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Those lucky enough to own their own homes (or more realistically, have a mortgage) at least have access to solar panels and as of recently, batteries.
Those two combined have the ability to drastically reduce one’s utility bills to near-0.
For everyone else stuck paying rent, short of having a decent landlord willing to invest in their property, is shit out of luck.
We are living in two drastically different Australia’s.
It's not quite that simple, if by near zero you mean after paying ~$25000 for a solar and battery combo. With feed in tarrifs being near 0cents now, I haven't crunched the numbers recently... But its really killed the payoff period for straight solar
Your pricing information is a bit out of date; with current Government incentives a 10kW array and 50KWh batteries can be gotten for less than $10K.
True, general feed-in rates have tanked due to a glut in solar panels, but certainly providers do still offer generous rates for shoulder periods (around dawn and dusk) where you could potentially discharge part of your battery into the network (I think?).
But the real savings from having the batteries will eliminate your need to use power during evening peak times, eliminating the need for buying petrol if/when switching to an EV and having the ability to buffer energy from a rare sunny day in winter into free energy for the next 2-3 overcast days.
Depending on how aggressively you monitor and take advantage of market offers, and electrify your home - the pay-down period can be as low as a few years.
Yeah, to be fair, having a quick look at prices they seemed to have dropped a lot (I paid about 10k for a 5kwh solar system about 5 years ago), although I'm not sure if I trust some of those batteries, they're looking far too cheap.
I suppose a lot of the calculation is also dependent on use. We use about 7-9kwh per day during winter (no gas heating) which is only roughly 2.50 a day, one of the bigger killers comes from the >1 dollar a day for connection.
Is it shareholder value?
It's mostly privatisation. The regulators are supposed to regulate but they don't do it effectively and competition isn't working, least of all in distribution which is a natural monopoly.
There is a huge amount of money spent to blame it on renewables despite the evidence showing clearly that they aren't the problem.
Unfortunately this takes the publics attention away from the real problem. This is becoming very common in today's social media driven populist politics. People incited to anger against scapegoats while the real perpetrators sit behind the scenes pulling the strings.
Unfortunately not much for reasonable people to do but let the mob fuck things up and then let them pass into the history books and be a lesson for a few generations before they once again forget it all.
The government can't win. If they move to fix the real problem they will be out on their ears in a week. If they sit on their hands the same people are organising against them anyway.
Capitalism is the reason.
Price stability only exists in a world where we nationalised energy infrastructure.
How will we pay for [edit: constructing] it? Wow, tax. Wow. What a novel idea. Maybe we'll actually get paid for our natural resources. What an idea.
Tax is just everyone subsidising the power usage of the big users. People should pay for what they use, so it incentivises using less power.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. People should still pay for the electricity, but at the very least the transmission and most of the generation should be publically owned and provided at cost
And energy retailers like some states have are so dumb. "Shopping around' for electricity when they're just slightly repacking the rate the transmission company sets is so stupid.
We don’t even need to pay tax for it. If you take the capitalism out of it and create a government monopoly; we still pay for the service, and it gets put towards funding the service.
Take out the Executive Salaries and other unnecessary overheads and it is much more cost effective.
“Renewables”. There’s no other answer. Ever since we started trying to eliminate the cheap, high energy density, reliable power sources (coal, gas) and started replacing them with unreliable, highly inefficient, spread out “renewables” our cost of power has skyrocketed.
The more “renewables” we put in the system, the higher the price goes. 50% of power bills are transmission costs, and the transmission costs for renewables are so high that the government refuses to disclose how high they are going to be. Pretty much every expert estimate puts it in the trillions of dollars.
You know you could just read the article
The renewables in our grid lowered average household electricity bills by up to $417 in 2024, collectively saving households up to $3.8 billion in just one year.
Thanks to the high share of renewables, wholesale prices nearly halved in the last three months of 2025.
And on your point the report says
Transmission – the highway system that transports power from where it is created, to where it is used. Transmission only makes up about 6-8% of an overall power bill.
Renewables did no such thing - the government handouts did that. If the average power bill dropped by $400 it’s because they gave every household $1000 off their energy bills paid using our tax money - meaning the average electricity bill actually increased by $600 that year.
Transmission makes up about 50% of a power bill according to the power companies themselves.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-12/power-prices-to-rise-in-clean-energy-transition/103696450
Network costs (the poles and wires) account for about 45 per cent of a power bill and it's these costs that are on their way up.
You can do a bit better than citing a dude with vested interests. You can even find government sources that roughly agree with you: The AEMC report
However the report also notes that:
Delays to new wind and transmission build, and the uncoordinated use of CER are projected to have the biggest impact on electricity costs.
Highlighting that renewables do decrease prices. Of course, reducing gas prices would probably also reduce prices.
Also at least for last quarter the [AEMO] (https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/major-publications/qed/2024/qed-q4-2024.pdf?rev=d75996ee2317495783a18c996d5878ac&sc_lang=en) report that coal and transmission are the driving costs. Negative energy prices were primarily driven by renewables.
Also
Transmission makes up about 50% ...
Network costs (the poles and wires) account for about 45 per cent of a power bill and it's these costs that are on their way up.
I heard it was up to 100% Last time I checked it was 156% Old mate said it was 196%
The actual figure I saw was around 40%, but sure you can inflate things by saying upto.
The AEMO are the biggest vested interest in this. Nothing they say can be taken seriously.
Renewables don’t decrease prices because without transmission and grid-scale storage, which doesn’t even exist yet, it’s basically useless.
If you’d heard it was 40% why did you say it was only 6-8% in your previous comment?
Renewables do decrease prices though? Maybe l2add?
If you’d heard it was 40% why did you say it was only 6-8% in your previous comment?
Because that's literally what the referenced article states? Maybe l2read?
As the percentage of renewables increases, power bills increase, not decrease. Have you not been paying attention?
So even though you know that the 6-8% figure is bullshit, having heard 40% yourself, you still chose to cite it to try and pretend that “renewables” aren’t causing power bills to increase? Why?