The Solar Sharer Offer went live last week. Retailers in NSW, South-East Queensland and South Australia must now offer three free hours of midday electricity to any household with a smart meter that opts in - 11am to 2pm in NSW and SEQ, midday to 3pm in SA, capped at 24kWh a day. The stated intent: share the benefits of Australia’s solar boom with the renters, apartment dwellers and low-income households who’ve been locked out of it.

It’s a good story - but good stories and good policy aren’t the same thing.

I’ve spent years building VPP products and working at the intersection of energy retail, wholesale markets, customers, and the technology that sits between them. The Solar Sharer looks glossy on the outside, however I think is ultimately a detractor for the industry. Let me run through four perspectives - retailers, wholesale markets, customers, and DNSPs - because each tells a different part of the story.

The retailer: mandated cost, no upside

Energy retailers already operate on thin margins. They buy wholesale, sell retail, manage churn, and absorb regulatory risk - without owning most of the infrastructure they depend on, and in most cases, without owning their billing system either.

That last point matters more than most people outside the industry appreciate. Most small-to-mid-tier retailers sit on top of third-party billing platforms - Tally, Gentrack, Kraken - and every tariff innovation requires a change request, a development cycle, and budget. Anyone who has raised a change request with one of these platforms knows a new time-of-use structure with a daily kWh cap isn’t a toggle. It’s a funded project, and the mandate gave retailers three months to deliver it. The Australian Energy Council’s CEO put it plainly: the lead time “is generally not adequate for a reform of this magnitude”.

That’s the compliance tax - but what do retailers get in return?

Not a customer acquisition tool - it’s a regulated offering they’re required to make available. Not a retention lever - customers on a mandated DMO-level plan aren’t stickier than any other. Not a margin contributor - it’s a new obligation with no corresponding revenue. The wholesale cost of free midday power is generally low given where NEM prices sit in that window, but unhedged wholesale energy costs are only one part of energy retail cost stacks.

And the cost didn’t disappear - it just shifted to daily supply charges. For a change targeting lower costs for households, it’s a miss.

One positive worth naming explicitly: AGL launched free daytime power in South Australia a full year before the mandate, and a handful of others - GloBird, Red Energy, OVO - had voluntary versions in market too. That’s what product leadership looks like: they identified the midday demand problem, built a product, and took it to market. The mandate then arrived and commoditised what they’d differentiated on. The irony of mandating innovation is that you punish the early movers by handing their competitive advantage to every retailer in the market, whether they earned it or not.

The wholesale market: marginal improvement, same fundamental problem

The theory is sound. More consumption at midday soaks excess solar, reduces the frequency of negative prices, and softens the duck curve.

Inflection // NEM

The midday solar glut shows up in the price shape

Average wholesale price by time of day, by region - capped (-$100 to $300) vs all

Wholesale price - 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2026 - generated from the Inflection Energy NEM price visualiser.

Australia now has more than 4.3 million rooftop solar systems, and the fleet keeps growing. On a clear day, midday generation regularly pushes wholesale prices to zero or negative. The oversupply problem is structural. Shifting a segment of residential demand into that window helps at the margin, but residential loads are a small lever against that volume of distributed generation.

More importantly, the load shift won’t be dynamic. A household that schedules their dishwasher for 11am will do it every day, regardless of whether the grid needs it that day. That’s a static response to a variable demand problem. A 3 hour static block every day doesn’t do much for a 5 minute market.

Research from Energy Consumers Australia found that around a third of customers already on time-of-use tariffs don’t change their consumption patterns at all. For those who do shift, the effect tends to be modest and reverts over time. The literature on energy consumer behaviour is consistent on this: price signals alone move a minority, the response is small, and it decays.

What would genuinely move the needle is dynamic dispatch - assets responding to real-time market conditions, not a fixed calendar window. That’s a VPP model. The Solar Sharer is the opposite of that.

The customer: a product built for someone who mostly can’t use it

The equity argument is the strongest case for the Solar Sharer, and it deserves engagement rather than dismissal. Renters - roughly a third of Australian households - have been systematically excluded from the solar transition. If you can’t install panels, you don’t benefit from falling daytime generation costs. That’s a real inequity.

But let’s be specific about who can use three free hours of midday electricity.

A renter in Sydney or Brisbane at 11am on a Tuesday is probably at work. The free window in NSW and SEQ runs 11am to 2pm - precisely the window most employed renters miss entirely.

If you’re home and run your air conditioning at noon to pre-cool your apartment, the thermal benefit will largely dissipate by the 5-7pm evening peak - the period the policy is trying to pull load out of. Apartment insulation in Australia is generally poor, and poorly insulated buildings can’t hold thermal mass across a six-hour gap.

If you don’t have an EV, a battery or solar, the shiftable load in a typical apartment is a washing machine and a dishwasher - maybe 1-2kWh on a good day. The 24kWh cap is irrelevant if you can’t find 2kWh to shift.

EV charging in apartments is a separate obstacle. Most apartment carparks have wall outlets at best, some strata schemes even require the resident to be present while charging, and smart scheduling isn’t an option for most apartment EV owners today.

A product that would actually solve this is a small portable battery, as is popular in Europe. Charge for free at noon, discharged into the home across the evening peak. Exactly the asset that would let a renter participate in the transition without a roof or a landlord’s permission - as it allows portability between residences. And in Australian contexts, unavailable under current fire safety and building standards.

So who benefits from the Solar Sharer? Homeowners with EVs and smart chargers. Homeowners with batteries. Households that already have solar and are adding storage. The most engaged energy consumers in the country - people who were going to respond to price signals regardless. Energy Consumers Australia’s own analysis reached the same conclusion, warning that some customers who switch may end up worse off once the higher rates outside the free window are counted.

The battery rebate changed the market because it changed what assets were in people’s homes - it accelerated the amount of infrastructure powering the grid (although potentially in a low-efficiency way).

The DNSPs: Some benefit, not enough change

Distribution networks have been playing catch-up for years. Rooftop solar has been installed faster than networks could plan for, and the result is midday export congestion, and a need to increase network spend over time (ultimately leading to higher charges for consumers).

The Solar Sharer helps here. More daytime consumption means less net export, less voltage rise, and lower peaks on distribution assets (assuming it gets some uptake).

But it’s not actual relief or a long term fix, because the benefit depends on voluntary opt-in by a population with limited ability to shift load. You can’t plan around a voluntary tariff’s penetration rate. You can’t defer a substation upgrade based on how many customers switched to a Solar Sharer plan and remembered to run their washing machine at 11am.

What DNSPs actually need is the ability to manage export and demand dynamically at the local network level - coordinated with real network conditions for that local location. Not a static daily window that happens to coincide with high solar periods. Community batteries might help at specific congestion points, but that’s another kettle of fish.

The better answer is network tariff reform that creates real pricing transparency at the local distribution level - giving retailers and aggregators something to build products against, based on the dynamic requirements of that local area. That’s a harder conversation than mandating free electricity, which is probably why it keeps getting deferred.

What we actually need

The Solar Sharer is live. A relatively small number of customers will adopt it. Most will be homeowners with batteries or EVs - the most asset-equipped and behaviourally active segment of the market, who were already the primary beneficiaries of every previous transition incentive. Retailers have spent compliance and development budget on a product that doesn’t improve their competitive position (and therefore probably spent less on actually innovative products), and the first visible market response was higher supply charges and a regulator investigation. The wholesale market will see a marginal improvement in midday demand, with no dynamic response capability. DNSPs will see some load shift, but not enough to defer structural investment.

If the goal is to genuinely democratise the solar transition and fix the structural mismatch between when energy is produced and when it’s used, the interventions that would work look different.

Proper DNSP engagement on distribution-level signals. Not community batteries, but real network tariff reform that gives retailers and aggregators pricing signals they can build products against - and that DNSPs can use to manage their networks in real time.

Higher tolerance for trials. The regulatory environment makes it genuinely hard to launch novel retail products without years of process. Let operators try things. Protect consumers, set guardrails, and allow the market to experiment. Some products will fail - that’s fine. Mandating a commoditised product removes the incentive to innovate at all.

Industry consultation as a default, not an afterthought. The peak retailer body being blindsided on timing should be a data point, not an embarrassment. Policy designed without the people who operate the system tends to underestimate the implementation cost and overestimate the behavioural response.

The Solar Sharer is well-intentioned policy in the wrong format. The problems it’s trying to solve - midday oversupply, renter equity, evening peak reduction - are real and urgent. The mechanism doesn’t match them. And the pattern it represents - policy announced without consultation, built for a customer who can’t fully participate, mandated rather than incentivised - is worth naming, because the next decade of energy policy needs to move faster and land better than this.

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Sam Fitz-Roy runs Inflection Energy, technical and commercial advisory for energy startups, investors and operators.