I Thought Soccer Parents Were Angry. Then Solar Sharer Happened.

Up until last week, the angriest Australians I’d ever experienced were the parents at under-10s soccer.

I was the ref. Not because I know anything about soccer. Because nobody else would put their hand up, even though half those parents were dyed-in-the-wool soccer tragics. I was raised on rugby league. My “was that a foul?” judgement is calibrated to league standards, which meant I wasn’t stopping play unless a kid launched a flying karate kick at the opposition.

The parents did not share my interpretation of the rules.

For years I reckoned that was as angry as Australians got. Then this week happened.

July 1 came around, and new fixed daily charges for electricity connections arrived, and I watched the reaction online.

Turns out the soccer parents were amateurs.

So what’s got everyone so worked up? To explain, I need to rewind.

Comparing Electricity Plans Used To Be Simple

For many years, optimising your electricity plan as a solar owner was simple. Find the retailer with the highest feed-in tariff. As long as they didn’t shaft you on the other charges, those feed-in payments dragged your bill down to zero, or into a nice credit.

That’s the whole reason I built a plan comparison tool that let you sort by the highest solar FiT with one click. Energy Made Easy took years to catch up.

Then solar got so popular that daytime wholesale prices fell off a cliff. On a sunny day they now go negative more often than not. Nobody’s paying you much to export solar when the grid is drowning in it.

So people bought batteries to store enough surplus solar to get through the night. And on cloudy and winter days when your panels can’t fill the battery, you top up from the grid during those cheap or free daytime hours. Because you almost never pay for grid power, your bill becomes your daily supply charge, minus whatever meagre daytime FiT you get for solar exports once your battery is full.

The really savvy big battery owners went a step further. They signed up for premium evening feed-in tariffs, some as high as 45c a kWh, and dumped some of their stored solar into the grid at the evening peak. Charge for free in the day, sell high at night.

Then the pollies noticed that “free” polls well. So they mandated every retailer offer three free hours in the middle of the day. The Solar Sharer scheme. Most people cheered. Yours truly put his hand up and said hang on. What’s this going to do to daily supply charges? What’s it going to do to peak pricing? Retailers don’t hand out free power out of the goodness of their hearts. They claw it back somewhere. Nobody listened. I got told I was just trying to flog solar leads, and opposed mandatory free power because it dampens solar demand. Which was a neat trick, given I’d already sold SolarQuotes.

Solar Sharer Goes Live

July 1 rolled around this week. The Solar Sharer offers went live. And there they were: eye-watering daily charges and peak per-kWh rates to match.

Cue the angry mob. Anger online the likes of which genuinely shocked me.  My advice to the angry: if you can find a retailer still offering a daily charge closer to $1 than $2, jump ship. But if every retailer is raising daily charges at once, that tells you something in a a competitive market (most of Australia). They’re doing it because the economics say they have to. The mandatory free window has to be paid for, and the fixed charge is where much of it lands.

So the game of chasing the highest daytime feed-in tariff has long gone. The new game, if you’ve got big solar and battery, is to hunt for the plan with the lowest fixed charge that still lets you top your battery up cheap or free during the day and won’t cripple you on the odd evening when you need some peak grid power. The team are updating the SQ comparison tool for exactly this as I type.

And don’t stop there. Use every lever you’ve got. If you regularly have spare battery capacity in the evening, a premium evening FiT can still be worth chasing.

Your Bill Doesn’t Tell The Full Story

Most importantly, stop staring at the total on your bill.

Look at what you’re actually paying per kWh for all the energy you use. That’s the number that matters. As we electrify our homes and our cars, if you can power your entire life for single-digit cents per kWh, thanks to a decent solar/battery system,  get no gas bill, buy no petrol, produce much less pollution, and still keep the 99.99% reliable grid sitting there as backup I reckon that’s a pretty good place to be.

Even the soccer parents would struggle to be angry about that.

Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.