Solar charges, new prices and government handouts mean your power bill will change from today
The new financial year marks changes to power bills. (Shakira Wilson)
And so, the first day of the new financial year is in and Australia's armies of accountants and tax professionals are sharpening their pencils.
It's a time for so many of the wonderful things life has to offer – dusting off and unscrambling old receipts, trying to learn (again) how to use spreadsheets, and wondering where all the time went.
But it's also an important time of the year for your power bills.
You might not know it, but July 1 is arguably the key date on the calendar for Australia's energy industry, or at least its consumers.
This year in particular there are a few things happening, and they all have implications for how much you'll pay for power:
- New power prices come into effect;
- New government handouts kick in, and;
- There may be changes to how your solar is charged.
What's happening to power prices?
For about one-in-10 households, the new financial year has a direct and immediate effect on the price they pay for their power.
That's because July 1 marks the date new benchmark power prices come into force.
Almost 10 per cent of residential customers are on so-called default market offers, which are set by the Australian Energy Regulator for New South Wales, south-east Queensland and South Australia.
In Victoria, they're set by the Essential Services Commission.
While the default rates might only directly capture a smallish share of the market, they act as the barometer by which all other prices are set.
What's more, July 1 often marks the date on which retailers change new contract offers.
That's where the action really happens, given the vast majority of households are signed up to these market contracts.
Unlike the past couple of years, when benchmark prices uniformly rocketed during and in the aftermath of the 2022 energy crisis, there's a variety of new prices across the states this time around.
New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia will all see decreases in the benchmark price for electricity.
And it's nothing to be sneezed at for beleaguered consumers who have been smashed by higher costs of living on all fronts.
In Victoria, for example, the fall amounts to as much as 7 per cent – or $100 – compared with an annual bill last year.
On the flipside of this equation is Queensland, where households in the populous south-east corner of the state will get hit by another, albeit relatively modest, increase in prices.
For residential customers in south-east Queensland, reference prices will edge up 4.2 per cent – or $83 – on last year.
In Western Australia, prices charged to households by the state-owned power providers Synergy and Horizon will increase 2.5 per cent.
[Power prices - Chart]
Richard Foxworthy, the boss of energy savings website Bill Hero, said the modest changes either way would be welcome news to consumers battered by years of double-digit price hikes.
Still, Mr Foxworthy noted that while prices had shot up quickly during the "dark days" of the energy crisis, they were falling much slower despite a slump in the wholesale cost of energy.
"Wholesale prices have now unwound and are pretty much back to baseline and have been for quite some time," Mr Foxworthy said.
"Retail prices – surprise, surprise – have been much slower.
"So while we can expect to see some moderate price declines, that's what we're anticipating, prices are still high with a long-term view."
What are governments doing about it?
Amid the sustained high prices for electricity, governments are, to varying degrees, stepping in to try to cushion the pain.
Perhaps most notably, the federal government will be handing out $300 to almost every Australian household – noting that some households claim they will miss out for reasons such as not being connected to the grid.
It won't be cash in your hand.
Rather, the money will be automatically taken off your bill.
And it won't happen all at once.
Instead, the $300 will be deducted in $75 increments for every quarterly bill over a year.
But it's not just the Commonwealth that's showering the largesse.
In Queensland, where the state Labor government faces a bruising election in October after almost 10 years in office, households are being given an extraordinary $1,000 energy rebate.
The assistance, along with the handout from Canberra, means Queenslanders will be paying much less for their electricity this financial year even with the increase in underlying prices.
It's a similar story in Western Australia, where gushers of resources and GST money have enabled the state government to shell out $400 as a "credit" against every householder's power bill.
The latest giveaway marks the fourth year in a row in which the WA government has forked out in such a way, meaning average consumers in the state have been paying some of the lowest prices in the country.
Other states such as South Australia and Victoria, which had hefty rebates for the financial year that's just ended, have not extended that relief.
Mr Foxworthy said the handouts were a "sugar hit" that would no doubt be gladly received by consumers but he said the money could have been better used.
"It seems like a huge, missed opportunity," he said.
"If those funds could have been deployed towards helping people install better insulation, install more energy-efficient appliances, decarbonise their homes by replacing gas appliances with electric alternatives, those kinds of things.
"It's kind of like to give a man a fish or teach them how to fish.
"So, you know, thanks very much federal government, you've given us a nice fish. But that's not going to last us very long into the future."
What's this about solar panels?
Millions of Australian over the past 14 years have, to a certain extent, tried to take matters into their own hands by installing solar panels to cut their bills.
It's been a successful strategy for the most part thanks, at first, to generous state and federal incentives that encouraged people to adopt the technology.
More recently, the plunging costs of solar panels have enabled people to install ever larger systems on their roofs to maximise the power they can produce.
Those two trends, plus one or two other things besides, have driven an extraordinary boom in rooftop solar uptake across Australia, where more than one in every three homes has a system.
But with the rapid spread of so much solar has come some significant challenges.
And none is bigger than the proverbial tidal wave of rooftop solar output that crashes over the system in the middle of every day – a phenomenon that is threatening to overwhelm the low-voltage poles-and-wires network in some places at some times.
To deal with that phenomenon, things are changing this financial year.
From this month, solar households across much of New South Wales may well have to pay for the right to export some of their output in the middle of the day.
Under a change that was approved by the regulator, poles-and-wires distribution companies Ausgrid, Endeavour and Essential will apply what is known as two-way pricing.
It involves customers paying 1.2 cents for every kilowatt hour of electricity their solar panels put back into the grid during the sunniest hours of the day – between 10am and 3pm.
But there are a couple of caveats.
For starters, the charge only applies over a certain monthly threshold of solar exports ranging from 192kW/h kilowatt hours to 212kW/h.
As well as this, those same households can be paid 2.3kW/h if they can deliver electricity into the network when it badly needs the supply – between 4pm and 9pm.
At the moment, it appears to just be New South Wales homes affected by the change, although both South Australia and Queensland have indicated they could update their tariffs in 2025.
Victoria has so far resisted imposing such costs.
Even so, one reader told the ABC his solar panels exported as much as 750kW/h into the grid during the height of summer, suggesting some customers could be on the hook for added costs all the same.
Either way, experts say the changing settings for solar tariffs – and tariffs more generally – showed how it was becoming increasingly important to make better use of Australia's abundant daytime solar resources.
Finn Peacock, the founder of SolarQuotes, said the likes of two-way pricing – and export limits for certain types of big new systems – were a reflection of the remarkable success of Australia's solar industry.
Mr Peacock said there were now so many households with solar panels and they were capable of generating so much power that it was, in fact, pushing the distribution system to the edge of its capabilities at times.
He said the changes were relatively minor in the scheme of things, adding they would be more than offset by the benefits provided by solar.
"The problem they're trying to solve – and it's a good problem in my opinion – is that solar uptake has been so fast," Mr Peacock said.
"There's so much solar in the network that the network does struggle at times to take all of that energy.
"We do need to do something because if we don't the network will break.
"So, doing nothing is not an option."
How do I get the best deal?
It's something of a cliche that consumers should shop around for the best deal if they want to minimise their power bills.
But, according to Mr Foxworthy of Bill Hero, it's also fundamentally true.
Mr Foxworthy said falling wholesale prices had set energy companies "back on the acquisition trail" for new customers.
Consequently, he said, they were throwing around offers to try to entice people across.
He said this latest acquisition spree was often taking the form of cash incentives rather than cheaper electricity.
His advice – take advantage of retailers' offers. And never be loyal.
"Our view is that incentives can actually be better for consumers because you get the benefit of that incentive up-front, typically," Mr Foxworthy said.
"If you switch to a new retailer, some of them are offering $300 incentives just to sign up, and they'll pay that out to you sometimes in the very first month that you're with them.
"So it's actually a realistic strategy to find a plan where the value is tied up in an incentive, sign up to that plan, pocket the incentive.
"It would give you typically one, two or three months more or less of free electricity while that incentive credit is being consumed.
"Then just switch again to some other plan, potentially another plan that has its own incentives."