Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity • Hacker News Board

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#411

Post by protocolture » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 10:56 PM UTC

rswail wrote: post #388

protocolture wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Aside from the supposed "contentious" nature of smart meters, which is mostly the RW cookers thinking it's some nefarious plot, along with vaccines and 5G. Eh I sit on the fence on this one. Take your pick as to who is going to abuse the data. Corps or the government to taste. Consider this very proposal, incentives to use power at certain times are good. But that incentive structure could instead be very anti consu…

Smart meters don't make things better or worse, they are technology that enables better time-of-use metering than the century of multiple meters for peak vs off-peak consumption, as well as making meter reading/billing cheaper. They enable new services like feed-in tariffs and incorporation of V2G and VPP infrastructure. Rents have not doubled in 5 years. Rental inflation peaked at ~8% and is now below 4% pa. https:/…

Well my rent went from 320 to 520. And then they wanted 580 so we are moving to a slightly nicer place for 600. Not quite doubled but near enough. My area has had larger increases than that. Bloke up the road had to have his daughter move home and take up 300 dollars of the rent, which is what her apartment was costing her before covid.

> they are technology that enables better time-of-use metering

Right and we all have to pretend that the technology is neutral and act surprised when it ends up being used for anti consumer purposes? Thats the usual game isn't it?

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#412

Post by AtlasBarfed » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 11:00 PM UTC

tw1984 wrote: post #264

bruce511 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, a battery isn't available to everyone. But I is available for many. One would have to do the math, cost of battery versus 24kw free daily. But clearly for lots of people the math will work. A side effect of policies like this is effectively getting people to invest capital to time-shift elec usage. That's good policy. Reducing the peaks in consumption solves other problems.

> A side effect of policies like this is effectively getting people to invest capital to time-shift elec usage. this means you don't have a functioning government/political system.

Strange anticapitalist stance for hackernews

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#413

Post by AtlasBarfed » Wed, Jul 15, 2026, 11:07 PM UTC

ghiculescu wrote: post #95

brabel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world? Here in Sweden nearly all of the electricity bill you pay is concentrated on the winter months when there is literally zero sunshine. Even then solar is popular here. I calculated that installing solar would take around 10 years or more to pay for itself, but I have very little hope to stay in the same house all that time so for me it seemed l…

10 year ROI is what I got quoted on a solar setup. I live in Queensland. It’s very sunny here.

You are mere hundreds of miles from cheap Chinese panel manufacturing. The Chinese are going to pump manufacturing oversupply for likely a decade more.

10 years roi is mass scale corruption

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#414

Post by stubish » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

thelastgallon wrote: post #393

stubish wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EVs with V2G are just big batteries, nothing special. You certainly can charge your battery on the free power and sell it back during peak periods, and people are doing just that today. Just mostly using their 50 kWh household batteries rather than their EVs though, because V2G is still mostly science fiction unless you buy one of the few models of car that actually support it and have a compatible charger and in…

For V2G, its a simple feature that enables a car to participate and make money in the energy ecosystem. Govts have to standardize it for cars, just like mandating usb-c.

It has been standardized here, and we see articles about it in the papers for a few years. Yet only 2 or 3 cars on the market implement it and don't even advertise it, apparently still in trials or pushed aside for sexier features. I was under the impression it was not simple, as it requires more electronics and complexity in the car.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#415

Post by stubish » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 2:28 AM UTC

Panzer04 wrote: post #288

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s also environmentally better for you to take the resistive heating thing. As long as you never need to heat it up outside of the noon-window that’s strictly positive. Because the “additional” solar panels will be necessary anyways to cover the night/late evening usage. The optimal buildout will always have superfluous energy at noon. That’s fine. We just need to get over the whole “energy costs anything” thin…

The magic of market pricing means people will figure out the best solution and optimise towards that. Hot water heater tanks are easily one of the most obviously good applications of noon excess energy, and resistive heating elements might as well be free.

I agree about market pricing. The new pricing model however distorts this, turning electricity into a subscription service for people with a large enough battery. This distorted market can create bad incentives. But switching to actual market pricing won't work for most customers who don't want or can't afford surprises in their energy bills (it is already available for those that want it). Short term, it seems a good policy to shave or remove peaks. Long term, in a world where every household has a suitably sized battery, it means several times more generation capacity than necessary because consumers have no incentive to reduce consumption (beyond ethics and peer pressure). I don't think this pricing model is a permanent solution. And I have no idea how many years it will remain viable and a good policy, or what sort of hot water system I should buy given 10-20 year warranty periods.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#416

Post by HDBaseT » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 3:12 AM UTC

didgetmaster wrote: post #350

ukd1 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This won't work. Just do air-conditioning whilst power is being produced? LOL, you know it's hot in someplaces outside of that?

I didn't say only do air conditioning during the peak times. You can definitely adjust the AC so that it runs on full during the peak times and cools things down a few degrees below ideal, then back it off and allow the temperature to rise a few degrees once electricity becomes more expensive. Again, if the incentives are there, people will adjust.

This might work if you live in an airtight 1 m × 1 m × 1 m cube.

Running the aircon 5 degrees colder at 1pm and turning it off at 2pm will nullify the temperature difference in under 30 minutes.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#417

Post by Swannie » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

RossBencina wrote: post #374

upsuper wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia has that as well, the wholesale market changes price every 5 minutes, but it is a big ask for average consumers to follow that price and shift power usage in real time.

> it is a big ask for average consumers to follow that price and shift power usage in real time. I could imagine appliances that take that into account. e.g. an airconditioner that works harder during the cheaper periods. I wonder whether any retailers pass through the 5 minute pricing variation? Should be easy enough to monitor the price and adjust my AC via the infra red remote protocol.

Down to 15 minutes, yes, retailers exist, if you have a smart meter (which are 4G connected for near-real time data back to the grid and retailer).

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#418

Post by Swannie » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 4:29 AM UTC

thatsit wrote: post #397

Australia is in fact primed to go all-in on all-electric. They have an hyperabundance of solar and wind (+land where it can be installed) and have the purchasing power to buy cheap panels and electric cars from China. Even the mining industry is going electric as it is plainly cheaper to operate mining trucks on solar PV. They couldn’t care less about that strait of hormuz disaster. Energy to cheap to meter at last!

Except agriculture and almost all logistics, rely heavily on imported liquid fuel.

And whilst EV's or Hybrds are about 50% of new vehicles, there are a lot of existing ICE domestic vehicles.

So, yeah, we actually care.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#419

Post by rswail » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 6:40 AM UTC

protocolture wrote: post #411

rswail wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart meters don't make things better or worse, they are technology that enables better time-of-use metering than the century of multiple meters for peak vs off-peak consumption, as well as making meter reading/billing cheaper. They enable new services like feed-in tariffs and incorporation of V2G and VPP infrastructure. Rents have not doubled in 5 years. Rental inflation peaked at ~8% and is now below 4% pa. https:/…

Well my rent went from 320 to 520. And then they wanted 580 so we are moving to a slightly nicer place for 600. Not quite doubled but near enough. My area has had larger increases than that. Bloke up the road had to have his daughter move home and take up 300 dollars of the rent, which is what her apartment was costing her before covid. > they are technology that enables better time-of-use metering Right and we all h…

On rentals: Anecdata vs ABS statistics. No one is arguing that rents haven't gone up, but the rise peaked post COVID at ~8% and are now roughly reverted to the mean of 3-4% pa.

On smart meters:

Victoria has had them for 2 decades now.

If there were anti-consumer uses that our retailers or distributers took advantage of we'd know about them by now.

We've also had a fully privatized grid for quarter of a century, with generators, transmission, distribution, and retail separated.

The rorts have been by the distributors "gold plating" the poles/wires, and some machinations of the NEM by coal/gas generators.

Neither of which were caused by the smart meter rollout.

Re: Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

#420

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Jul 16, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #402

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was way back in 2008! Solar has been in China for a long time, but they were using it directly to warm the water, not via photovalic panels (which is why the results were so bad).

well, whatdoyouknow, maybe our apartment's water was indeed heated by solar and I just had no idea :)

It’s hard to say. If they use photvalic instead of pure solar, they can top off a lack of sun with electricity from other sources to keep the hot water warm (outside of winter when it’s all natural gas based anyways). Ome would think they could do a better job with personal heat pumps.