by near zero you mean after paying ~$25000 for a solar and battery combo. With feed in tarrifs being near 0cents now, I haven’t crunched the numbers recently… But its really killed the payoff period for straight solar
Your pricing information is a bit out of date; with current Government incentives a 10kW array and 50KWh batteries can be gotten for less than $10K.
True, general feed-in rates have tanked due to a glut in solar panels, but certainly providers do still offer generous rates for shoulder periods (around dawn and dusk) where you could potentially discharge part of your battery into the network (I think?).
But the real savings from having the batteries will eliminate your need to use power during evening peak times, eliminating the need for buying petrol if/when switching to an EV and having the ability to buffer energy from a rare sunny day in winter into free energy for the next 2-3 overcast days.
Depending on how aggressively you monitor and take advantage of market offers, and electrify your home - the pay-down period can be as low as a few years.
Fwiw a 50 kWh system is insanely excessive for most people. I have 10 kWh and have used grid electricity 3 days in 9 months. Granted, I live alone, but usage does not scale linearly with number of people. I’d hazard a guess than even a family of 4 would be unlikely to need more than 25 or 30 kWh, with some basic attention to how they use it (like run the dishwasher and washing machines during the day, and preferring rugging up to running the heater—which is reverse cycle AC and not the far less efficient resistive heaters of course—where possible, and having good insulation).
Fwiw a 50 kWh system is insanely excessive for most people.
Nah, the 50kWh is borderline the smallest any family of 2+ should go. My household uses about 15-20kWh minimum between sun down and sun up, and we do all our washing etc during the day. We’ve got a 42kWh battery and it’s not even enough close to for 2 days with no solar generation. Unless the battery is over 50% by sun down I’m not confident in it lasting until solar kicks in the next day without being careful with our usage.
10kWh can be less than an hour of ducted AC. It can be cooking dinner on the stove/oven for an hour with the tv and fans on. 10kWh isn’t close to enough for a family, and it would be hard to make it financially worth it. Would take 10 years to pay itself off, then it’s out of warranty with diminished capacity before it starts to provide any return on investment.
40-50kWh given the current incentives (which are changing in May) only costs only a few hundred dollars more than ~15kWh, and provides owners with more flexibility in terms of EV charging (especially if the car is used for daily commuting and would not be able to directly take advantage of solar), and discharging back into the network at optimal times to recoup the system cost that much faster.
But otherwise, I do agree with you - our peak usage is less than 16kWh/day (2 WFH adults, 2 grandparents and 1 child); while our solar exports usually triple that amount in summer and we usually net-0 in winter (ie. the amount we export matches what we buy in over those ~3 months).
We don’t have a battery installed yet - but we are very seriously considering it, hence I have the figures available off the top of my head.
Yeah, to be fair, having a quick look at prices they seemed to have dropped a lot (I paid about 10k for a 5kwh solar system about 5 years ago), although I’m not sure if I trust some of those batteries, they’re looking far too cheap.
I suppose a lot of the calculation is also dependent on use. We use about 7-9kwh per day during winter (no gas heating) which is only roughly 2.50 a day, one of the bigger killers comes from the >1 dollar a day for connection.
Yeah I’ve got a 42kWh battery and even with Amber I couldn’t make enough from feed-in to cancel out the subscription and daily connection fee. The average feed in rate I got over a month was a smidge over 6c/kWh. Not terrible but far below what some people make out that you’ll get.
Not to mention Amber’s “smartshift” “AI” is garbage, regularly leaving me with not enough battery to comfortable make it through the night, and then having to buy from the grid for hours.
I’ve switched to GloBird and their plan seems much better for me. I can fill the battery almost from empty to full in the 3 hours of free electricity, then they pay me $1/day for every day I don’t draw from the grid between 6-8pm, and pay 6c/kWh feed in (more if you can get on their VPP which I can’t). So now I set it up to charge for 3 goes every day, and export 7kWh every day, which covers their $1.42 daily supply fee. $0 bills here I come.
As an aside - how on earth can someone only use 7-9kWh a day? My pool filter/pump uses that much alone.
Oh yeah that would be interesting re: free energy period and charging the battery back up. I had crunched the numbers a while ago, but should look at it again. I’m guessing it’s not possible to actually remove yourself from the grid fully so that you don’t need to worry about the daily supply fee ?
We’re pretty light on with energy usage, kids in bed early, no tv(still use screens obviously) generally no heating just some extra layers. Not sure… I think it’s probably the bloody kettle boiling that uses most of our power… Edit: our base hourly usage is about 0.2kwh (say over night -fridge, router etc) then we really only have a spike in the morning and from about 6-8pm
Nah not possible to remove from the grid unfortunately.
one of the bigger killers comes from the >1 dollar a day for connection.
Yeah that’s it for me. I built new and moved in 9ish months ago. The covenant on the land required a battery and solar as standard. Since moving in, I’ve used grid power on maybe 3 separate days. Because of government handouts my electricity account was several hundred dollars in credit when I moved in, and I haven’t paid a cent from my actual bank account as a result. But the credit is slowly draining, entirely as a result of the connection fee.
Is it shareholder value?
It’s mostly privatisation. The regulators are supposed to regulate but they don’t do it effectively and competition isn’t working, least of all in distribution which is a natural monopoly.
There is a huge amount of money spent to blame it on renewables despite the evidence showing clearly that they aren’t the problem.
Unfortunately this takes the publics attention away from the real problem. This is becoming very common in today’s social media driven populist politics. People incited to anger against scapegoats while the real perpetrators sit behind the scenes pulling the strings.
Unfortunately not much for reasonable people to do but let the mob fuck things up and then let them pass into the history books and be a lesson for a few generations before they once again forget it all.
The government can’t win. If they move to fix the real problem they will be out on their ears in a week. If they sit on their hands the same people are organising against them anyway.
“Renewables”. There’s no other answer. Ever since we started trying to eliminate the cheap, high energy density, reliable power sources (coal, gas) and started replacing them with unreliable, highly inefficient, spread out “renewables” our cost of power has skyrocketed.
The more “renewables” we put in the system, the higher the price goes. 50% of power bills are transmission costs, and the transmission costs for renewables are so high that the government refuses to disclose how high they are going to be. Pretty much every expert estimate puts it in the trillions of dollars.
You know you could just read the article
The renewables in our grid lowered average household electricity bills by up to $417 in 2024, collectively saving households up to $3.8 billion in just one year.
Thanks to the high share of renewables, wholesale prices nearly halved in the last three months of 2025.
And on your point the report says
Transmission – the highway system that transports power from where it is created, to where it is used. Transmission only makes up about 6-8% of an overall power bill.
Renewables did no such thing - the government handouts did that. If the average power bill dropped by $400 it’s because they gave every household $1000 off their energy bills paid using our tax money - meaning the average electricity bill actually increased by $600 that year.
Transmission makes up about 50% of a power bill according to the power companies themselves.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-12/power-prices-to-rise-in-clean-energy-transition/103696450
Network costs (the poles and wires) account for about 45 per cent of a power bill and it’s these costs that are on their way up.
You can do a bit better than citing a dude with vested interests. You can even find government sources that roughly agree with you: The AEMC report
However the report also notes that:
Delays to new wind and transmission build, and the uncoordinated use of CER are projected to have the biggest impact on electricity costs.
Highlighting that renewables do decrease prices. Of course, reducing gas prices would probably also reduce prices.
Also at least for last quarter the [AEMO] (https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/qed/2024/qed-q4-2024.pdf?rev=d75996ee2317495783a18c996d5878ac&sc_lang=en) report that coal and transmission are the driving costs. Negative energy prices were primarily driven by renewables.
Also
Transmission makes up about 50% …
Network costs (the poles and wires) account for about 45 per cent of a power bill and it’s these costs that are on their way up.
I heard it was up to 100% Last time I checked it was 156% Old mate said it was 196%
The actual figure I saw was around 40%, but sure you can inflate things by saying upto.
The AEMO are the biggest vested interest in this. Nothing they say can be taken seriously.
Renewables don’t decrease prices because without transmission and grid-scale storage, which doesn’t even exist yet, it’s basically useless.
If you’d heard it was 40% why did you say it was only 6-8% in your previous comment?
Renewables do decrease prices though? Maybe l2add?
If you’d heard it was 40% why did you say it was only 6-8% in your previous comment?
Because that’s literally what the referenced article states? Maybe l2read?
Capitalism is the reason.
Price stability only exists in a world where we nationalised energy infrastructure.
How will we pay for [edit: constructing] it? Wow, tax. Wow. What a novel idea. Maybe we’ll actually get paid for our natural resources. What an idea.
Tax is just everyone subsidising the power usage of the big users. People should pay for what they use, so it incentivises using less power.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. People should still pay for the electricity, but at the very least the transmission and most of the generation should be publically owned and provided at cost
And energy retailers like some states have are so dumb. "Shopping around’ for electricity when they’re just slightly repacking the rate the transmission company sets is so stupid.
We don’t even need to pay tax for it. If you take the capitalism out of it and create a government monopoly; we still pay for the service, and it gets put towards funding the service.
Take out the Executive Salaries and other unnecessary overheads and it is much more cost effective.
