Some parts of Australia.
Not Victoria which has bankrupted itself building roads and railways it cannot afford.
Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
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Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
#12Australia, excluding Western Australia as we are on a separate electricity grid.
From the article; this applies to NSW, South Australia and part of Queensland.
So yeah, not universal yet. But the precedent means it's moving in that direction. If WA homes end up producing lots of solar at midday then this opens the door there as well.
Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
#13basically they give you a few hours free electricity in exchange for significantly higher electricity prices for the rest of the day. basically a free IQ test.
Can you elaborate on the higher elec prices for the benefit of those of us not in Aus? Is that because of the smart meter requirement?
Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
#14Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.
Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
#15Not really.
The fundamental costs and margin requirements in the system haven't changed.
This is a government-mandated electricity plan (a default market offer) that competitive electricity retailers are now required to offer. Those retailers still have network costs, environmental costs, energy costs, and administration costs to recover, and so prices at other times of day necessarily go up.
Some consumers may be better off on this plan (generally at the expense of other consumers), and some will be worse off.
It's good politics and only so-so policy.
Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
#16The fine print is interesting, theres a cap, fair use provisions and it requires a smart meter. Smart meters are still a bit contentious. Sadly probably wont be any good for selective crypto mining, alas.
A 24 kWh cap per day seems very reasonable. Drawing 8 kW is quite a lot.
My home is in London UK and is relatively small and efficient, but 8kWh may be higher than our peak demand ever over more than 20 years in this house...
Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
#17Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.
They've already burned at least $15bn on that disastrous Snowy Hydro "battery" project... Could've just rolled out consumer batteries on a large scale instead.
Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
#18It’s very cool to see what happens where there are simply so many residential solar installs. Power price goes negative during peak sunshine hours so they just give it away.
Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
#19Incentivizing usage during peak times makes total sense, but if price swings are this wild, how are grid scale batteries not highly economical? My rough ballpark math was that you need roughly 20 kilowatts of battery storage to make this issue basically nonexistent, and that would cost about 10 billion dollars, which doesn't seem that much for this.
Grid scale batteries and household batteries are being widely deployed.
Australia is the third largest market in the world for grid scale batteries, and has the highest per-capita capacity in the world; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/10/21/australia-becomes-wor...
Not to mention more than 200k new household batteries installed in 2025 (out of roughly 10 million households).
Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity
#20It’s very cool to see what happens where there are simply so many residential solar installs. Power price goes negative during peak sunshine hours so they just give it away. Solar installs benefitting everyone, even those who never got solar.
As an Australian, the lack of anxiety and guilt you get when you're using 10-12 hours of air conditioning in the middle of summer and not paying for a cent of it because your solar panels are covering is worth more than anything