The best solar feed-in tariff in Australia is 55.99 cents. You can't have it.

Someone asked me last week what the best solar feed-in tariff in Australia is. I went digging.

It's 55.99 cents a kilowatt hour. That's Horizon Power's published rate, in a handful of remote towns in Western Australia.

It runs from 3pm to 9pm. Not the middle of the day, when panels are flat out — the evening, as they wind down.

Why that number exists

Those towns run on diesel generators. Diesel is expensive. So when someone sends power into that grid in the evening, it saves the utility a lot of money. Enough that they'll pay 55.99 cents a unit for it.

That's the whole mechanism.

And it leads to the most useful way I've found to understand feed-in tariffs:

A feed-in tariff is a measure of how alone you are.

If you're on a tiny grid, running diesel, with barely any solar around you, your exported power is precious. You're alone. So the tariff is high.

If you're on a big city grid with a million roofs exporting at the same moment, your power is one more drop in the ocean. You're not alone. So the tariff is low.

It explains the pattern that otherwise looks arbitrary:

• Remote Western Australia pays 55.99c in the evening, when nobody else is selling.
• Tasmania's regulated minimum has gone up 39% in eleven years. Hydro grid, no midday flood of solar.
• Melbourne pays five cents, then one. A million roofs, all at once.

It isn't fairness and it isn't politics. It's how alone the buyer is at the moment you send your power.

So who does get paid 55.99 cents?

Someone with a battery.

That's not a Horizon quirk. The same shape turns up wherever an evening rate exists. In Perth it's 2 cents before 3pm and 10 cents between 3 and 9. In NSW, Essential Energy's published benchmark runs about 4 cents at midday and up to 33 cents in the evening peak. The Northern Territory pays double in the same hours.

Every high feed-in rate in this country is an evening rate. Panels don't generate in the evening, so the only way to sell into that window is to have stored it first.

IPART, the New South Wales pricing regulator, puts it about as plainly as a regulator ever does: "To receive higher feed-in tariffs, you will need a battery that can store and discharge electricity."

So the best feed-in tariff in Australia isn't really a solar rate. It's a rate for stored power that happened to be solar earlier in the day.

Which raises the obvious question: why not buy a battery, fill it at lunchtime and sell it back into that window?

I thought so too. The arithmetic goes the other way almost everywhere — the rate you avoid paying beats the rate you'd be paid, in Melbourne by 34 cents to five.

Almost everywhere. In those remote WA towns, households buy power back at 33.26 cents and sell into the evening window at 55.99. There, and as far as I can find only there, the battery really does pay for itself twice.

➜ The full working is in this issue: Should you buy a battery and sell at the peak rate?

Which brings it back to the rest of us

None of that applies to a city grid. There the rate is four cents, it isn't going up, and no battery changes that arithmetic. So I stopped looking at the rate and looked at my own meter instead.

When I lined up a full year of hourly readings from my own house — 8,208 hours, one Canberra home — the shape of it surprised me.

Between 9am and 4pm, when the panels are working hardest, my house draws 1.35 kWh an hour. That's the quietest my house ever gets.

Between 10pm and 7am, in the dark, it draws 2.29. Nearly twice as much power after dark as in daylight.

That shape is deliberate. The car charges overnight. The dishwasher and the washing machine run overnight. Years ago I moved everything I could into the cheapest window on my tariff, 10pm to 7am, because that is what you are told to do.

So I had optimised for the cheapest grid power. Not for the free power already landing on my own roof.

I buy at thirty cents in the dark and sell at four in the sunshine. I've been doing it for years, under sixteen panels, quite pleased with myself.

That's the problem I build software for, so take the enthusiasm with a grain of salt and check the numbers below.

So I ran my house around Australia

My habits aren't changing much. But tariffs change enormously depending on where you live. So I took my exact house — same appliances, same overnight habits — and ran it through every major city on real published plans.

Here's what I actually pay now, on ActewAGL's Solar Advantage plan in Canberra:

That one's a bill. Everything below it is a model — and checked against that bill, the model runs about 2.5% cheap. Read the rest as a best case.

Origin sells the same plan in five of these cities. So in those five, the only thing changing is where the house is standing:

Origin doesn't sell in the other three. Perth and Darwin have only one retailer at all:

Melbourne is the surprise. It has one of the worst feed-in tariffs in the country — five cents, then one — and it's the second-cheapest place on this list to run my house. Because its overnight rate is low, and my house is busiest in the dark.

If your house is busiest at 7pm, your answer will be different. That's the point.

The part that changed how I think about solar

At one Sydney address, the same retailer sells two plans:

One is 8 cents from midnight to 6am. The other is 33.72 cents around the clock. I buy 5,818 kWh a year in that exact window.

Moving my house from Canberra to Brisbane would save $325 a year. Changing plan without leaving Sydney saves $1,122.

I could shift my whole life 3,500 kilometres, or click a different plan.

What being one of a million roofs actually costs you

The crowd sets the price of what you sell. A million roofs exporting at one o'clock is why the feed-in tariff is four cents and won't be going up.

The crowd has no say at all over what you never have to buy.

I spent years being careful about when I buy — car overnight, dishwasher overnight, everything crammed into the cheap window. All of it still buying. Meanwhile the free electricity was landing on the roof at lunchtime and I was selling it, for four cents, to people who had plenty of their own.

We were sold solar as a generator. It behaves more like a clock.

What this means for you

Three things, in order:

Find the off-peak rate on your bill, and the hour it starts. That single number decides more about your bill than your feed-in tariff does.

Check whether your retailer sells a plan with a cheap window. Overnight or midday. Then look at when your house is actually busy.

Then look at the feed-in rate. It's the smallest number on the page, and the one you control least.

Then the one I missed for years. Of everything you've already moved into the cheap window, ask which of it could run at lunchtime instead. On my tariff every unit shifted out of the dark and into the sun is worth about 27 cents. That's the thirty I don't spend, less the few cents I give up by not selling it.

Depending on your habits and your plan, that's somewhere between about $100 and $600 a year.

If your house turns out to be nocturnal too — you're in good company. Mine has been quietly doing it for years, and I taught it to.

A note on my interest: I build Powermind, software that helps households use more of their own solar instead of exporting it. The conclusion above — that timing matters more than the rate you're paid — happens to be what my product is for. The figures are sourced, the model is published, and I've noted where it flatters itself. Check them.

All rates GST-inclusive, accessed 2–4 September 2026. Household figures are from one Canberra home over 8,208 metered hours. The city comparison is a model of that same house, not a survey; run against my own bill it comes out about 2.5% optimistic. The 3pm–9pm window is not dark year-round. At Perth's latest sunset roughly four and a half of those six hours are still daylight. By midwinter almost none of it is, which is why reaching that rate reliably needs storage.