How Getting Solar & Battery Systems Literally Empowers You

I’m pretty sure that date is accurate, and nearly 3kW of solar was horrendously expensive.

Back when I had long hair, solar was pretty basic, and so were the electricity supply, metering, and billing.

It’s wistful thinking to imagine we’re going back to simpler times. But today, it makes sense to streamline and rein in your bills equally.

Just getting your head around energy and the various ways we pay for it these days is a bit complex. Sadly, the retailers aren’t helping much. Block pricing, flat rate, off-peak, time-of-use, solar soak, shoulder plus demand charges, there are 7 options without even talking about export rates for solar. They know if it’s a bit opaque, you’ll probably give up, just pay the bill and move on with your day.

Once you have a good understanding, though, there are simple choices you can make that will curb your energy bill at a fundamental level. Of course, this means having enough data to make these informed choices, and solar power is excellent for this point alone. Knowledge is powerful, and an app in your pocket gives you both the power and the energy to use it.

Efficiency is KING

While solar power is cheap and some retail plans offer “free hours” around midday, the zero-cost kilowatt hour is the one you don’t have to buy in the first place.

There are a thousand ways to save energy, but even before you do any assessment or planning, one of the best DIY things you can do is just fill gaps, stop drafts, and even do some cheap double glazing.

Hot Water can easily account for 30% of your home’s energy use. While heat pump hot water is arguably a smarter choice than a home battery, I can personally recommend an efficient shower head. Or, much better still, take a shorter shower.

Better insulation is always a winner too, but as we’ve explained before, that can be hard to retrofit.

The heart of the matter is this: no matter the technology or retail plan, using less power will always be cheaper. The trick is to find ways to make it comfortable and, if you can, automate it.

A History Of Gross Consumption

We used to build basic, leaky houses and pour a lot of energy into them to make them bearable. Rules limited the size of post-WW2 dwellings, extended families lived under enclosed verandahs, and the house my parents bought had an extension that was literally a tent. They took 30 years to buy an air conditioner and 25 more to buy the second.

Now we have novelty McMansions, which leak more because they’re oversized, so we plough far more energy into them. In a rich country, most people come to expect whole-home ducted climate control from the outset. Sadly, this demand is understandable because the crap designs of Australian houses mean you couldn’t live without some kind of air conditioning.

The thing is, despite technology becoming cheaper, we still have to put in raw energy. There’s not enough vision here to enact the sort of measures that have flatlined electricity demand in California since the early 1970s.

Enter Solar Power

Average system sizes have grown 10-fold, and prices have fallen even more, to the point where there are increasing instances of South Australia’s entire demand being met by rooftop solar alone.

As we progress toward a cheap, resilient, decentralised mesh of power, it’s not only grid engineers but consumers too who are finding things more complex. There’s some real and understandable fatigue due in no small part to the shell game played by the electricity retail industry.

Punters are keen to reduce expenses. They’ve seen some solar companies make brave claims about “zero bills,” so spending irrational sums of money to get ahead isn’t uncommon. Everyone likes to stick it to the man, but they’re understandably enraged when that investment doesn’t pay off, because the rules change or the goalposts are moved.

Yelling at the clouds, or the retailers, won’t do much, sadly

The Perverse Incentive

I remember when 1 kW systems cost $14,000. They consisted of 1 inverter, 2 cables, 5 wires, and 6 panels. The fastest we ever installed one was with 3 people; it took 45 minutes flat. They would only yield 4.4kWh/day, but offering a high feed-in tariff meant that a small yield would pay a big dividend. Put simply, you would export during the day and buy the power back at night for less than half price.

This grid consumption profile would suit a premium feed-in tariff customer. It’s exactly what the grid doesn’t need now that we have lots of solar available.

However, there was occasionally hell to pay. Monitoring systems were uncommon, and if a winking red fault indicator light went unnoticed, the quarterly bill would cause irate phone calls about why this expensive kit was broken. Despite the subsidy, feed-in tariffs took money from people who could afford it and injected that private capital into establishing an industry.

It gave early adopters some real skin in the game. It trained people not to use their own power.

For everyone else who’s benefited from increased scale, competition and lower prices, working out how to use the sunshine when it was falling on the roof for free is the key.

Choice Doesn’t Suit Legacy Electricity

For years, the likes of Origin & AGL would generate kilowatt-hours, and we punters had no choice but to buy them, at whatever rate was going.

You might buy some for cheap, but only after hours. They called it off-peak, which is worth remembering when people wail about the networks controlling things and retailers offering different time-of-use windows.

The big yellow bulge of solar yield is where we need to move consumption patterns.

These days, the cheap power is at midday, not midnight, which isn’t the only way solar has broken the business model of legacy energy. Solar means you have some choice in where to get your electrons. Batteries mean your choices are many, and to some extent, the sheer number of options can be paralysing.

There Are Some Golden Rules

Daily charges might suck, but at the end of the day, we’ve all got to contribute, because looking after the least of society is cheaper than letting them fail or sending them to gaol. The power grid is a great public good, like reticulated water, sewers, roads, rubbish collection, and your Medicare card. It’s modern infrastructure that keeps you healthy. So be wary of solar salesmen promising “Zero Bills”

• Nobody can predict tariffs, consumption or legislation.

That’s not to say electricity retailers don’t need to be held accountable. They are known to offer loss-leading contracts to get you to sign on, hoping you’ll not bother to change when the rates revert to something higher after the introductory offer.

• Repay them the favour by changing retailers regularly.

While Solar Analytics is handy, I use a service called BillHero to compare accounts and let me know when to change retailers. They promise to save you more than the subscription costs, but there’s more proof than that. Some retailers have been caught declining service to customers who use an automatic bill-forwarding service.

• We know BillHero works.

Maximise your solar. Panels are so cheap now, you can just put them anywhere, so long as it’s not inside the shed. East, North, and West are great; even South is fine. The correct orientation is simply facing up.

• In 17 years, the only consistent complaint I’ve had from solar customers is “Geez, I wish we’d installed more.”

Batteries can simplify your life. While some people love the idea of trading energy, gaming the retail plans, or turning fat profits, the reality is that most people don’t want to turn electricity into a hobby. A fellow industry traveller of mine actually warns people, his obsession with energy was dragged up in divorce proceedings.

What a battery can really do is remove the anxiety about just when you put the washing on. You can get on with life without setting a timer or forgetting to switch things on or off. The only trap is if you get complacent and your consumption climbs, the battery you bought based on efficient habits may prove inadequate.

• Batteries give you flexibility, but be warned, they’re not a silver bullet.

Remember, you will likely need after-sales support. Buying the cheapest tools from the $5 bargain bin at the hardware shop might seem like a great idea at first, but if something breaks, your $15,000 battery is too expensive to just go in the rubbish.

Ideally, your battery simply recharges with solar every day. If you need to change settings to match a new retail plan and charge from the grid, or even if it’s just a change of telco or a firmware update that breaks something, you want someone available to solve problems. It’s likely a remote monitoring tweak or a site visit to reconnect the internet. Not everyone has highly responsive customer service, but it’s worth knowing if the people taking your money will ask for more when you need assistance.

• Ask your battery installer if they offer a free site visit per year, a maintenance plan or an annual online review.

Knowledge Gives You The Power

Modern solar power with full consumption monitoring is really powerful, but you must make sure it stays connected to the internet, and your app stays up to date to get the most out of it.

I must admit that when we were first installing solar close to two decades ago, the novelty of seeing the old mechanical meter spinning its disc backwards was priceless. It really did make it obvious.

When the solar inverter powers up, it not only meets the consumption, the meter literally turns backwards as power flows back to the grid.

I’m convinced this has always been the best thing about solar power, its ability to change behaviour.

If you’re interested in investigating solar panels and a home battery, get three quotes and start comparing.