Price plan
Your price plan is the deal you have with your electricity retailer — what they charge you per kilowatt-hour (kWh) you import from the grid, and what they pay you per kWh you export back. Solarprod uses this to estimate your bill and to decide when your battery should hold charge for evening peaks versus push electricity out to the grid.
Where do these plans come from?
The AU retailers list is built from the Australian Energy Regulator’s public catalogue of every residential plan currently offered — refreshed monthly. WA users see Synergy and Horizon tariffs alongside. If you have an Amber Electric account, you can also pick “Live Amber prices” to use your actual wholesale-passthrough rates.
Don’t see your retailer? Pick the closest match by rate shape (supply charge, buy windows, feed-in tariff), or leave the picker on “No price profile” for a flat-rate analysis.
What you’ll see in the detail panel
- Daily supply charge
- A fixed daily fee for being connected to the grid, charged regardless of how much electricity you use. Typical AU residential plans charge $0.90–$1.30 per day — that’s $330–$475 a year before you consume a single kWh. A battery can’t avoid this; it’s the same whether you import nothing or a megawatt.
- Buy price (and time-of-use windows)
- What you pay per kWh imported from the grid, in cents. A flat-rate plan charges the same all day. A time-of-use (TOU) plan splits the day into windows with different rates:
- Peak — usually 4pm to 9pm on weekdays, the most expensive (often 35–45c/kWh). This is when everyone gets home and turns on lights, heating, and ovens.
- Shoulder — mornings and late evenings, a middle rate (around 25–30c/kWh).
- Off-peak — usually overnight (10pm or 11pm to 6am or 7am), the cheapest (often 15–20c/kWh).
- Solar soak / midday — some plans add a cheap or free window around 11am–2pm to encourage you to run dishwashers and EVs while the grid is awash with rooftop solar.
- Feed-in tariff (FiT)
- What the retailer pays you per kWh exported back to the grid. Most AU plans pay a single flat rate around 5–7c/kWh; some pay more during peak evening windows when wholesale prices are highest.
- Compare your FiT to your peak buy rate. If you pay 35c to import but earn only 5c to export, every kWh you can self-consume (instead of selling) is worth 7× as much — which is why a battery that shifts solar from midday to evening is so valuable.
- Tiered feed-in tariff
- A premium FiT for the first few kWh you export each day, then a lower rate after that. Example: 10c/kWh for the first 5 kWh, then 4c after. Common on AGL, Origin, and EnergyAustralia plans — together about 60% of the residential market. It rewards smaller solar arrays and penalises large exporters.
- Discounted (or free) midday imports
- A daily allowance of cheap or free imports during a fixed window (typically 11am–2pm) to soak up surplus rooftop solar across the grid. Beyond the daily allowance, the normal buy price applies. Useful if you can run an EV charger or heat-pump water heater in that window.
- Demand charge
- An extra fee, in dollars per kilowatt per month, based on the biggest spike in power you draw from the grid during the peak window. Some retailers (AGL Demand, Origin Demand, EnergyAustralia Demand) offer plans with lower per-kWh rates but add this on top.
- A battery that flattens your evening peak draw is the single most valuable thing you can have on a demand plan — every kilowatt you shave off saves the monthly charge for the life of the battery.
- Low-demand credit
- A daily credit (around $1/day) paid if you can keep your grid import very low during the evening peak window — typically below 30 watts. Pioneered by GloBird Energy. Effectively a structural rebate for battery owners, since only a battery covering the full peak can realistically earn it.
- Seasonal rates
- Most AU residential plans run two seasons (typically Summer Nov–Mar, Winter May–Sep) with different rates — usually higher peak prices and supply charges in summer. When the picker shows a seasonal warning, the rates on display apply to today’s date; the other season has different numbers.
- Negative buy or sell prices
- Wholesale-passthrough plans (Amber Electric, Flow Power) can have buy prices that drop below zero during midday solar oversupply — the retailer pays you to consume. Some newer plans also have feed-in tariffs that go negative during oversupply, meaning exporting can cost you money. The picker flags these when relevant.
- Distributor zones
- The same retail plan is often offered across multiple network zones (Ausgrid, Endeavour, Energex, Citipower, etc.) — each is the local company that owns the poles and wires. Solarprod collapses zones that behave identically into one row. When two zones have different rates (different supply charge or peak window), they stay separate and you’ll see the rates spelled out in the dropdown label so you can tell them apart.
Solarprod will recommend holding battery charge for peak windows and accepting grid imports during off-peak.
How solarprod uses your price plan
Solarprod estimates your daily bill (or savings) and decides when your battery should discharge to avoid expensive imports, when it should hold for a peak export, and when it’s worth importing during cheap off-peak windows to refill for the evening. These decisions all come down to: what do peak imports cost, what does the retailer pay for exports, and how big is the gap between them.
Off-grid mode
Hidden in off-grid mode — there’s no grid to buy from or sell to, so price plans don’t apply.
Closes this tab and returns to the calculator.