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Oz: Free Daytime Electricity Is Coming. Here's How It Actually Works (lenergy.com.au)

submitted 2 weeks ago by BaconWrappedEnigma to c/offtopic

4 comments fedilink hide all child comments

From 1 July 2026, energy retailers in NSW, South Australia, and South-East Queensland must give households at least three hours of free electricity every day. No solar panels required. No need to own your home. You just need a smart meter and to opt in through your retailer to have access to free daytime electricity.

The scheme is called the Solar Sharer Offer. It works by passing on the benefit of cheap midday solar power, which has always existed on the wholesale market but never made it to your bill, directly to households. Since it was first announced in November 2025, one significant change has been made to the design. This article covers what that change is, how the scheme works in practice, and how to get the most out of it.

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[–] Dave 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The power companies will obviously just adjust their pricing to account for the free power period, so this isn't about cost to households is it? If I understand it correctly, it's about how the grid has too much power at this time and they want an incentive for power users to shift their power use to this time to prevent grid issues?

[–] Ilovethebomb 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I guess so, unless there's some serious magic thinking happening over there.

It does make getting a 20+kwh house battery an absolute no brainer though.

[–] Dave 2 points 1 week ago

It does make getting a 20+kwh house battery an absolute no brainer though.

On the face of it, the numbers seem to work. This site says the average grid cost in Australia is 31c/kwh which seems about right I guess. So assuming you could charge and use all 20kwh every day, you could save $6.20 per day or $2263 per year. $15k AUD or so for a 20kwh battery makes a but under 7 years to pay for itself.

Batteries have a loss of around 10% of the energy during the charge/use cycle, so you'd get about 18kwh of actual use. But that doesn't matter that much because according to this website the average power usage is 3,900 kWh per year, which is 10.6kwh per day. So it may take you 13+ years to pay it off.

Yeah that's pretty worth it. I don't know the lifespan of the battery but it seems it should be more than 13 years. I calculated the pay back on our battery was about 40 years 😬 (assuming it kept full capacity all that time).

This may be pretty smart actually. To solve the problem, many places (including NZ to some extent) are doing grid-scale batteries. But this way you can encourage people to get batteries, you get a grid-scale battery spread over millions of houses and you don't even have to pay for it.

[–] Manticore 1 points 1 week ago

I'm guessing it will be an opportunity for providers to charge more per kW/h outside of those hours, possibly treating this like a perk. Much like we often have here with 'free power hour' plans.

Plenty of citizens won't know, and will take the ruse. Much like extended warranties that are redundant under Aus's consumer laws.