![\"kids](\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/soccer-game.jpg\")
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Up until last week, the angriest Australians I’d ever experienced were the parents at under-10s soccer.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The parents did not share my interpretation of the rules.<\/p>\n
For years I reckoned that was as angry as Australians got. Then this week happened.<\/p>\n
July 1 came around, and new fixed daily charges for electricity connections arrived, and I watched the reaction online.<\/p>\n
Turns out the soccer parents were amateurs.<\/p>\n
So what’s got everyone so worked up? To explain, I need to rewind.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That’s the whole reason I built a plan comparison tool<\/a> that let you sort by the highest solar FiT with one click. Energy Made Easy took years to catch up.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/a>\u00a0Most people cheered. Yours truly put his hand up and said hang on<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\nSolar Sharer Goes Live<\/h2>\n