Supply Charges Are Rising, But Off Grid Still Doesn’t Make Cents

With the recent rises in fixed daily charges, the retail price of electricity means a lot of people are going off.

I understand the anger – I’m paying it too – but I have to reiterate the answer isn’t going off grid.

For everyone who’s invested in solar, and now batteries, hoping to effectively prepay their electricity bill for years to come and insulate themselves from future price rises, the 30, 50 or 100% lift in daily supply charges many are copping is a bitter pill that blows out payback times and applies higher ongoing costs.

Free Hours Don’t Directly Cause Price Rises

The launch of free daytime electricity plans has been described by some as a transformational gift, while others call it industry grift, blaming it for the rise in daily supply charges.

But perhaps we should point out the AEMC began a pricing review two years ago, well before the free hours of power program was announced last November.  The electricity industry is looking to rearrange the way it charges for energy and there were two rounds of 49 submissions made before a draft proposal dropped.

2724 submissions came back in response, so you can guess not everyone was happy about what the industry had planned for us.

SolarQuotes, the Smart Energy Council and thousands of others were railing against it. Happily it seems we’ve been heard as the changes were slated to be much worse.

I won’t argue that our electricity market is fit for purpose, but it’s what we have to work with at the moment, so we’d better get on with it.

As for plans offering 3 hours of free power, they serve as the perfect backup for solar and batteries – a luxury you lose if you go off-grid.

Going Off Grid

I’ve spent 15+ years installing remote area power systems and the simple rule is this: you need backup, especially through winter.

As an off-grid electrician, my wry observation is this: a generator’s main purpose is to make my phone ring. Battery charging is just a byproduct, but without it your battery warranty is toast.

Generators are both essential, and unreliable compared to sunrise, plus your neighbours won’t want to hear one wailing all night.

The only off-grid customers I’ve encountered without a generator are very modest users, with an efficient house, a huge solar power system and some additional energy sources like a wood fire, mains gas or perhaps an EV with V2L.

Hot water can be 30% of your energy consumption so having a cooking range, space heater and water heating combined makes sense, in winter at least. Urban air quality would be horrendous if Australian cities were full of these.

Speaking Of EVs

Roughly speaking your electricity consumption will double when you get an EV, which is great because electricity is cheap compared to petrol, so you’re going to save heaps of money and stop sponsoring extremist theocracies in the Middle East.

Meeting that extra demand with your own rooftop solar will be a challenge  – made easier by free hours of power from the grid, if you don’t disconnect!

Free electricity might just save the grid, and all the taxpayers who paid to build it, from a very expensive death spiral.

Going off grid in the suburbs sounds superficially attractive, but really it’s freedumb.

A diesel genset like this doesn’t have the particulate filter & emission control gear a modern car engine does. They’re filthy.

The Disconnect

The energy transition hasn’t been well explained but the core promise of significantly lower bills hasn’t broadly materialised yet, which erodes public support for the work needed and emboldens the NIMBYs who don’t like the look of transmission towers and renewable generation. Sadly the examples, like $156 million saved in two years, don’t sell clicks in the (f)right wing media.

Fun Fact – privately built, Australia’s newest coal generator is about old enough to drink, but has already gone broke. Like a drunk midnight eBay purchase, the now foreign owners have also written off the billion-dollar asset, while the adjacent coal mine survives on millions of dollars of state government subsidy. The whole thing is slated for closure by 2030.

Frankly, a lot of people aren’t doing solar and batteries for the warm and fuzzy feelings – it’s a grudge buy with a silver lining of a single finger salute to the power companies.

Unavoidable price rises are a political disaster, because power bills are now front and centre for punters who’ve paid up front to make them go away, and they’re pernicious for renters without roofs.

If you want to treat the grid with contempt then what you need is a gutsy remote area system with grid compatibility, not a lightweight hybrid pretending it’s capable. There’s roughly $30,000 pictured here, not including solar and installation.

Bringing Us To Batteries

To some extent, batteries make things simple, but I’m absolutely sure a lot of people have some buyer’s remorse about them.

For years customers have been lashing out a lot of money on solar and laughing about how much they’ve saved at the power company’s expense.

However, as the rates have risen, feed-in tariffs fell, and the bills have come back, punters ring their favourite electrician to ask – Why are my costs rising? The solar must have malfunctioned!? When it turns out nothing is wrong, they often leap into buying the next gadget, because if it’s expensive, it must be worthwhile, right..?

This is a grid hybrid system with 36kW of surge capacity, 40kW of solar and 42kWh of storage for the princely sum of $150,000 installed.

Are Batteries a No-Brainer?

The simple luxury with batteries is you’ve stored some free sunshine for later. You don’t have to think much about when you use power.

It’s a crutch for convenience and old habits, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think before flicking the switch. There’s no arguing you want to run your dishwasher overnight so you have clean cups for breakfast, but maybe a two-drawer machine gives you flexibility to wash during the day, without cycling the battery?

The complexity is that batteries themselves aren’t cheap. You have to realise the warranted delivery of energy from them is a helluva lot more expensive than free hours of power, or solar straight from your roof.

Efficiency Is Always King

If you can generate your own power and use it yourself behind the meter, that’s perfect.

What’s better than perfect? Not needing the energy in the first place. Stopping drafts, insulating your house, shading walls & windows, using a better showerhead for fewer minutes. It’s hard to put a price on comfort, but having a home that’s inherently comfortable is priceless.

These are all such simple and effective measures that you think they’d be law. Except the law is heavily influenced by the building industry, which cares about short-term profit at your ongoing expense.

Perhaps the best we can work toward is making frugality fashionable. It’ll be a tough nut to crack, what with the consumer capitalist psyop we are living in. Billions in advertising budgets are aimed at getting you to consume more, more, more! So the most revolutionary thing you can do is just stop buying.

So Stop Buying Electricity?

Free hours of power has at least one really important feature. We’ll explain it better in a new article, but for people with systems that don’t reach 100% charge for months on end – a forced charge of free grid power will save your batteries from an early death.

When you get an EV, the extra storage you can trickle charge into will be a boon, but being able to pull bulk energy from the grid quickly becomes important too, even if it’s not free.

Mains power is the strong, stable, clean, reliable and quiet backup you’ll need for a long week of overcast conditions.

More importantly, it’s a first-world asset we need to look after. My local shops don’t have enough roof to run all the fridges that keep my groceries cold, but the collective suburb has solar all over it. Just like the sewer, water mains, rubbish collection and the roads that bring all these luxuries to us, the electricity grid is a public good that keeps us healthy.

I’m pretty sure we need an honest conversation about who owns what, and how we collectively pay for the public good, because it’s the community, not corporations, that makes this country great.

However if you reckon I’m alright Jack and it’s your right to take your publicly subsidised solar and battery system, and go off grid just to spite the power company, maybe start by handing in your Medicare card.

But for most, going off grid isn’t a sensible answer – if you’ve been stung by supply charge rises, search around and find a better electricity plan instead.