For a year I paid the real price for solar and I hated it – and loved it.
I eventually had to stop because I was starting to more-than-slightly obsess about it. For a while it was worse than my Candy Crush addiction, and it ended the same way.
But then Ausgrid announced it was going to charge solar panel owners for some of the excess power they sent to the grid, and it is giving me intense flashbacks to that year.
Ah, 2022. The year I gamified the power industry, and inadvertently learned exactly how that weird and perverse place works.
To rewind. Shortly after we got a nice solar array on our roof, we signed up to a very rare (in Australia) kind of energy retailer. What it does is expose you, completely and unapologetically, to the real, wholesale price of power.
It turns out that the retailers that on sell the power from the network to your house don’t pay a set price for it. Every 10 minutes or so, the wholesale price for a megawatt, or wattever, is determined by how much it costs to generate it at the time (it’s actually more complicated than this, because many retailers sign hedging contracts to eliminate some of the risk, but my new retailer’s model was to pass on the price – and the risk – to me).
That wholesale price can vary wildly. On a cloudy, windless winter afternoon, when everyone gets home from work, turns on the heater and the lights, puts on a load of laundry and chucks something in the oven, wholesale power gets pretty expensive. Especially if – in an increasingly common occurrence – one of our country’s clunky, dirty old coal generators has broken down.
Conversely, around midday on a sunny, windy day, when the windmills are churning and the panels burning across the state (and the country), there’s so much power around that it’s basically free. And because the system has more power than it needs (and often nowhere to properly store this excess – more on that later), it actually charges power generators to feed it in.
And that’s, increasingly, us. Thanks to subsidies and price cuts and the general feeling that this is a nice way to save on energy bills and maybe help the climate emergency, a third of Australian households – coming up to 4 million – have solar arrays.
When I signed up to this provider I got an app which told me the going rate for buying power, and the going rate for selling power, at any moment.
It was also set up to send me alerts – thanks to the Bureau of Meteorology you can tell when there’s going to be a spike in the power price in advance, so if you get an alert you can avoid putting on the washing, or dial down the air con, to avoid being slugged.
This was, uncoincidentally, also the time the feed-in tariffs were highest, and if you had a battery full of old solar power and it was set up the right way, you could make a motza selling it back to the grid.
The app would also let me know when I was literally paying the power company to take away my excess solar power. After all that money we spent putting the bloody things in, there they were, adding to our power bill. Thanks, app.
The idea of this energy provider was that if you know what you’re paying, and what you’re earning, from minute to minute, you can stack the deck in your favour.
At least that’s the theory. But, and this was increasingly my frustration, this was not what happened.
To gain the benefits of this system, you need to be able to move power use around. And, annoyingly, it turned out that this isn’t so easy, and even more annoyingly, the less affluent you are the less you can take advantage of it.
Got an electric car? Lucky you, you can plug it in when the power price is low and the feed-in tariff is negative to get an entirely free charge and save yourself the penalty. Nah, we can’t afford an electric car.
Got a home battery? Lucky you, you can store up all that lovely solar power during the day, instead of paying for it to be taken away, then either use it yourself at night or sell it back to the grid for a nice juicy return during the morning and evening spikes. Nah, we can’t afford a battery.
Got a heat pump water system? Lucky you, you can set it up to fill the boiler with hot water using power straight from the solar array, no grid required. Well, actually we do have one of these. Lucky us.
Which leaves us with moving our power use around. We both work, so if we’re not WFH we can’t pop a load of washing on when the app tells us it’s smartest to, or cook a dinner ahead of the evening family full-court press. We pop the heating on in the dim afternoon light when we get home, not in the middle of the day.
When I was working from home, it was a great joy to whack on the dryer after a clothes wash and know it was doing absolutely no damage to either the environment or our finances.
But in the end my power bills told me the bad news. We couldn’t do nearly enough demand-shifting to make the system work. We ended up paying a lot more for our power than the year before, despite the solar panels.
So we switched power providers, to a sane one on the old fixed-price model. The app went the same way as Candy Crush.
Soon after our former retailer sent us a big refund, because it had a guarantee that no user would pay more than the state’s “default offer” which sets a cap on power bills. But it was too late, we were gone, and I was too burned out from app-stress to sign up again.
I still love our solar panels. They still save us a heap of money overall. I’ve just found that I don’t have the right kind of household to make the most of them.
And the key? Batteries. What I’ve learned is the super importance of batteries. If I’d had the upfront cash to afford one, I’d have been laughing. And I’d still be addicted to that bloody app, checking in multiple times a day to find out how much I was saving/earning.
Which tells me one blindingly obvious thing. It’s a bad idea to nakedly disincentivise solar panels, especially in a way that benefits the affluent at the expense of the rest. It’s just eliminating a previously invisible solar subsidy, and putting a drag on the renewable revolution.
WE SHOULD INVEST IN BATTERIES. Not necessarily little ones in each home, which are a nice luxury but really an inefficient way of dealing with the issue. We need great big community ones.
Then, all our solar panels will still earn money for us, because there will be someone who still wants to buy that power. And we won’t be hit by such big spikes, because when the time is right and our panels are dark, the batteries will send it back to us.
And I can have my app back.
Nick Miller is Guardian Australia’s morning live news editor
