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. Â 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 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, Â 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.Â
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Great suggestion on working out cents/kWh from *all* total actual usage and total bill $$. About 8c/kWh for me via amber since mid Dec last year, in Melbourne with an ev and half (phev) and fully electric home. It would be interesting to do some sort of user survey of this, so people can roughly work out the real deal best options for their situation / location.
Heh we are at -3c/kWh with Amber in the last 3 months. I guess I have been timing my energy use rather well.
Amber seems to the only honest ones on pricing at the moment. The increase has come from the DNSP. An extra 17c/day just because.
The network per kWh fees barely moved.
Yeah I come out at a BILL of about 9c/kWh Consumption. Cost is a different matter with my solar being about 9c/kWh LCOE and battery at about 15c/kWh LCOS. I’ve averaged 15c/kWh grid bill including all fees (yeah – Amber).
This compares to a likely bill of 23c/kWh Consumption had I remained on Powershop’s flat rate of 35c/kWh usage + daily fees.
My bill for EV phuel (PHoton fUEL) is equivalent to ~11c/litre FFuel.
I run a fully Better-Call-Saul (Griffiths) configuration with 70kWh/48kWh BoW/BoP (Battery-on-Wheels/Battery-on-Plinth) config.
The mandatory free window has to be paid for, and the fixed charge is where much of it lands.”
I can see limited causal link between free midday solar and fixed charges. If the kWh cost is reduced during the day to zero then the other hours in the day should be increased to offset this midday “loss”.
The delving into changes to fixed costs without any real definition of “fixed costs” appears to be simply a means of broadening the revenue base. Many, many years ago a daily supply charge was the cost of moving electricity from the generator to the household. Now however the daily supply charge does not represent the “cost to supply” there are all these other undefined costs that need to be added to the “real” supply cost.
Look forward to the updated SQ tool being available soon.
Hopefully there will still be an electricity company or two that has been able to not raise their daily feedin charge by 85%.
I have already changed my supplier on principle,taking advantage of a $100 discount for swapping ( offer ended on 30 June) .
If this type of offer is available from other companies as well,I may find myself changing every couple of months.
“If this type of offer is available from other companies as well,I may find myself changing every couple of months.”
Quite a few have these ‘new user’ credits, but you should look carefully at T&Cs, as I would expect you might have to stay with them for X time, perhaps a year of so.
I do see other special offers being payable at end of the first complete year.
I sent a comment to the recent enquiry, where I said that the daily charge should be passed at a minimal markup for admin because it is a fixed cost from the wholesaler. At least then consumers would have an easier comparison.
Personally, I have gone for the lowest fixed charge + low o/p & then see how it goes. I can always change retailer again. In fact, the retailer I have gone for worked out abt the same as my old retailer before the recent rise. I am still sorting my battery(s) out to get the best from it. That is one problem of fitting a battery into an existing setup.
I was very disappointed with the recent offer from Globird, where their prices increased by abt 30% after July 1. Jumped ship on 2 July! Many retailers had not posted their offers before 1 July, so I needed to wait until I could compare. I think that is a message to AEMO, that new pricing should be locked to 30 days before the new price rises so consumers can compare before the rises hit.
An AC coupled battery is easy to integrate.
The PW3 even cones with an inverter you can/don’t have to use.
Solar and batteries attracted the same mindset we saw in the 1970s with self-sufficiency movements. People who wanted to escape society itself. Any cent paid to the grid or a retailer is a failure, etc.
While, and like the EV tax, I think slugging people with extra charges is ridiculous at a time we’re trying to create urgent transitions to renewable energy, this is entirely due to the earlier decision to privatise electricity distribution.
As stupid an idea as privatising communications technology was, at the exact moment both technologies were exploding in capacity and importance in collective life. Sure, privatise a government airline, nothing essential about that. But energy and communications? A massive public policy failure.
But I do agree with your conclusions here too Finn. The endgame was never ‘everything for free’. I’m very happy to pay for the upkeep of the grid. I’d just rather do it through taxation, as a public service, with real controls over outcomes.
I saw a FB post screenshot with an Origin consumers DSC going from $1.87 to $4 something, almost the magic $5 a day DSC that was taken to AEMO by some lunatic green organisation (for ‘fairer’ power pricing).
I think it must have been NSW.
The fun thing is that this should be around whatever the DNSP sets their charges at, so I expect if it was the case, all retailers should be about the same, or risk losing a lot of customers.
G’Day Les.
I have had enough of the power suppliers. Talked to an electrician yesterday and it works out that I can go “off grid” and it is cheaper by a mile. Even these last couple of weeks when we have hardly seen the sun I still have not used the grid. In worst case, I have a genset that is big enough to run this house. Downside is increase in my Co2 footprint, up side is no monthly power bills. As a friend said “there is no such a thing as “free” power. It is either prepaid or postpaid”. I opt for prepaid.
Cheers Trev, yeah a lot will certainly consider going off grid if / when the daily supply charge goes north of a few $, $5 would be a disaster I feel for renewables helping the grid, it will stifle people investing in solar / battery, and make going off grid more attractive to those that can afford it.
I always through though that going off grid meant totally different planning, equipment, a real overkill on PV and battery to get through a few days between wintery days etc.
Sure a genset, maybe a little wind if permitted, might counter this, but most suburban situations would see that pretty much frowned upon and breaking some sort of council bylaws.
My guess is going off grid should / could be around double the investment, not including other means of power generation if needed.
Maybe if frugal . . .
To disconnect from the grid, the powers say it’s a permanent thing, they come and removed meters, all wiring from the road etc, cost here in SA is about $1000 for abolishment of service.
I find the c/kWh varies greatly between summer and winter. I am a heavy user of power, averaging 40kWh a day (I blame the hot tub), and in summer it’s overall about 3c/kWh. In winter more like 12c/kWh, mostly because the battery runs flat too often.
I have debated much about whether to go to one of the 3 free hours plans, and I may try one out at some point, but I am not convinced overall that it would be a net win for me. One of the factors is the typical 24kWh limit (my spa takes maybe 15-16kWh during that window, and so I would only have 8 kWh spare for the battery, so I would rely on the solar topping this up).
It would be great if the limit were higher, but I understand why they want to put a limit on.
Are there any Solar Saver plans with a higher limit?
I received a letter advising that my daily supply charge was about to increase by 0.60c on July 1. I searched the AGL website for a better deal on the supply charge. Nothing satisfactory was available, so I phoned them. They offered a plan that I can’t find anywhere on their website. I gladly accepted as the daily supply charge on this plan was slightly less than the original.
As my Tesla batteries fill most days, the usage charge doesn’t really matter although I notice are very comparable anyway.
Dave
“They offered a plan that I can’t find anywhere on their website.”
I have just signed up to Billhero, but this is my concern. All the energy companies have secret plans that are not advertised and only pulled out for retention purposes. How do we compere these?
Alan, you call them and say you’ve found a better deal, is there anything can do to match or beat it.
I’d do it every year, after a little comparing online.
Yes, it’s a PITA for sure, loyalty taxes are everywhere now, if you don’t do due diligence at most every 2 years or every unreasonable price rise (sounds like a warranty !), you end up paying more, often a lot more.
Car insurance came up the other day, premium was up 52% to $3600 odd, no incidents etc, made a couple of online inquiries, and ended up trying the same, the very same existing insurer, came back with $1217. Go figure.
Just find a better deal and switch. They deserve the loyalty they provide, which in general is nil.
Once, I tried being nice with AGL. They wouldn’t budge, so I switched. Two months later, they tried crawling back with an offer which still wasn’t as good as my switch.
Now I’m on Amber – full transparency of the grid and control of my CER gear when their optimiser goofs off a bit. They’re still having a few growing pains, I keep wanting to teach their software nerds some real-world economics, but they seem refreshingly and uniquely honest.
For those reasons, I’m not even tempted to keep banging my head against the hundreds of contracts that give with one hand while picking your back pocket with the other. It’s much easier to understand that when the sun shines and the wind blows, ship it in; when the coal and gas burns, your wallet catches fire too. OpenNEM, I love you.
Look if you ref an under 10s game with the same level of bias you have pumped out in these blogs, I’m not surprised you’ve ruffled a few feathers.
Regardless, you’re absolutely right, the writing was on the wall about the impact this was going to have.
I’ve not noticed anything as I’ve committed to the pure wholesale option (not sure if I can name it).
My fixed fees increased 15c to 85c/day as that’s what Energex increased the charge by. I think I’m coming out ahead
I’m not sure this tells the whole story.
The way I see it, when solar uptake increased, solar households were forced onto TOU tariffs. That allowed retailers to still make significant profit from solar households with peak tariffs after the sun went down.
Then came the governments battery rebate scheme. Solar households jumped on it and the retailers could no longer make money from large portions of the community. The only way they could maintain their profits is to increase the fixed portion of the bill.
I’d say, yes it’s a government own goal, but not just due to the mandated 3 hours of free power. After all, power is almost worthless in the middle of the day so shouldn’t be a huge cost to retailers.
Not all FIT has been nerfed. AGL battery rewards works out fine still with unlimited peak export FIT 28c/kWh. Although no free power, 6c/kWh import in the afternoon is close enough, and allows decent arbitrage on bad weather days. Daily supply charge didn’t increase, albeit already fairly high at $1.63
Hi Finn and team,
I must admit when I first received the notice from AGL that my rates were changing I was more than a little ticked that the supply charge had increased by over 70%.
I had – like many others – invested in a new solar / battery combo with the hope of reducing my bills to nearly zero (and the first bill was indeed close to that).
Interestingly though, the three timed kWh charges dropped – peak by about 55%, shoulder by about 20%, and off-peak by about 1%.
On thinking about this, it seems to me that at least in my circumstance, AGL may well have given me some transparency into their costs. i.e. the cost of the electricity is relatively small (between 20 & 25c/kWh) while the infrastructure (Ausgrid’s) is where the major cost is.
So, perhaps there should be more transparency into the “real costs” of delivering the power to our homes (and businesses).
Thanks to you and your team for your great resources. Replacing the gas appliances next 🙂
Hi Solar Quotes,
It would be good if you could look at the rise of daily/supply charging.
Consumption based charges can be mitigated against by modifying consumption behavior, adding solar panels and/or a battery etc.
Supply charges don’t have a mitigation strategy apart from changing plans/retailers and I am not convinced its the distribution networks materially changing from one year to the next being the underlying reason driving up the supply charges.
Keep up the great work.
Yeah… my daily usage from the grid is about half a kw, so that works out at what? about $5 a kWh that i buy for my power when you add the daily charge?
Not sure that little calculation has me any less peeved…
Andrew,
I’m not sure of the price of peeve these days, but removing it or converting it to self-peeve, by going off-grid, also has a daily charge. A $50k basic off-grid installation, “owing” 5% interest, is $2500 p.a. or $6.85 per day. Deduct your self-consumption from that.
The daily charge on mine is then $9.86, offset by a $1/kWh FiT-on-wheels into the BEV, I’d have to drive 60 km daily to recoup that, but average 23km, leaving a net daily charge of $6.08. But hold, there’s the small matter of the electricity, 15241.1 kWh over 2.5 years till yesterday, which is 16.8 kWh/day @ 33c = $5.54/day tariff saving, leaving $0.54 off-grid vs $?? on-grid daily charge.
And my system has three batteries and four inverters, for redundancy. Single equipment failure still leaves the lights on and the ice-cream unmelted.
That leaves replacement cost after a few decades, and what whilly-nilly hard to avoid grid-availability charges might one day be fabricated, at least in cities.
The stich these days is to just howl grievances with no discussion of possible solutions.
If I were to fix two things (while remaining a bit market oriented),
1. I would put a cap on the retailer margin on locally generated and consumed energy. e.g. customers may not be charged more than x c/kWh above their FiT for imports of local energy. They know where you live and smart meters tell them what’s being put on and taken off the local network (where local = on the same transformer say). All doable and economically rational.
2. Marginal pricing is an ivory tower economic theory which is failing to produce an efficient market that delivers electricity at close to cost. It is also failing to produce investment in dispatchable peakers. The CIS did that with batteries, while the fossil fouls were happy to underinvest to promote eye-watering price peaks for their generators. Simple fix would be to have basket pricing and per-fuel caps (which could still be fairly generous).
In addition, I find the increasing fixed daily rates more a reflection of the networks’ natural monopoly and capture of the regulator. Sure, the smart meter and piece of wire to the nearest power pole are a fixed piece of capital, but after that it’s shared with a highly variable capacity factor. A fixed fee provides no market signal to optimise use of the resource nor promote equitable investment in and sharing of a supposedly limited resource.
Why don’t we see fees that reflect perhaps the zone from which we source the energy, e.g. local, intra-REZ, intra-state, inter-state that more closely reflect costs or fees that charge for instantaneous power ToU power, e.g. instantaneous kW as a percentage of unused instantaneous local capacity? These would level out capacity factors and recoup costs more equitably.
Up to retailers to average these things out to simplify or do an Amber-style pass through with an optimiser service to make the best use of your CER.
Darrell,
The variability of solar energy, due to clouds makes a x3 to x5 array overdimensioning optimal at today’s panel and battery costs. That provides adequate generation much of the time, and a helluva surplus in the middle of many days.
The sun wantonly spills as much energy into space in a second as all nations
combined produce in 650 millennia – all at zero fuel cost to us. So once the overdimensioned generation provides overabundance, i.e. about now, there are only capex, maintenance, & billing costs. Charge a nearly flat fee for domestic consumers, and you can let a bunch of office staff go, replaced by half an AI.
The physics make monopoly irrelevant. The daytime *incremental* cost of a kWh, within the grid’s supply capacity, is zero. Nighttime adds battery lifetime cost, but that’s about it.
Regional batteries minimise the grid upgrades needed, by removing transmission peaks. A more fixed fee is real life market signalling. Innit?
(Coal is dead, economically.)
Oh, forgot to say Finn, that would be really good if you can modify your “find a supplier” system to be able to search / rank on daily network connection fee for your area.
Also be good if you update what the current charges are for the “solar quotes origin” scheme available to those who used an installer sourced through solar quotes.
Clearly the electricity market is broken.
No properly functioning market gives away a commodity for “free” unless it is a dysfunctional market.
The dysfunctional electricity market in Australia did not start on 1st July 2026. It has been dysfunctional for years.
Australians will get what they deserve.
What’s dysfunctional was that it was turned into a market.
Australians get most roads for ‘free’. It’s an essential public service.
You conflate the issues.
Roads are a government provided service.
Australians do not get any roads for “free” and it bewilders me why you would say something that is clearly false.
Electricity is not a government provided service.
Has electricity ever been a government provided service for “free”?
Electricity used to be like roads. Generation and distribution were publicly owned in NSW, and prices were stable and tracked basic inflation and CPI. It was a vertically-integrated system.
This is similar to how the US also provides electricity to this day, which is why its prices are some of the cheapest in the world. While the infrastructure there is largely privately-owned, it’s heavily regulated to control prices. It doesn’t run as an energy market.
Was the electricity “free”?
Peter, I think what Nick is saying is . . . yes, power was all state owned in the pre 2000 era (and some is still partially in govco hands), until privatisation around the 2000 era.
Under state ownership, it was charged on a cost basis, everyone is same situation (residential, commercial, possibly most industry, etc) paid the same, there was no plan or tariff choice apart from perhaps single rate with off peak.
The move to private ownership / control meant a charge to the more important profits for shareholders, over bloated ceo / executive salaries, and ever increasing returns and share price increases.
With it has come power pricing that is high, and so confusing that it is almost impossible to work out apples for apples, and many are not able to work through the maze of daily supply charges, various tariffs for their own power needs etc, choosing to stay with the devil they know retailer.
The reason that electricity can be offered free is that during peak solar times, wholesale electricity prices are usually negative due to excess solar coming from households and solar farms, also wind.
Large renewables can stop feeding the grid, but coal and households mostly cannot, so coal accept having to pay to generate, households get virtually nothing, so retailers are still getting cheap power.
After the 2 pm window, retailers can charge peak rate, but they are still getting extra cheap renewable power into the grid until early evening when the sun goes down.
Everyone benefits from this system: Load shifts to peak solar time, reducing the evening peak and the result is more renewables and less coal to keep the lights on.
I think you have missed the point.
Whilst you have provided an explanation for my benefit you needn’t have bothered. I have been tracking AEMO data for a long time.
But it doesn’t matter as what our opinions are will make no difference to the outcome.
Time will tell how successful the renewables transition will be.
“Time will tell how successful the renewables transition will be.”
Its on the nose now.
The biggest problem is they have to continue as too much money and time has been invested without any thought…
I see comments like this and I really want to take people on a tour of one of the coal-fired plants that are so popular in the deniers, with one of my engineering friends who work there.
They’re held together by string and sticky tape, falling apart, costing a fortune to keep running. Nobody wants to invest in new plants either because they’re so much more expensive to build, run and maintain.
Tired of the widespread politicised nonsense in these fake debates.
I would love it if you could talk at least a little bit about us poor regional flogs who have zero choice in our electricity provider, who get about 7c feed-in tariff, and live in a hot (not cold) climate. I don’t think free hours is a thing here. So much of your content assumes the reader is in a southern state and actually has provider choice. So what can someone in regional Queensland do to improve their solar outlook? What should we do about batteries in extreme heat?
Agree, Ergon’s free power offer is probably irrelevant to you, but you’re potentially way ahead of the rest with Ergon’s Solar Soaker plan. At 7c/kWh from 11am–4pm to charge a battery, that’s close to free, and likely only needed on the occasional dull day.
The 6c/kWh daytime feed-in tariff is better than anything else available, and with plenty of sun and enough panels, you’ll likely generate the average 26kWh/day to cover the $1.56 daily supply, with spare capacity left to cover the occasional import and still put you in credit.
As for heat vs battery: a shady, well-ventilated southern wall should cover it.
My batteries are indoors, and in your climate, I’d definitely protect the investment in that way. A non-habitable room will do. Ceiling insulation is always good.
A roof full of panels gives a lot of free hours here, 7 good ones, plus 2 of only 2 kW today. That’s not bad for mid-winter. (61.7 kWh)
There are some good points, but I still think retailers should only pass the fixed cost as Energy supplier (eg Essential Energy) cost + reasonable markup. What that would allow is consumers to easily be able to compare purchased energy costs on an equal position: retailers will have different energy pricing structures because they have different contracts with bulk energy suppliers, so consumers can compare using the data from their bills to calculate the optimum plan for their usage.
At present it is extremely difficult to compare retail offers. The supplier I have currently just moved to is reasonable value atm, but I will change when something better comes along.
Hi Finn and team Most of the Solar Sharer column assumed you have a battery. Please update how to pick a plan if you have a standard 6.6 kw solar system and no battery, with or without an EV. Thanks!
Another issue when trying to compare retail offers is the times for Peak, Shoulder & Off-peak change, as well as some offering o/p all weekend. The issue is that one has no method to get the ´real time´ data, even tho modern meters do have it available.
It is really time to allow consumers to access meter data directly, by using an optical interface to the port (requires metering co´s to give read-only access) or an economical method to access metering ports. It must be available on new meters after 2028, but that still leaves many, many meters that have no open-access. It is possible to safely access this data if the rules were changed. Data is available 24H old, but that is not useful for real time monitoring. By having a recognised method of direct meter access, it would not be necessary to have after-market grid monitoring installed. Inverters could directly access that meter data, so get better management of energy.
No such thing as free electricity. Somebody, somewhere pays for it. Are you the one that pays for another consumer?
AGL claim because usage is measured by a interval meter.This means you won’t see a start or end read on your bill .Instead; the total amount of your
electricity usage is shown.
Is This true,as I
water meter and petrol pumps have a start and end read as proof to the to amount you have used.
Isn’t the second to last paragraph predicated on tens of thousands of dollars invested in capital – solar panels, inverter, battery system etc, plus any other expenses e.g. installation, or maintenance, being ignored and the cost of generation being averaged out with actual grid costs?
I’m still using retailer usage charges as solar charges because that’s the only way to claw back the cost of investment now.
Looking again at battery payback periods after the Brakels piece and I need a minimum of 10% electricity inflation to get the battery to pay itself off within 10 years. Factor in that I’d need a new inverter, possibly work done with regulations having changed since installation of the solar, my retailer may charge more than the SQ estimate for the battery, and all the lost interest – more than $500 lost each year per $10K invested, and electricity probably needs to rise 20% each year to justify the investment. Except at that rate off-grid would soon be a better option!
Catch 22?
Hi John,
I know some people just can’t help but wallow in conspiracy theory & grievance politics but why don’t you stop whingeing about it and start walking the walk?
Just pony up the cash and go off grid, you’ll love it.
Bennett I get you’re a partisan Far Leftist who can’t help but politicise SQ but do try to stay within the lines – Origin’s customers are at least as likely to be non-Left as they are Left. (No I don’t expect this will get published)
I get partisans hate facts, but I’d think that what I wrote was actually entirely unexceptional. Solar panels, inverters, and batteries all cost money. Surprise surprise, we don’t have socialism.
Since capital expenditure is required, a RoI is expected, unless you can rely on everyone else to foot the bill – taxpayers, foreign countries, take your pick.
I periodically run the numbers but haven’t, yet, reached the stage where battery benefit outweighs the cost – whether off-grid or on.
Someone else in my area recently asked about going on-grid because of solar’s terrible performance these last few months, but after getting responses the decision was stuff that, stick with generator and off-grid as the cheaper option. I’m not there, yet.
Hi John,
It might be worth questioning your own bias before handing out labels.
If we don’t have socialism I’d encourage you to open the window and ask yourself who built the road, look in your bathroom and wonder where the waste goes, open the tap in your kitchen, consider how the water got there and why it’s clean enough to slake your thirst. These are all luxuries afforded to us by a civilised society.
The fact you can read at all is down to a social movement where everyone who came before you has contributed to your education. There are no rugged individuals in a hospital, the fire station, the Army, Police or Parliament for that matter, because it’s teamwork that makes the dream work.
I encourage anyone who declares “we don’t want socialism” to disconnect from the grid and hand in their Medicare card.
Dear John,
Anthony personally called me on my mobile phone number to give me a spray of his invective because I had the temerity to disagree with him. I never met the man before in my life.
I wonder where Anthony got my mobile number from apart from Solar Quotes database?
Solar Quotes should think long and hard about having a representative like Anthony on it’s team. I am talking to you Mr Finn.
Hi Peter, we’ll look into this to see if there’s any basis to the allegation. Am closing comments on this blog.
Hi Peter, we’ve looked into this and see you reached out to SolarQuotes with some questions around tilt racking systems for concrete tile roofs last year, and we suggested Anthony give you a call to provide advice – an offer which you accepted. Anthony has provided evidence as to how you conducted yourself in your correspondence with him.
Dear Anthony, as usual you stay on point and don’t make it personal.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your support.
You’ll understand it’s a little irksome to provide nuanced technical advice, with evidence and links for further reading, only to be repeatedly trolled with unsubstantiated hot takes. We always strive to offer a place for debate, provided it’s in good faith, but not all opinions carry the same weight.
I’m the first to admit I’ve learnt things in the comment section but sadly, some people have no grace. They’re so wedded to being right they don’t realise the more you know about a subject, like energy, the fewer simple answers there are and the less certain you can be.