Rooftop solar versus a home battery: which pays back first
Last month I sat at a kitchen table in Blackburn with a couple who’d just been quoted $4,200 for a 6.6kW solar system and, separately, $11,500 for a 10kWh battery to go with it. They wanted one number: which one pays for itself first. That’s the wrong question, but it’s the one everyone asks, so […]
5B’s Maverick panels: prefab solar leaves the roof behind
A standard 1MW ground-mount array takes a crew of six roughly two to three weeks to rack, wire and commission, assuming the ground’s cooperative and the weather is too. 5B says its Maverick system does the same job in two to three days, with a smaller crew and a fraction of the concrete. That’s not […]
SunCable’s Australia-Asia PowerLink: what’s left after the split
Nobody has poured a footing at Powell Creek yet. That’s the fact worth sitting with before anything else: three years after the first big splash about a solar farm the size of a small city out past Elliott in the Northern Territory, and eighteen months on from a takeover that changed who’s actually paying for […]
Rooftop solar and the midday minimum demand problem
Stood in a garage in Buderim on the Sunshine Coast a few weeks back, watching a customer’s inverter throttle itself down to almost nothing on a cloudless afternoon. Full sun, clean panels, nothing wrong with the string. The inverter was doing exactly what its firmware told it to do under AS/NZS 4777.2, the grid connection […]
Tesla Energy Australia: Powerwall, Megapack and the SA VPP now
Two Powerwalls hung dark on the garage wall of a townhouse off Sherriffs Road in Reynella last month, and the owner couldn’t work out why his app had gone quiet. Nothing dramatic, as it turned out: a firmware push had knocked the gateway offline for a day. But it’s a decent way into the state […]
Rooftop solar versus a home battery: which pays back first
A homeowner in Reservoir rang me last month with a quote in hand: 10kW of rooftop solar plus a 10kWh battery, bundled, $19,000 after rebates, five-year payback promised on the glossy sheet. I asked the obvious question. Payback on what, exactly: the whole system, or just the panels? He didn’t know. Neither did the salesperson, […]
How rooftop solar feed-in tariffs actually work in 2026
Check your solar retailer’s rate card right now and you’ll probably see two numbers that don’t look like they belong to the same product: something like 3c/kWh for power exported between 10am and 3pm, and 15c or more for the same electrons pushed out between 4pm and 9pm. That’s not a typo and it’s not […]
Negative electricity prices at midday: what they mean for you
Around 1pm on a clear day last week, the wholesale price in South Australia dropped to minus $60 a megawatt-hour. Not a blip – it sat below zero for the better part of four hours. If you’d asked me a decade ago whether generators would ever pay the grid to take their electricity, I’d have […]
Australia’s Consumer Energy Resources roadmap: what it means on the ground
Somewhere around 3.6 million Australian households now have rooftop solar. That number has been cited so often it’s started to lose its weight, but consider what it actually means for the grid: roughly one in three detached homes in the NEM is, in principle, a small generator. The Consumer Energy Resources roadmap – released by […]
SunCable’s Australia-Asia PowerLink: where things stand in 2026
Roughly 4,200 kilometres of high-voltage direct-current subsea cable. A solar farm in the Northern Territory that would cover more ground than some Australian suburbs put together. And a collapse, in January 2023, that stopped one of the most ambitious energy export proposals ever put to paper. Three and a half years on from that administration […]