I think the likely cost would have been hundreds of billions considering Australia does not have a nuclear energy generation industry. It currently has a very small nuclear workforce as it only has a small nuclear medical reactor on the outskirts of Sydney.
I am talking about the $30 billion that the opposition was making up. My point was that even those made up numbers for nuclear were still more expensive than installing solar and batteries.
This article is misleading as it implies that Australian energy retailers must provide every household with 3 hours of free electricity.
This is not the case. From 1 July 2026, Australian energy retailers with more than 1,000 customers must offer at least one energy plan which includes 3 hours of free electricity, capped at 24kWh per day, to residential customers in 3 states - NSW, SE Queensland and South Australia.
https://www.energy.gov.au/rebates/solar-sharer-offer
Not all energy plans that the retailers offer have to include 3 hours of free electricity. In practice, most energy plans currently offered don’t include 3 hours of free electricity but some retailers such as Globird are offering more than one energy plan which includes ‘free’ electricity.
The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity.
Australian consumers can choose the retailer and energy plan their home or business is on and can change their plan at any time.
Wait, capped at 24 kWh a day? Our household consumed 8 kWh per day over the past week (gas cooking, no airco). So with a home battery that sinks 10 kWh during those 3 hours you have minimal energy costs?
Quite simply put this is what they ask you to do. To the point that the Australian government will heavily subsidise (30%) home battery installation.
Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course). It’s not hard to achieve this for any competent government. Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is also corrupt and inefficient).
This rollout of cheap solar in Australia is causing power prices during a global energy crisis and a datacenter build out to plummet.
And fwiw i don’t think Australia’s government is perfect. But it should set the bar to other nations of ‘what could be’. You could have falling power prices right now if you enabled a government to encourage what is currently by far the cheapest form of electricity (solar).
The bits of China where most of its people live are pretty mediocre for solar power. Like, Southern France at best, not Australia, not even California.
China is huge, and it does have huge solar farms, but the trouble is now you need a huge power transport infrastructure. Australia can move enough power from a desert where nobody lives to a small city 100 kilometres away on a few ordinary hundred kV pylons and be happy. China has huge cities, 2-3 thousand kilometres from those solar farms so it is building long chains of 1MV pylons which is the same idea but at this incredible scale.
> ”Remember Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course).”
China is adding around 10X Australia’s total installed solar power generation every single year. Half of the entire world’s deployed solar is in China.
And while Australia’s solar growth is impressive, it’s worth remembering that it’s only possible because of China. It was Chinese government policy that pushed to develop the huge solar industry that exists today and supplies vast quantities of cheap solar panels to the world.
This is true - without Chinese manufacturing of solar cells and panels, solar energy would not be as cheap as it is today.
Equally true is that Chinese manufacturing of solar cells is only partly possible because of Australian solar research and development. In 1983, a research team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), invented the PERC silicon solar cell. This design fundamentally improved solar cell efficiency to capture sunlight more effectively and reduce electronic losses. Over several decades of refinement, the UNSW team continued to set global efficiency records, pushing cell efficiency from 18% in 1984 up to 25% by the early 2000s.
RE "......what is currently by far the cheapest form of electricity (solar)....."
this is misleading and wrong. At best it is a half true statement.
My total power bill has not decreased.
Solar electrity may be cheap to produce.
However if only generates for 4-5 houra day, generates non at night or bad weather.
May generate non for several days in bad (cloudy weather )
So the supply of reneables (solar ) is un reliable.
To make renewables (solar ) reliable , we need big (grid size) batterys. For the grid we need new transmission lines. Predicted to be 10,ooo KM for Austrlia. Cost of new transmission network, last estimate i saw was $40 Billion AU
The government mandated smart meters will allow peoples power supply to be turned off when the likely power shortages occur.
> Australia has over 10x the rollout of solar than china (per capita of course)
This is a remarkable stat that's the opposite of what I expected, but I suppose China is (a) starting from a lower base and (b) much, much larger in absolute population. Australia's population would fit in Chongqing.
Chinas solar rollout is absolutely pathetic. Netherlands is a close second to Australia in case anyone wants to argue latitude or population density alone is a cause. Germany’s up there too. In fact on a per capita basis China’s way down the list.
Where people get misled on China’s rollout is total generation (since it’s a huge fraction of the worlds population) and the fact that they do large centralised rollouts rather than enabling rooftop solar. So they have some of the biggest solar farms. Rooftop solar is the way the countries that have shot past china have mostly achieved results - remove barriers to installation and grid connection and suddenly every citizen is invested in it since it saves them money. It’s the classic efficiency win from a massively motivated population vs a central bureaucracy. China’s showing everyone how NOT to enable solar.
How would rooftop solar even work in China, especially in Chinese cities? Is the assumption that SFHs or at least row homes are as common in China as they are in other countries?
SFH's are rare in China outside the villages; big cities are all high-rises (in Beijing, and I believe other large cities, it's illegal to build SFH's within the city limits, though the few remaining "hutongs" are exempted for historical reasons)
Yes, I think most of us know that, so I find the statement to be confusing that China is behind on personal solar. Of course they are! It is never going to be much of a thing as urbanization continues to accelerate, because people just don't live in those kinds of houses where you have your own roof to put solar panels on. You are much more likely to see community solar instead, or solar plants (along with wind farms) in western china sending energy to eastern china via transmission lines. And you better bet that in rural china the 农民 are using whatever free electricity they can get (I've seen water wheels in the weirdest of places).
When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water. Well, I could tell when they turned on the central heating plants for the winter because I finally had hot water showers again.
> When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water
was that recently? I lived there from 2011-2017 and solar power was virtually unheard of, much less powering any buildings. But yeah, China is that kind of place that the city decides when you get heating in your apartment (Nov 15 IIRC, so early Nov could be _really_ cold inside; we wore our coats).
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).
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.
China’s problem is geography and density: they have plenty of ideal land for solar in the west, but people largely live in the east in tall apartment blocks in cities that are often cloudy. They build lines to send the power east, but can only build so much capacity per year while the problem is pretty big.
I reckon more Australians live in SFHs than apartment blocks (so have roofs where personal solar makes sense), and the major cities get more son than eastern Chinese cities do.
Why is China's government corrupt? specifically when it comes to solar? Are they not accused of the opposite, overdoing solar? Help me understand your critique.
The have hardly any solar per capita compared to Australia. They are occasionally held up as an example by misguided westerners as if what they’ve achieved is an example of good policy on solar when it’s utterly dwarfed on a per capita basis by countries like Australia.
And the geography (especially in the more populated areas) is like 60-70% mountains and hills and shit. Australia has significantly more flat land for easy solar builds, with 1/50th the population.
Australia tends to do far more rooftop solar than it does solar farming, so the requirement for flat land is really.more a requirement for houses not to be in valleys surrounded by mountains.
That doesn't actually mean anything though. It's a measurement several layers abstracted from the thing that matters, which is how many panels they can build and deploy.
Apparently, Australia has ~3x times rollout of solar than china, what is mostly caused by a much higher per capita consumption in Australia, both countries having basically the same share of electricity generated from renewables.
China is adding 10 Australias worth of new solar generation every single year (315 GW of new solar installed just in 2025 alone). Half of all the entire world’s solar is deployed in China.
you're providing a chunk of storage for excess power for free
i know a guy who bought an arseload of batteries and buys and sells off the grid to make a moderate amount of money. he says it's not really paying back the time spent but he does it because he finds it interesting to optimise
>Bluntly China’s government is corrupt and inefficient (usa is even further behind china since their current government is also corrupt and inefficient).
So countries are only behind Australia because of corruption? And the US is only behind because of Trump, specifically?
Man, must be nice to have such a basic view of the world; everything so sinpmy explained.
Trump hates specifically wind turbines (or "windmills" as he insists on calling them). Which isn't to say his administration is friendly to solar projects, but the stuff which makes Trump visibly angry is the wind turbines. The fact this works and is free power is very annoying for a man who insists they can't work and shouldn't be used.
So yeah, Trump doesn't help, but in respect specifically of Solar you'd likely see pretty similar policies from many US regimes, including mainstream Democrats.
Texas is beating California by a large margin when it comes to solar due to bureaucratic red tape and "environmental" review in California along with monopolistic utility companies, which have successfully lobbied against solar by removing net metering and adding in extra solar connection charges.
That isnt an point for california because distributed solar is an economically inefficient solution.
It is only attractive in California due to a combination absurd electricity prices from State sanctioned monopolies and red tape preventing grid development.
Coal is economically inefficient compared with distributed solar.
Nuclear is broadly on par in cost.
The health impact costs of running existing coal plants in Texas are higher than the cost of installing new rooftop solar. That's ignoring carbon costs, which could be the same again.
And that's at Texas install costs. While low for America they are double Australian costs mostly due to poor permitting regulations and lack of competition.
This artificially makes the gap between utility and rooftop solar wider.
So you're being weirdly specific in your desire for economic efficiency.
Followup:
This article [1] and this website [2] contain some information about grid connection statistics by region.
California grid connections approval times are pushing 9 years, nearly doubling that of nearby western states. In comparison, Texas ERCOT operates on a connect and manage framework, which lets people buildout generation without stagegate approval, and then works out the interconnection issues in parallel or after the fact.
From what I can tell, Trump mostly doesn't like them because you can see some from his vanity golf course in Scotland. He has absolutely zero interest in the significant benefits they provide, he only cares about the fact he can see them from "his" land.
I remember when the first ones started appearing in the UK over 30 years ago and people were quick to complain about how ugly they looked. But actually, over time I think most people accept them now, and personally I think they're pretty cool. Most of the UK ones are actually off shore now - you can just about see them from the coast, but they're just small specks on the horizon at that distance. I think the biggest concern people have with them now is the belief that lots of birds get killed by them, but the reality is that actually many more birds die every year from flying into windows than get hit by turbine blades.
They have been mass deploying solar and battery. They also realise that they can make profit from export markets because internal supply capacity exceeds internal demand.
This is what I am doing. 42 kWh battery, 6 kW solar and fully electrified house, 2x EVs. I am able to charge cars at work and so in the depths of winter I am able to run the house by charging during the 3 hour window. There have been just a couple of cold (~2-4 degC) days when the battery was depleted 1-2 hours before the window starts.
As the weather warms and we get more solar exposure we will easily be in excess. We get a very small export rate with a bonus for no energy consumption during peak evening hours which can offset the fixed daily charge.
There are a lot of gotchas that you need to be aware of. 42 kWh is nominal capacity not the actual usable capacity. House load, max grid import and export capacity, max inverter capacity, AC or DC coupled panels, battery charging profile, battery temp are all factors in how much you can charge in the window. For example I have max 15 kW grid draw, with a 10 kW inverter that can charge the battery. I can put in max ~30 kWh into the battery, so I also run other loads in the house to use the other 5 kW capacity. If I go over 5 kW house load the battery charge is clipped to maintain grid import limit.
Nice perk! Does you know who pays for the electricty? Is this "virtue signalling" by the company or landlord... or a subsidy from the local/state/national gov't? To be clear, I am not making any value judgement about providing free charging for EVs. It seems like good gov't policy to promote the adoption of EVs.
It costs $5-$10 for the electricity to charge a car using level 2 charging. It is a trivial "perk" for an employee that costs an order of magnitude more per hour of work.
While that's an extreme, I would expect the cost of any urban parking space with a low speed charger to be dominated by the land, then the charger one-off install price, and thereafter electricity use is a pretty trivial cost.
Not trivial if they a bunch of chargers. I work for the state in California and we have chargers at work but are charged for them around $.29/kWh which is cheaper than Tesla I think.
Are they fast DC chargers or level 2 chargers? If it's the former, then that is cheap. If it's latter, then that is some expensive electricity.
I'm in Washington where electricity is cheaper, so 29 cents per kWh is not much cheaper than Tesla's superchargers. The closest one to me is 31 cents in the middle of the day and goes as low as 20 cents per kWh at night. I pay 8 cents per kWh at home, which is where I charge (at much slower speeds) unless I'm on a road trip.
Yeah, I was thinking the same. If you look on Google Maps, California has some epic large parking lots next to office complexes. If you had 100+ "free" EV chargers that could add up pretty fast with California's expensive daytime electricity prices.
it costs me ~$5 to charge my car overnight at home (level-2) thanks to a residential electricity plan that offers very cheap night/weekend rates in exchange for more expensive rates at peak hours
We have a company fleet which is being slowly converted to EV where possible in line with company net zero policy so there is good charging infrastructure that is extended to all employees. We also have other initiatives such as solar and biogas generation.
throwaway account and "virtue signalling" plus a dig at so called subsidies. Oh and "no value judgement" except for the value judgement. You are not helpful here.
Fair point: I work in an industry that checks social media before job offers, so it is not possible to have a public Internal persona. If you look at my profile, you will see that I have been here many here with a modest amount of "Internet points".
Forget 3hrs free. We lived in the tropics in Australia with a ~6kW system and often had negative quarterly invoices (i.e. got paid by our retailer) ... esp. in winter months. Aircon, pool, appliances all electric. At the very least the pool pump ran free all year round.
Edit: should add, that's straight solar no battery
We live in a deep valley where it snows a ton in Canada, and with 7.2kw of panels and no battery we only get a bill in winter. For the entire year our power bill is $500, and we have heat pump heat, and disconnected the natural gas.
We just got a very high efficiency wood stove, I expect we will now have no electricity bill each year.
The Australian grid presently curtails ~7-18% of production every single day between 11:00 and 14:00.
I believe that incentivizing people to acquire batteries is precisely the purpose of the policy. It's good for the grid for there to be a lot of storage at the edges. As I understand it, the 24kWh cap is subject to annual review, with it being reduced/the policy being soft phased out once curtailment is no longer necessary.
The core of the EU system is much more elegant. It sets a day-ahead production price per 15 minutes at auction. In EU countries with reasonable distribution cost, dynamic rates are a quite popular way to shift consumption to when cheap electricity is abundant.
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.
We have Amber Electric which pass through the 5 minute pricing, and I personally have a lot of automations on Home Assistant based on it. But TBH it doesn't make much difference and it may not even make sense. The price just doesn't move in the way you may find it useful.
For example, in an average sunny summer day, the midday price is usually close to free, and you can have you AC on for several hours. But the price starts rising from 3~4pm, but if you turn off the AC at this point, the room temperature would also start rising quickly at the hotest time in a day.
Also, in winter days (now), the price could be at a relatively high level for all day around almost every day in a week, but you still have to use it regardless.
It is the spring and autumn that most of day time has free electricity but it is also the time you need the least of power.
Just for reference our fully electric household (including cooking, water and aircon). Highest usage this month on a very hot day was 25kWh.
(Disclaimer: I am not in Australia. Already cover most of it with roof solar. No battery yet)
Yes - the regulated offer is capped at 24 kWh per day but some retailers such as Globird and CovaU are offering plans which include up to 50 kWh per day of ‘free’ electricity. With a large enough battery and inverter you could just end up paying daily supply charges of $1.65-2.20 per day.
Critically, that cost excludes the amortized amount the batteries will be over that period. And if you're cycling them every day like this, they're not going to last more than 15~20 years.
> And if you're cycling them every day like this, they're not going to last more than 15~20 years.
You can't make a blanket statement like that because it depends on a lot of variables about their specific battery system and power needs. If you have just enough battery to get through a normal day so you're running them top to bottom every day then sure, those are likely to have a relatively short life. If you've set up your system with extra capacity to support extended total grid outages and/or bad weather now your normal days might only be cycling from 80% down to 60% and back. Of course battery chemistry is also relevant, and a home battery system doesn't need to care about energy density or peak charge/discharge rates in the same way an EV might.
On top of all that, now that we're over 15 years in to mass-produced EVs we've learned that our battery life expectations were generally pessimistic. As long as the batteries are kept within a reasonable temperature range and not otherwise abused they tend to be in pretty good condition even this far in to their expected service life. Home energy storage systems are a lot easier on batteries than automotive use so as a general rule they should last even longer even with similar cycle counts.
I'm in Australia, with Globird, and have their 3hrs free plus they pay $1 on days I don't use any grid power between the 6-8pm peak, and another $1.50 if I send them back 10kWh of the energy I was given for free during the day, during that peak. In winter, with bugger-all solar (maybe 5kWh generation if I'm lucky) I pull 10kW/hr into a 40kWh battery for those 3hrs each and every day, while also running the heating as high as possible to gain some thermal battery effect too. That 30kWh of battery charge is used up by late evening or middle of the night by fully-electric heating (RCAC split systems and a large ducted RCAC system), so the battery goes down to 5% where I stop using it except in the case of grid failure, and back up to ~75% each day. The idea that no one uses more than 24kWh of electricity each day is absurd - not only will I pull 30kWh to charge a battery, I'll also pull another ~30 or so just to keep warm. My house could easily use 100kWh per day if we heated it to a pleasant level instead of a warm-enough level.
The main problem, as Australians are no doubt aware, is that our houses are large and poorly insulated. I've done everything sensible already (ceiling + floor insulation, draft sealing, honeycomb blinds, etc) except paying $100,000 to double-glaze all windows, and it still feels like a tent.
Despite all this ranting, electricity is now effectively free in summer for me, and ~$5-8 per day in winter. Pre-battery it was in the ballpark of $10-25 per day. The battery should have a payback period of 4 years, but was heavily subsidized by the government. Due to how I'm charging and discharging it so regularly, I'm expected it might only have a 10yr lifetime.
While I can't speak for other states (though I'd be surprised if they were different), power bills in Victoria are split into supply and usage. Eg each day costs 90c, then 30c per kw/h.
So you could eliminate the usage costs, but not the supply charge.
The whole reason for this is Australia's power grid is a market, where suppliers put in bids for how much they can produce, and at what price. And AEMO then selects the cheapest way to meet demand (paying the marginal price), but also expects residential rooftop solar a given.
As a result we often have an excess of power driving wholesale pricing into the negatives.
The free power is a way to increase usage at times when we're most likely to have negative pricing, and encourage use of high energy appliances like dishwashers etc to be run during that period to reduce demand the rest of the time.
I pay about 38c per kilowatt plus $1.70 per day for the connection fee. So by that maths, you'd save 8×0.38=$3.04 per day. A 10kWh battery is in the ballpark of $4000. So it'll take about 4 years to break even.
Then you'd just have to pay the connection fee, which seem to be increasing every year.
Not necessarily. At least in Flanders (northern ~half of Belgium), this was shifted onto consumers by making them pay for peak quarter consumption. Using more than 2.5kW for 15 minutes in a row on average means you pay a lot more for your fixed grid cost.
Australian grids are already talking about removing all per-kWh tariff and shift all the cost to fixed supply fee. The government rejected it probably because it doesn't make them look good, and it makes poor people pay more. But it's probably just time before that comes.
A sneaky tax that keeps rising. In the UK it pays for failed energy companies, people defaulting on their energy bills, energy bill subsidies... and supposedly for grid upgrades lol
It's risen far above inflation (responding to a sibling comment)
In general inflation is increasing everywhere so not completely unexpected. Also solar/battery powered networks are shaped differently than ones only powered by prime movers. The edges become thicker as power becomes generated at the edge.
Given that energy prices are negative during this period (because of surplus solar which needs to be drained into a load to keep the grid balanced) – this is effectively consumers providing "free" balancing-services to the grid.
With sufficient take-up and consumers funding the cost of battery storage, this could replace an amount of commercial balancing services and reduce the overall cost of grid-management.
An ev charging at 7kw will consume 21 of the 24kWh. Now, if you don't drive massive distances every day then this might not be the best deal, but I can see how this might be worth it for someone commuting 200km a day for example. Taxi drivers, and the like will also probably benefit.
"The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity."
Free energy is too good to be true, even if you aren't a physicist.
I thought there was so much excess solar generation that even the utility company couldn’t store it all. There is a perverse incentive to dump the excess power to prevent the price from going negative and prop up demand for their generation services. There are lots of examples in economics where it is more cost effective to destroy a worthless product than to give it away. When the government subsidized the generation infrastructure and some of that power is generated by residential solar, it makes sense to step in force the utilities to behave in the people’s best interest.
Moreover, apartment dwelling residential customers connected to embedded networks (many new apartment blocks in NSW, Victoria and Queensland) are not eligible for the Solar Share Offer because under section 6(3)(c), a consumer supplied through an embedded network is already excluded from the Commonwealth Electricity Retail Code’s definition of a «small customer».
The government won't address this particular perverse situation with the embedded networks until the 2027–28 DMO period.
I love being ripped off because I'm renting, so instead of having a direct relationship with my service providers, they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager who I'm sure in no shape way or form receives a kick-back.
So I'm stuck with an energy provider that is too incompetent to figure out how to bill me correctly, but puts a markup on what I'd pay as a home owner, and I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!
No IPv6, no gigabit Internet, no free solar electricity.
> […] they are legally allowed to sign binding contracts with the building manager […]
The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation of wiring, air-conditioning, gas, hot water, and sometimes the internet – usually for free – and that happens before the strata comes into the picture. The strata is left with no choice but to inherit a fixed-term contract (typically 3-5 years), after which it can switch to… another embedded network.
The builders accept offers from embedded networks because it reduces their overall costs.
The NSW government has enacted the first tranche of regulations for embedded networks from the 1st of July this year, with the embedded networks price caps being introduced in early 2027 (that is the promise, anyway). If you live in NSW, IPART is the government body in charge of the regulation, and it is accepting submissions until the end of this month. Prepare and make your own submission whilst you can, as I have done.
> The embedded networks collude with the builders and offer them the installation
I got into a dispute with my embedded provider because of a bad meter and came to discover through friends and family in the construction industry as well as speaking to a former sales person in the industry that there is a lot of additional corruption in the process with straight up payments being made to win installs with developers.
When it came time to switch providers in our building, strata was promised electric vehicle chargers as part of signing a new deal with a new provider. They never delivered because they found an escape clause because of fire safety approval.
We're now locked in for years (again) and they've already increased rates once in the first year.
Nobody in the entire chain works in the interests of residents or owners. It's a completely broken system and a thorn in the side of otherwise advanced and progressive Australian energy policy. It needs to be abolished ASAP.
I still pay more for my single apartment living alone in electricity than what family and friends do in full large homes with air conditioning, 4-6 residents, heated pools, etc. It's astonishing.
«Mates rates» is a big problem in Australia, indeed. At best, it is collusion, but typically it is corruption.
I have recently gone through the entire chain of complaints, the ombudsman including, and I have gained plenty of insight into how insidious the current scheme is.
NSW has set out to do something about it, with price caps being introduced in 2027. If you live in NSW, make your submission to the regulator (IPART) ASAP – submissions are closing at the end of July.
So how do you get Internet? Is it provided as a shared wifi service for the building or something, like in a hotel? (so the building manager is essentially running a mini-ISP re-selling a single NBN service?)
These are things where policy is set by government and so could be moved by your elected representatives. If you already have a preferred flavour of representative, try to get them to want to do this. If you don't, here's an issue that could make you prefer one over another, make sure they know that.
No, technically it can't. An individual writing to an MP is rarely sufficient by itself.
Australia’s embedded network landscape is a peculiarly intricate tangle of nuance, complexity and regulatory optimism. Note that the embedded networks are distinctly unique and different from retail utility providers.
Please bear with my lengthy explanation for a few rather long moments.
Embedded networks are private distribution systems sitting behind a single connection to the public grid (shopping malls, apartment blocks, retirement villages, camp and caravan sites etc). They all have, effectively, a single wire going into the site.
Originally, they were designed for incidental on-selling by site managers, and they are a regulatory exception allowing the operator to on-sell electricity and other services without becoming a fully authorised energy retailer or licenced distributor. The embedded networks typically bundle: 1) electricity, 2) centralised hot water, 3) cold water, 4) gas, 5) heating / cooling (air-conditioning) and 6) fibre to the premises (sometimes, not always). All those things are governed by separate statutes.
In theory as well as occasionally in practice, they should be cheaper for consumers because they are able to negotiate lower wholesale rates from the upstream supplier and because the customer churn is non-existent (the customer is locked into the network and has nowhere to go). In some cases, that is indeed true, but because the current legislation explicitly excludes the embedded networks from the government reporting, many embedded network operators have resorted to the insidious exploitation of their customers, and the government is clueless because the operators' imposed pricing is opaque.
Natiaonally, Australia does not have a single federal embedded-network statute. The principal framework is a cooperative national scheme comprising 7 government bodies (Australian Energy Market Commission, AER, Australian Energy Market Operator, National Electricity Law and Rules, National Energy Retail Law and Rules, Australian Consumer Law and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission).
At the state level – so far – only Victoria has largely banned new embedded networks, with the remaining states either participating or not participating in the National Energy Customer Framework. Overall, NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and the national regulators are tightening the rules but they still have a way to go.
For a reform such as embedded-network regulation, the path looks closer to:
An MP may understand: «Residents in apartment towers are getting poor outcomes». They are highly unlikely to understand: a) market settlement arrangements, b) metering identifiers, c) distribution-loss factors, d) retailer-of-last-resort frameworks, e) exemption classes, f) embedded-network-manager functions, or g)interactions between state strata law and national electricity law.
Unsurprisingly and consequently, politicians become heavily dependent on: a) departmental advice, b) regulator advice, c) industry submissions, d) consultant reports, and e) lobby groups.
The people who understand the system – and especially those one who know how to work the system to their benefit – therefore acquire disproportionate influence over how the system evolves. That does not necessarily imply corruption, it is a structural feature of technical governance. Customers, however, refer to it as «rent seeking», even if they own an apartment.
Despite all that, elected representatives still do remain one of the few machineries capable of changing the underlying legal framework. The deeper issue is that modern regulatory states are neither pure democracies nor pure technocracies – they are hybrids. Formal authority remains democratic, but practical power is distributed among elected officials, bureaucracies, regulators, courts, industry participants, consultants, lobbyists and organised interest groups.
I have recently gone down the rabbit hole of the embedded networks and learned a bewildering number of things hence the fulmination.
Jeesh, these embedded networks sounds like something that was once a good idea to serve more marginalized customers, but has drifted into revenue generation because of a change in information available to those providing it.
Single customers having these issues don't really have any power to convince representatives. Historically, the only real way to enact change in this way is to have thousands of people contacting their representatives about it.
> I don't even get the NBN despite having fibre to the premises!
Woah, this is crazy. Personally, I have read so much about the Aussie NBN (The Australian National Broadband Network) [1]. (Dear nerds: If you don't know about it, I highly recommend you read about it!) I am utterly jealous that you lot pulled it off! (Not perfect, but pretty damn good.) Can you share more details about why the building does not have high quality NBN connections? The whole dream sold to nerds about NBN was basically 1Gbit fibre for everyone in a big/mid-sized city (and suburbs) and "decent" Internet (100MBit+) for everyone else in the bush.
At least part of the story is a cautionary tale about electing the LNP. The NBN was originally going to be as you describe, but then Tony Abbot came along, under instruction from his pal Rupert Murdoch, and threw a major spanner in the works.
He decided it was waaaaay too expensive and big-governmenty to do that and besides, Uncle Rupert had a satellite tv business to defend, we don't want him to have to compete with the likes of Netflix now do we? So he told Australia that it was too much money for a "glorified video delivery service" and that 25Mbit was enough for anyone for the foreseeable, and threw out the original plans.
The plan was downgraded to "Fibre in some places, we'll reuse copper where possible". This ended up taking longer and costing more than the original plan, delivered worse service, and we're only now getting towards where we should have been under the first plan. A lot of the work has had to be repeated due to the initial poor rollout and then needing to upgrade as that 25Mbit started looking woefully inadequate. Just last year a further $5 billion was pledged to replace more FTTN/Copper with FTTP.
It's still more expensive than other markets I'm aware of, a lot of people who aren't far from cities and major towns are on wireless connections (theoretical 400Mbit, actual ~150), and the real bush "Sky Muster" system tops at 100/5 (actual ~55-83) and is having its lunch eaten by starlink.
tl;dr the Liberal (conservative) party got in and fucked it up.
> […] why the building does not have high quality NBN connections?
Because their place of residence is connected to an embedded network that has eschewed the NBN Co and chosen to connect to a private fibre operator who sits outside the NBN. They probably also pay more compared to NBN for the same speed.
Not every embedded network supplies fibre, but some do, and that appears to be the case in their situation.
By the way, NBN has recently upgraded the network to 2Gbps, with 10 Gbps having been trialled but no availability date set as of yet.
> The downside of these solar sharer plans which include ‘free’ electricity is that they generally have higher daily supply charges and higher usage charges outside the ‘free’ window to recoup the costs of the ‘free’ electricity.
Ok, then why not take one plan with retailer A, and another plan with retailer B?
This seems like a very complicated way to maintain a menu on a static website. Have you considered using old school server side includes? It’s what they were designed for.
server side includes are just a variant of the backend framework. they have the same problem. i'd still be locked in. and i'd depend on and have to maintain a backend for the lifetime of the site.
I thought I'd read that they planned to expand the scheme to non solar homes to fit in with the ethos of the new "benefits of solar for people without solar" messaging of the proposal under discussion here.
But I checked my supposed source and it was just someone suggesting that it would be consistent and useful if they did make that change.
Nice work! This is very impressive and you’ve shown real resilience and perseverance to work through the challenges you encountered while building this.
The author of this article appears to be unaware that very high electricity prices have been the other key driver behind Pakistan’s solar boom along with the massive reduction in the cost of solar panels.
I am not a lawyer but this CDC order seems contrary to Trump’s recent Executive Order “RESTORING FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP”.
This Executive Order states in part: “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.
…
Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to: (a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;
(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;
…
Sec. 3. Ending Censorship of Protected Speech.
(a) No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to section 2 of this order.”
This is an administration that is actively ignoring other EOs such as anti-DEI initiatives. An administration that has come out and said that either all humans are neither male or female, or both male and female at once. This is an administration that either tried to send $50M in condoms to Gaza, or thought their followers were too stupid to believe the lie. This is also the administration that hates the military, police, and Americans in general. None of this is debatable. It's backed up by action. So, not surprised why we'd think they'd be burdened by the law.
> this CDC order seems contrary to Trump’s recent Executive Order
Freedom of speech and the First Amendment generally apply to the government imposing penalties on private citizens, e.g. through criminal law.
The CDC is the government. The government as an employer regularly imposes speech restrictions on government employees and always has, e.g. if you're a public school teacher and you want to teach students to believe that vaccines cause autism, they can tell you not to do that and fire you if you don't. You can imagine the trouble if that wasn't the case.
> You can imagine the trouble if that wasn't the case.
While you're absolutely right, just wanted to take this opportunity to point out that we may well not need to imagine this particular scenario, unfortunately, as it might happen very soon indeed.
Based on a man who has dedicated the last twenty years of his life to fighting vaccines (and who thinks that even the polio vaccine killed more people through cancer than it saved) becoming Health and Human Services secretary. What makes you so sure that antivaxx propaganda will continue being banned from education?
When Trump (or Republicans, generally) say "free speech", they patently do not mean what the rest of us mean by free speech. They mean:
1. Everyone should be able to say horrible things about sexual and racial minorities.
2. Everyone should be able to deny scientific facts that are inconvenient to Republican ideology, the fossil fuel industry, or any of their friends.
3. There can be no consequences for (1) or (2), even when it obviously contradicts other laws (libel, incitement of violence, fraud, etc.) or oaths (to truth, to the constitution).
4. Stating a fact or opinion contrary to (1) or (2) is in fact trampling the free-speech rights of right-wingers, and is therefore forbidden.
They don't want free speech. They want free speech for themselves, and enforced consent, if not assent, from everyone else.
All right, then by this logic what does the left mean by "free speech". You talk about scientific facts, so does the left believe we cannot say scientific facts about biology? Furthermore, I'm not aware of any censorship regarding fossil fuels. My understanding is that the Sierra Club and Thunberg are able to say whatever they want in this country if this is what you are talking about.
One difference is that the left doesn't generally advocate for absolute free speech, so it isn't hypocritical. I think the left is generally more open about the areas where free speech shouldn't be absolute - namely, where it causes manifest harm, especially to underprivileged groups - whereas the right will use it in a doublespeak way where they claim to be free-speech absolutists while actually favoring only their own ideology.
But also, the main difference is that the left wants to protect speech that is factually true and punish lies, whereas the right wants to protect lies and punish truths. So even if the strategies were very similar, I wouldn't actually care all that much - you can still differentiate and make a value judgment. Scientists should lose federal grants if they publish made-up or obviously biased research; they shouldn't lose federal grants if they publish results that are inconvenient to the current president's fragile masculinity.
> does the left believe we cannot say scientific facts about biology?
No.
I'm guessing you're trying to not-so-subtly talk about gender identity/trans people. If you're trying to say that "there are only two biological sexes" is a true fact that the left suppresses, then (1) it isn't a true fact (according to literally the entire medical community), (2) even if it were, it's not relevant to gender identity (nobody questions that trans women are biologically male, it just isn't relevant), and (3) the left position isn't that you can't say such things, just that saying it makes you an idiot and likely a bigot, and it should be treated like any other hate speech: if it ends up causing harm (e.g., by inciting physical attacks on trans people, or getting them fired from their jobs) then there should be legal consequences (the harmed people should be able to sue you, it should be a violation of equal-employment laws, etc.).
> I'm not aware of any censorship regarding fossil fuels.
Have you looked at any news reporting lately? The Trump administration just spent half of last week stripping every mention of climate change from every government website, and threatening any research organization that takes public money against looking into it.
> the Sierra Club and Thunberg are able to say whatever they want in this country
The Sierra Club is a mess and a neutered shell of what it used to be, so nobody really cares what it says.
Greta Thunberg has been personally mocked and threatened by Donald Trump, so I don't think it's fair to say that she can say whatever she wants - I think she'd be in very real danger if she came here.
We are losing this battle, every kid now talks about how they are “hype” rather than hyped for something, and talking about being “tan” rather than tanned is already commonplace in the USA
No, no, no. A bias government has layers in opposite directions at an angle of about 30 degrees to the way of travel, as opposed to a radial government where layers are parallel to each other.
Radial governments have better fuel economy, and suffer fewer blowouts.
In my experience, the more loudly someone shouts about being a crusader for free speech, the more likely they are to actively be attacking others' freedom of speech.
It just seemed like an outright lie and I guess it is.
It's a generic rhetorical flourish, those often come with a bit of hyperbole, aren't universally applicable, etc. That's a normal thing that happens when people have normal conversations, especially if they're a little worked up. It's this cliché, without the iambic pentameter
If you find something someone's said unclear, you're better off just asking instead of smacking them with a wikipedia link and then calling them a liar, though.
You’re arguing it’s a rhetorical misstep and at the same time suggesting it need not be called out. Huge pet peeve of mine is when these little flourishes derail an entire discussion because they aren’t really true but get the sympathetic individuals involved all riled up. If the device isn’t positively contributing it should be identified and dismissed.
It only 'derails' anything if someone decides to pedantidunk on it. That's not conversation. The occasional flight of verbal fancy is, though. 'Calling out' completely mundane things about other people's comments demolishes forums which is why the site docs and zillions of mod comments exhort you not to do it.
In addition, your experience and this statement aren't mutually exclusive. As for evidence: political developments in the EU and America(s), including the US, as well as policy changes by some of the wealthiest, claiming-to-be-freedom-loving platform owners on earth, should provide enough hints not to dismiss this claim outright.
I don't know where you lived, but you are surely familiar with the related trope in regards to Democracy: the more of it in a country's name, the less of a democracy it will be.
You could also simply look at current events to understand the turn of phrase: Elon Musk, proud "free speech absolutist" bans Twitter accounts which criticize him, bans posts with the word "cisgender", and has manipulated the algorithm to prioritize his own posts.
It's certainly true of the Republican party in the US. They proclaim to be defenders of freedom of speech, yet have passed the vast majority of bills censoring books in educational institutions.
Musk is a glaringly obvious example. But also basically the entire GOP fits, as well (they all screamed free speech in response to fact checkers only to do this "anti-woke" silencing)
I'll just pick one quote: "There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society."
Also this in relation to his book: A section of the book favoring exclusion of democrats and homosexuals from society.
This is not the kind of person that is arguing for free speech on its own merits. In fact he's asking for the opposite of free speech. He wants to choose who has the freedom to speak and who doesn't.
Nitpick: it can be if you redefine numbers and/or operations. Math is not science (but is used as a basis for science) and you can yourself redefine what 2, 5, + and = mean, and use that new set accordingly. Just like you can make "Sky is green" true if your redefine what either "Sky", "is", or "green" mean - language is also not science so it can be redefined.
Wow, this is such a concise description of what has been going on with the far right in the US and Europe for the last decade! I'm glad to finally have a name for it. Thanks!
I think your strongest venue to keeping it (short of a civil war) is organizing in labor unions. Because individuals are easy to control but nothing focuses the minds of billionaire elites like a full general strike with no end in sight.
> I think your strongest venue to keeping it (short of a civil war) is organizing in labor unions.
US labor unions have been systematically weakened for decades, though, so that's not a very good chance. Labor organizing can do powerful things, but it doesn't tend to work overnight on the scale needed.
I said this is the strongest venue, not that it is a strong venue.
This crisis is not going to get solved by individuals. The route for individuals to take is infiltration and nudging of the two parties from within — but that is not general advice you can give to everybody, it takes a certain kind of individual to do that. E.g. if you are a person like AOC, trying to replace you Dem representative would be a very good venue to help the cause.
But most people aren't that politically capable or stubborn to run (they rather complain about politicians than mame those decisions themselves).
So outside of that it takes organizations to take stances. Organized labour, churches, other kinds of groups that can turn out in big numbers.
> I knew a few Rep voters who went like "Project 2025 is not affiliated with Trump, and even if, that's good, because fuck the LGBT"
> * last part added by me, but that's how their attitude was...
I think the problem is one of a non-united grouping - Most people are accepting of L, G and B, but not T.
The actual L and G friends I have (Don't have any B friends; or if I do, I don't know about it) individually try to distance themselves from the T.
There would have been much less for Trump to mudsling on if the opposition simply dropped support for T while keeping L, G and B.
Having LGBT as a single block that you are either for or against is stupid because while most people would be either neutral or positive about L, G and B, the clear majority of people are not neutral on the proposals from the T camp.
There is no right to pronouns or to being referred to in whatever way you want. In fact, policing that kind of thing is an infringement on other people's right to free speech either.
There is no right to expensive surgeries either, especially cosmetic ones.
There is also no right to deciding which bathroom you get to go to.
Please be precise which rights you think are "human rights" and why.
> You don’t have to use pronouns if you don’t want to.
I'm pretty certain that that is not true. Language policing was a big problem - "use the wrong pronoun and lose your job" is not a meaningful choice to many people.
I ran into several young Trump voters after the election that adamantly believed he would just improve the economy. “All that Project 2025 stuff was a smokescreen.”
I think the emperor's new clothes is not a fitting comparison at all. Everyone could see the emperor was naked, they just thought they were the only ones. As soon as there was a second voice confirming what they saw, the illusion crumbled. But trump voters are so far off the deep end, the smoke screens so elaborate, that they _actually_ see the fine garments.
I'm not sure that's true for most of them. Most seem to love a naked king as long as he's "hurting the right people". The cruelty is the point for them, but they don't understand that he also doesn't care about them so long as he's getting high on the damage he's causing everyone, which is what his well-known malignant narcicissm demands.
Retraction isn’t censorship, and bans on what you can publish at work as part of your job are not restraints on your individual right to free expression.
> In the order, CDC researchers were instructed to remove references to or mentions of a list of forbidden terms: “Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female,” according to an email sent to CDC employees (see below).”
So yep, censorship. Any article that even _mentions_ LGBT (e.g. for epidemiological reasons) is now prohibited to be even referenced.
By that logic, is the term Baptist or Hindu scientifically sound? Is the term string theory? Is the term working class ? What makes words or terminology scientifically sound that doesn't apply here?
It sounds like someone disagrees with the underlying identity that individuals ascribe themselves and now anyone who do research using these identities is censored. You don't have to endorse (or even fully understand) a phenomena to research it. Arguably those are some of the most interesting research questions.
This argument doesn't hold water when the left does it, and it doesn't hold water in this instance either. Censorship does not only mean government infringement upon freedom of individual expression.
https://electrek.co/2026/02/05/first-sodium-ion-battery-ev-d...
Sodium ion batteries are safer than Lithium ion or LFP batteries and also perform better in very cold temperatures.