For years, solar owners had it easy. You looked for the highest solar feed-in tariff. You checked the usage rate and the daily charge were not silly. You picked the winning tariff and moved on.
That world is gone.
Daytime solar feed-in tariffs are racing towards zero. In some places, they already are. And for households with solar and batteries, that number barely matters anymore. A new number has taken its place. The evening battery feed-in tariff.
That is increasingly the number solar/battery owners compare. And it is quietly reshaping how people choose retail plans and how batteries are configured and used.
Until the rebate, most home batteries were 10 to 15 kWh bought by early adopters, generally with efficient houses. Those homes used most of their own energy, barely touched the grid, and paid very small bills. People grumbled about low solar feed-in tariffs, but life was good.
Big batteries were rare. If you had one, you paid a lot and knew what you were signing up for, often joining Amber and playing the wholesale price game. Others joined Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) to get a large upfront discount. I did exactly that. My Powerwall 2 cost under $4,000 because I signed up to a five-year VPP in 2017.
Battery-specific retail plans barely existed.
Then the battery rebate hit.
Now there are 30, 40, even 50 kWh batteries sitting in garages all over the country. People are no longer asking how to save money. They are asking how to earn money. For years, the answer was: “Join a VPP!”
But VPPs without a giant upfront bribe, have always been a hard sell. Most people think the issue is loss of battery-control. That matters, but it is not the showstopper. VPPs can be designed to give the consumer control. Amber is the perfect example1. The showstopper is the tech.
The installer of your large, inexpensive battery typically has little interest in spending hours setting up software, testing comms, and ensuring the battery responds properly to VPP signals. When it doesn’t work, the retailer receives the support call. Sometimes the manufacturer and DNSP do too.
Amber integration is often even harder. It relies on reliable battery control and on-demand solar curtailment. If the install is rushed or sloppy, the battery software is buggy, or the internet connection is flaky, the whole setup becomes fragile.
The Rise Of Battery Retail Plans
But there’s an alternative to VPPs that gives the consumer 80% of the benefits with almost none of the tech headaches: Battery-specific retail plans with:
- Cheap or free usage rates during the day.
- High feed-in tariffs in the evening.
Most batteries can take advantage of these plans with basic timers. Many can be set up locally, sometimes by the owner, sometimes with a bit of installer help. Simply charge the battery on a timer, and discharge your spare capacity on another timer. Brutally simple.2
- Good for homeowners.
- Good for retailers.
- Good for installers.
- Good for support teams – at the installer, retailer, manufacturer and DNSP.
And it is easy to understand and compare these tariffs. Look for the highest evening feed-in tariffs. Check the usage rate and the daily charge are not silly. Pick the winning tariff and move on with your life.
Where this leaves VPPs
VPPs will not vanish. They still make sense where batteries are tightly integrated and properly supported. And they are the best way to support the integration of renewables into the grid.
But, for the household with plenty of kWh to spare, battery-specific retail plans with evening peak export tariffs look to me like the simple solution we’ve been looking for, with no need to relinquish control, or get tied up in a tech support nightmare.
Long live the feed-in tariff.
Just not the one we used to care about.
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.
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When they allow you to sell power to someone other than the company you have your electricity connection through, that is going to be the game changer.
OK so give me a few examples of these new plans you are talking about?
Specific retailers and the specific plans please….
It depends on individual usage patterns however in nsw, good options are
Globird zero hero (free charging 11am-2pm, $1 for not importing between 6-8pm, up to 15c/kwh for 10kw between 6-8pm)
Agl battery rewards (25c/kwh between 5-9pm)
Origin Battery Starter (18c/kwh between 5-9pm)
Flowpower (45c/kwh between 5.30-7.30pm )
And please include some that are available to regional consumers in Essential Energy areas.
I googled > South Australia small electricity retailers < the other day, and got a pretty good list, try that with your state or state / region.
There isn't much to assist, but to visit each site and click through, do your due dilligance for what suits your homes energy usage needs / patterns.
Be aware, energymadeeasy.gov.au is useless at finding the great battery FIT deals, just the regular plans . . . it's probably becasue it is so complex what's on offer, and comapring apples for apples.
Here is SA, with a battery there are some offers about.
Probably the best I have seen is iOenergy SA Sustainable Home plan.
37c peak TOU from 2100 evening through to 1000 next day, then a great 8c rate for 6 hours 1000-1600 (for winter top off etc), another 37c hour 1600-1700, then the one to avoid with your battery 85c 1700-2100.
NIL FIT through the day, but . . . they pay 30c FIT from 1800-2100, 3 hours to dump say 10kwh or so and cover the $1.65 daily supply charge easily, with some to spare.
Thanks for this Finn. Useful information for me in the near future when I will be getting a biggish battery and more solar. I live on the mid north coast NSW and have a well sited good quality system which is ticking along well. I still get 12c kwh feed in tariff (for how long?) but my supply and time of use charges are high. I can control when timing of some uses well. Currently my usage is low so I am still in credit across the year but the benefits have been diminishing every year. Still the system has paid for itself so I’m fine.
However, around the time the solar/battery upgrade is done the usage on my property will go up significantly. But using the sort of plans referred to above I should still come out ahead.
That will definitely be the time for a reassessment of my retailer’s options and a careful analysis of competitors.
Personally I cannot imagine electricity retailers changing their spots, they are by nature bottom-feeding bloodsicking parasites with teams of experts constantly dreaming up ways to gouge their consumers. They have proven beyond doubt that they cannot be trusted and even if they propose something that ‘looks’ appealing, it will soon be changed. I accept that is their culture so I am creating a system whereby I will be totally independent of their predations..
How much of the daytime solar peak will be soaked up by Snowy Hydro 2.0 and other big storage projects coming on line over the next 5 years?
In other words, will daytime FIT’s ratchet back up?
Have wondered the same, with many big firms rushing to install batteries and other grid-level storage, there’s surely a market for cheap electricity to fill them. Many aren’t even bothering installing generation equipment alongside the storage any more.
Great advice as always Finn. Is SQ going to do a summary/assessment of available battery-specific retail plans at some point?
Also there are rumours Tesla may relent and allow Powershare for at least its latest Model Y and Model 3 some time this year, for those with an existing Powerwall. That would be a game-changer for me, the economics of a second battery don’t make a lot of sense for me (and I have a PW2, so there are basically no options anyway). But being able to use the car battery as a top-up on winter nights would be superb, any way you can ask them if that’s coming?
Yep, in 2023 early summer when our 11.23 PV went in, we were neutral in cost most summer days, just with solar . . . peak TOU was about 47c (13 hours a day !), FIT 6c.
July 2024 peak went up somewhat, FIT dropped by 33.3% to 4c, daily costs went to perhaps 50c – $1.
July 2025 Peak TOU went to 54c or so, FIT dropped 50% to 2c, and now looking at just ubnder $3.90 a day based on quarterly billing period just finished yesterday.
A battery of 10kw will well and truly cover us for all our usage, maybe a little credit inc daily supply ($1.10), 20kwh would guve us some great options for decent evening FIT dump of 10kwh, but what’s next ?
The last blog about supply charges, infrastructure warning of big increases there, I’m starting to see we won’t be let off the hook for ever escalating ways to get consumer $.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy paying something to be part of the grid, even this bill just received, if not for our huge self consumption of production, we’d be looking at $1000 bills.
Exactly l suggested in solar quotes months ago the solution was to pay a higher fit in peak hours to solve the duck curve 😀 😉
We started out without solar panels or a battery and were getting MONTHLY bills of up to $1100!!! That pushed me to get panels; it was the smartest thing ever, because they ended up being almost free! Then the panels were not enough, so we doubled them, but this time, we connected them to the 3-phase and put in a 10 KW SUNGROW battery before the rebate.
What is saving us, with only 3.5 cents for export, is that SUNGROW batteries can be charged from the grid. It took me months to work it out, but now it’s working really well.
I charge the battery at off-peak, from 12.00 am, to full charge; the battery kicks in at 6.00 am to run our commercial espresso machine (coffee is important!) The battery switches off at 8.00 am, and we are on solar panels.
When it’s back home time, the battery will switch on at 9.00 pm, and we stay on that until we go to bed and the charge starts again at 12.00 am.
The most important number for us is that off-peak one.
Thank you for your advice and comments; very useful for someone not technically minded like myself. We are in FNQ so, on the surface, seem to be limited to one supplier. Our feed in is 8c which we thought risible until we visited friends down south! At the moment our panels plus battery meets our needs with about $100 per month credit. For the our supplier charges $50 per month.
Are you aware of any alternatives? Or does our location mean we need to be happy with our lot?
Anthony, you’re DSPN is Ergon I think, and they bill you too through retail arm ?
Not sure, but I don’t think you even have other retailer options up there ??
My Brother in Bowen had 10kw pv and 10kwh battery put on a few years ago.
Up to when he sold that place about 6 months ago, His fixed rate was 34c inc gst, FIT 12.337c . . . he would be in credit $150 each month, nothing special, no VPP or supplier control, just the lower rate and excellent FIT.
His monthly supply charge was $41 inc gst.
Low daily usage rates and higher evening feed in rates sounds great but we’ve go a Sungrow system, battery and inverter and there’s nothing in the app that allows force discharge settings, only force charge. I’ve seen a YouTube video of someone setting force discharge in the Sungrow app so I’m wondering if this option is available in Australia.
Would love to know my options in WA, just feels wrong sending 1.5kW to the grid and not being paid for it (but I have to pay them a daily charge?), just because my inverter is bigger than 5kW.
Agreed! Back to Andrews’s first comment. Can we donate to another user or at least reduce the daily charge? Need options
I’m in a down-sized 3br house with a 6.6kW PV system (with not much roof space left to meaningfully add more PV) and a PW2.
I don’t qualify for the federal battery rebate but am considering a second PW2 if a still-good second-hand one was available (at a reasonable price) so as to be able to take advantage of solar sponge rates and my PV system to fill both PW2s to provide power through the evening/night until the start of the next day’s solar sponge period.
The current single PW2 can’t quite do this on cloudy days and especially in winter. Not looking at making money exporting during high-FIT periods, just looking at keeping consumption costs as low as possible.
Anyone know whether and where one can get hold of a still good second-hand (or maybe even a new) PW 2 ?