Receiving my MBA certificate from the MBA School of MBA Credentials – after 45 minutes of tuition at Adelaide Fringe.
Every now and then, someone asks: How does SolarQuotes make money?
Fair question. We run a popular site, send thousands of referrals a month, and have a reputation for helping people avoid the dodgy end of the solar market.
In a world full of ‘smart’ energy tech, AI-driven optimisation, and dashboards that would make a Qantas cockpit blush, I’ve come to a confronting conclusion: the future isn’t clever. It’s just… timers.
Credit where it’s due: Labor’s proposed home battery rebate is the right policy at the right time — for the most part.
Some ideas are just too clever to die. Like Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) — the notion that your electric car can act as a home battery. Park it at home, plug it in, and when the sun goes down or prices spike, your car sells energy back to the grid. It’s green, it’s clever, and it feels like you’re gaming the system.
The Federal Election has been called, and people are now banging on my door demanding I provide them with some deep analysis on the ‘nuclear debate’. They want to know what I think about Peter Dutton’s grand plan to build nuclear power stations across Australia.
Here’s what I think: I’m not wasting your time or mine.
When I was a kid growing up in Yorkshire, wasting electricity was almost criminal. Coming from a place synonymous with frugality, I learned early that every kilowatt-hour was sacred. And fair enough: back in the 1970s, generating each kWh of electricity meant burning roughly a kilogram of coal mined by Arthur Scargill’s finest1.
Fast-forward to today and things couldn’t be more different. Solar and wind have free ‘fuel,’ and we often find ourselves with more electricity from wind and solar than we know what to do with.
I rented most of my adult life. I left home at 18, bought my first home at 32, struggled with a mortgage for three years, then sold it to start SolarQuotes. It was another four years before I bought again, only after SolarQuotes started doing well enough.
The Australian federal election is creeping up, and if history is any guide, Labor and the Coalition will be battling it out with policy sweeteners. One of the likely big-ticket items? Battery rebates. It’s a safe bet that, in a bid to win votes, both sides will throw money at home batteries (just like WA Labor is in today’s state election).
That’s great, except for one thing.
For most Australians, hot water heat pumps are the most energy-efficient way to heat water.
According to installers we trust, what are the best brands in Australia in 2025?
Solar hot water panels going on my roof in 2013.
Two years ago, I ripped a perfectly functional solar thermal hot water system off my roof. It had been sitting there for a decade, dutifully heating about 70% of my water with the sun’s heat (the rest boosted by gas). [Read more…]
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