If you’ve gone looking for the Solar Sharer Offer with free periods of daytime electricity and come up empty, you haven’t done anything wrong. The Solar Sharer Offer (SSO) only exists in three parts of the country: New South Wales, South Australia and South East Queensland (SEQ).

Everywhere else runs on a different plan, and what you can actually save depends on where you live. Here are some alternatives to the SSO.

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Tesla is about to become an Australian electricity retailer – as first reported by Danny at ZeCar.

Its local entity, Tesla Energy Ventures Australia, has a plan called Tesla Electric Dynamic that is currently in testing, and I spent the evening pulling it apart.

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Victoria’s Midday Power Saver offers three hours of free electricity from 1 October. The federal Solar Sharer initiative, already operating nationwide, has reportedly attracted only around 10,000 customers.

With Victoria’s tariffs now finalised, there’s an opportunity to see what the state is offering and whether its approach might prove more attractive to households.
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Australia’s data centre boom is going to need an extraordinary amount of electricity. Without the right rules, households and small businesses could end up sharing the bill. [Read more…]

Western Australia’s government-owned Synergy has an unusual position in the electricity market: it owns some of the state’s biggest batteries, as well as generators selling electricity into the same market.

New analysis has found its batteries sometimes charging at surprisingly high wholesale prices in the middle of the night, helping push those prices even higher. On the one hand, Synergy is paying more to charge its batteries. On the other hand, its generators could benefit from higher wholesale prices.

The prices discussed in this article are wholesale electricity prices. Individual price spikes don’t flow directly through to the regulated tariffs that most WA households and small businesses pay. But persistently higher wholesale costs can ultimately affect the cost of supplying electricity in WA.

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Only 24% of Australian battery owners have joined a Virtual Power Plant (VPP). That’s from the ACCC’s latest electricity market report, and the reaction has been fairly uniform: this is a problem, and the fix is to make VPPs more appealing. Better consumer protections. Simpler products. Minimum technical standards. Probably more VPP rebates.

 But there’s another way to read a number like that.

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From the start of this month, most energy retailers are required to offer plans offering three free hours of daytime electricity. We’ve put three Solar Sharer offers under the microscope to see the devil in the detail – just how much extra customers will be paying in daily supply charges and peak rates.

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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.

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Up until last week, the angriest Australians I’d ever experienced were the parents at under-10s soccer. [Read more…]

Most energy retailers have released their mandatory “Solar Sharer” free daytime electricity plans to market, but those who failed to meet the July 1 deadline or hiked daily supply charges could face the wrath of regulators.

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