> Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff

That's pretty rough. That should be about 14¢ per kWh which only a hair less than the median price per kWh in the US (~17¢).

> It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.

As if we aren't busy enough. I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them.

Is it too much to ask for my government to provide sensibly and simply priced energy so we can get on with our day, working, studying, raising kids etc?

IMO this is just setting us up for insane surge pricing for those people who don't do the good citizen thing of becoming nocturnal

The average price of power in Australia is 34 cents per kWh. The average Aussie spends A LOT more than $0.20 per day.

7.3% return, not bad. As battery prices drop it will get even better.

Where I live, $1000 would get you about 3kWh of battery power, which would pay for itself in a couple years

Basically every home in Australia, and certainly every home and business solar setup, has a smart meter that is grid connected and can be remotely shut down when needed. Or they even just limit the amount that can feedback to the grid if required I.e you’re making 8kw of solar, but it will only let you feed in 2 if the system determines that.

There is not “person” turning things on and off.

Commercial solar fields are entirely automated, nobody is going to the site to throw a disconnect switch lol. For sites without hardwire internet, there’s 4G or satellite connectivity. A 4G cell comm module is a few hundred dollars. Adding in remote operations control is probably a tiny fraction of a percent of a solar field project.

Also, turning off solar (known as curtailing) is just dumb. It's throwing away "free" electricity. The UK and Ireland is doing the same by turning off their wind turbines every now and then, and it's frustrating.

By making the price go negative, you are creating the market incentives for someone to do something about it: households will invest in BES systems to suck up all that free electricity to use during peak times, and some industrious entrepreneurs might even be convinced to do it on a very large scale to start arbitraging on the price fluctuations.

You don't even need the price to go negative to have a BESS buffer make financial sense.

I'm on a time-of-use tariff, with a special "EV" slot between 02h and 05h. My car is programmed to only charge during this time unless I tell it otherwise.

The price difference is significant: About €0.08/kwh compared to the €0.2 - €0.4 I'd be paying during normal day/peak times.

This has made my day-to-day driving basically free, less than a euro per 100km (€0.08/kwh * 7kwh/100km)

I tried doing the same thing for other large(ish) loads in the house, dishwasher, washer & dryer, but the cost benefit was really really small when compared to the big savings from my EV charging.

I heat my water using an oil burning boiler, but if I had an electric water heater, it would make total sense to run that during the "EV" hours as well. If I could, I would then also invest in more capacity, and set the thermostat higher to have essentially a hot water battery that could last me the whole day.

At my old house I had an overspecced solar system, and I set it up to dump the remaining available solar energy after the batteries are done charging into my hot water heater. The thermostat was set to 75C or something, super hot. I'd then have piping hot water for most of the day, and maybe needed a small electric boost in the mornings, especially in the winter. Another 200L or so would have resulted in me not needing any grid power to heat up enough hot water for the household.

Power at peak times is cheap because load is distributed throughout the day. If everybody ran their heaters at the same time, power wouldn’t be so cheap and we’d reach the same situation we’re in.

Australia has some cutting edge tech that actually sends control signals through the electric wires.

It rolled this out in 1953:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak

It let coal plants run more efficiently and people could heat their water overnight.

Somewhat bafflingly they seem to have somewhat failed this same task with the solar rollout.

Presumably 21st century capitalism got in the way of the mid 20th century engineering.

If you built homes with a lot of thermal mass, you could cool the internal thermal mass when energy is $0 and have that mass absorb heat the rest of the day. This is sort of the principle a lot of traditional architecture uses where evaporation, wind over a courtyard, or nighttime lows cool thick walls.