{"id":58034,"date":"2022-01-21T05:02:15","date_gmt":"2022-01-20T18:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/?p=58034"},"modified":"2022-01-21T05:02:16","modified_gmt":"2022-01-20T18:32:16","slug":"solar-export-tariffs-mb2324","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/solar-export-tariffs-mb2324\/","title":{"rendered":"Solar Export Tariff Draft Guidelines Released"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Solar<\/p>\n

Draft guidelines for solar export tariffs – a potential charge for exporting electricity into the grid – have been released for comment; and no doubt there will be plenty.<\/p>\n

Solar export tariffs have been brewing for a while, so first a brief summary of the saga to date.<\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s electricity grid was originally designed for electricity flowing into premises, not out from them. But the latter has been increasingly happening as households and businesses across the country install solar panels<\/a>. One of the motivators aside from the solar rebate that reduces the upfront cost of systems has been availability of feed-in tariffs<\/a>, which provide a credit for surplus solar energy exported to the mains grid.<\/p>\n

There is so much PV capacity in some parts of the National Electricity Market (NEM1<\/a><\/sup>), the congestion caused by all this solar energy goodness – particularly around late morning to early afternoon – is causing some headaches; threatening the stability of local networks.<\/p>\n

In some situations, new solar owners have been hit with stingy export limits<\/a> or are zero export limited<\/a>.\u00a0 Thankfully tech smarts and tweaks being implemented means this isn’t as prevalent now, but more needs to be done to cater for more systems.<\/p>\n

There are a couple of fixes, including increased spending on infrastructure. But this is not only expensive, and everyone will still ultimately pay, the extra capacity is only usually needed at certain times of the day.<\/p>\n

The other approach is to provide pricing signals to solar owners when they should self-consume more of their solar energy2<\/a><\/sup>, but also for exporting energy to the grid when it\u2019s needed.<\/p>\n

One of the signals to self-consume is to introduce a charge on exports under certain circumstances. And once that idea was floated, cries of “SUN TAX!” soon followed.<\/p>\n

Solar owners were justified in being concerned – after all they’ve made a significant investment – but there was a fair bit of misinformation that followed, which the Australian Energy Market Commission attempted to address last year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What’s Happened Since With Export Tariffs?<\/h2>\n

To this point, NEM Distributed Network Service Providers<\/a> (DNSPs) have been banned from whacking a surcharge on exports, but that changed in principle in August last year with the AEMC’s tweaks to National Electricity Rules and National Energy Retail Rules, a summary of which can be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, the ability for DNSPs to integrate two-way pricing isn’t going to happen straight away. Existing solar owners cannot be put on export pricing until 2025 at the earliest<\/b>. And there are expectations that two-way pricing will very much be a two-way street, with benefits for both parties.<\/p>\n

The Australian Energy Regulator was tasked to develop Export Tariff Guidelines on two-way pricing that would cover issues such as:<\/p>\n