Solar Sharer Offer: The Three Free Hours Matter Less Than the Peak That Follows

The Solar Sharer Offer is a government-priced electricity plan that, since 1 July 2026, has given eligible households in New South Wales, south-east Queensland and South Australia three hours of free electricity in the middle of every day. The free hours get most of the attention, but the arithmetic points somewhere else: whether a household comes out ahead depends mostly on how much of its use is left in the evening peak, where the offer charges its highest rates.

The position taken here is straightforward. Switch only if your peak-time use will fall, not simply because your midday use can rise. On Ausgrid’s 2026-27 Solar Sharer prices, each kilowatt-hour a day moved out of the 3pm to 9pm window is worth about $189 a year, against about $101 for a kilowatt-hour moved from any other time. Energy Consumers Australia, the national consumer advocate, put the general point in a single line when the prices were set: “not everyone will be better off on the SSO”.

All prices below are the 2026-27 figures, which apply until 30 June 2027 and are due to be reset from 1 July 2027. This is general information, not financial advice.

What the Solar Sharer Offer is

The Solar Sharer Offer (SSO) is a standing offer, not a retailer promotion. Its prices are set by the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) alongside the Default Market Offer (DMO), the annual price cap on standing offers in the same regions. The main features, as reported by Finder and RenewEconomy:

• Where: New South Wales, south-east Queensland and South Australia, from 1 July 2026.
• The free window: 11am to 2pm in New South Wales and south-east Queensland; 12pm to 3pm in South Australia.
• The free amount: up to 24 kWh a day.
• Who must offer it: retailers with more than 1,000 customers in those regions.
• Requirements: a smart meter, and the household has to opt in. Nobody is moved onto it automatically.
• Lock-in: none.
• Who is excluded: customers in embedded networks (many apartment blocks, retirement villages and caravan parks) and small businesses.
• Prices outside the window: the same as the DMO time-of-use tariff for that network, according to energyplans.

Victoria runs its own version, the Midday Power Saver, which started on 1 October 2026. It works under different rules and is outside the scope of this analysis.

The price of the other 21 hours

The free window is the headline, but it covers three hours. The other 21 hours are charged at the network’s time-of-use rates, and those rates are where the bill is decided. The table below sets out the 2026-27 SSO prices by network.

Sources: Finder (14 July 2026) and Canstar (23 July 2026). Rows marked * are from Finder only.

The Ausgrid row is the starkest. A peak rate of 63.72c is more than double the 27.56c off-peak rate. South Australia’s structure is different again: its peak runs twice a day, across the morning from 6am to 10am and from 4pm through to midnight, so a household there carries peak pricing for 12 of the 21 charged hours.

For context, the AER’s DMO 2026-27 flat reference bills, which are price caps rather than typical market bills, are $1,899 for Ausgrid (at 3,900 kWh a year), $2,328 for Endeavour, $2,604 for Essential, $1,988 for Energex (at 4,600 kWh) and $2,334 for SA Power Networks (at 4,000 kWh), as compiled by wattever and energyplans. The final determination was made on 26 May 2026 and took effect on 1 July.

Three households, one meter (hypothetical)

To show how the peak share drives the outcome, take three hypothetical Ausgrid households. All three use the same amount of electricity, 3,900 kWh a year or about 10.7 kWh a day, which is the AER’s representative usage for the Ausgrid network. They differ only in when they use it.

Two working assumptions sit underneath the figures. Ausgrid’s peak rate applies only from November to March and from June to August; in the other four months the 3pm to 9pm hours are charged at the off-peak rate. Spreading that across the year gives a blended 3pm to 9pm rate of about 51.67c (eight months at 63.72c, four at 27.56c). The daily supply charge of $1.76 adds $642.40 a year to every household regardless of behaviour.

Household A is the case the sceptics have in mind. Nobody is home between 11am and 2pm, so almost nothing is used in the free window, and nearly half the day’s consumption lands in the evening when the family gets home, cooks, runs the heater or air conditioner and watches television. On the SSO it pays about $188 a year more than the flat reference price. The free hours are worth almost nothing to it, and the peak rate costs it a great deal.

Household B uses exactly the same total. The difference is that its hot water system, dishwasher and washing machine run on timers in the free window. Compared with household A, it has 3.3 kWh a day more in the window, and 1.5 kWh of that has come out of the evening peak. That is enough to put it about $276 a year ahead of the reference price.

Household C has a home battery charged in the window and drained through the evening, so very little is bought at peak. Its bill falls to about $788 a year, roughly $1,111 below the reference. That figure needs a firm caveat: it excludes the purchase cost of the battery and the energy lost in charging and discharging it, and the comparison says nothing about whether the battery itself pays for itself.

One further qualification applies to all three rows. $1,899 is the AER’s cap, not the price most households pay. Many market offers are cheaper than the DMO, so for a household already on a competitive plan the gain from switching is smaller than the table shows, and for household A the loss may be larger.

Why the peak is the number to watch

Much of the retailer and calculator material on the SSO frames the decision as a single instruction: shift more of your use into the free hours. The arithmetic suggests a more precise version. What matters is not only how much moves into the window, but where it moves from.

On the Ausgrid figures above, the value of moving one kilowatt-hour a day into the free window is:

• From the 3pm to 9pm window: 51.67c x 365 days, or about $189 a year.
• From any other time: 27.56c x 365 days, or about $101 a year.

A kilowatt-hour taken out of the evening is worth close to twice as much as one taken out of the night or the morning. Two households can shift the same amount into the free window and end up hundreds of dollars apart, depending on what they stopped doing at 6pm.

Energy Consumers Australia’s analysis, as reported by RenewEconomy, reaches the same conclusion from a different starting point. It modelled a household using 20 kWh a day with 30 per cent of that in the free window. With 40 per cent of its use still falling in the peak, the household was about $320 worse off on the SSO. With the peak share cut to 20 per cent, and the same 30 per cent in the free window, it was about $210 better off. The free share was identical in both cases; the peak share decided the result.

The practical reading is that a household considering the offer should look at its evening use before its midday use. If the evening share cannot come down, a large free allowance at noon may not rescue the bill.

What actually moves

Not every load can be shifted, and the ones that can tend to share a feature: they can run unattended on a timer or a schedule. The main candidates are:

• Hot water. An electric storage or heat pump system set to heat during the free window. For many homes this is one of the larger loads, and it is also one of the easiest to retime because the tank stores the heat for the evening. Households considering an upgrade can weigh it up in our guide to whether heat pump hot water is worth it in Australia.
• Dishwasher and washing machine. Most models have a delay-start function, which turns an evening load into a midday one.
• Pool pump. Already running on a timer in most cases; moving the timer is a one-off job.
• Pre-cooling and pre-heating. Running the air conditioner in the free window so the house is already cool, or warm, before the peak begins. This only helps if the system then runs less in the evening, so insulation and closed blinds matter.
• Electric vehicle charging. Worth it only if the car is at home in the middle of the day.
• Home battery charging. Filling the battery from the grid in the window and drawing on it through the peak, as household C does.

The 24 kWh daily cap is generous for most homes. Household B uses 4 kWh in the window and household C uses 9.5 kWh, both well under the limit. The cap starts to matter only for homes with a large battery, an electric vehicle, or both, charging in the same three hours.

Who should not switch

The SSO is designed to reward a particular pattern of use, and households outside that pattern can pay more on it. On the evidence above, the following groups should be cautious.

Households out all day with evening-heavy use. This is household A. If nobody is home and no appliance can be scheduled, the free window delivers little and the peak rate does the damage. That is a fair point for the sceptics, and it holds.

Households already on a competitive market plan. The SSO is a standing offer priced against the DMO cap. A market time-of-use plan with a lower peak rate can beat it, even for a household that shifts well. Before switching, compare your current plan against the SSO on Energy Made Easy, the government’s price comparison service. A recurring complaint among households online is that some versions of the offer carry higher daily supply charges than the customer’s existing plan, so the supply line deserves as much attention as the usage rates. Simple changes to daily habits can also lower a bill without changing plans at all, and our guide to reducing your energy bill with everyday eco habits covers the low-cost options.

Households weighing rooftop panels instead. A home with its own solar system already has free daytime energy from the roof, so it gains less from free grid power in the same hours. A household deciding between the SSO and installing panels faces a different calculation, set out in our Australian guide to solar cost and payback.

Embedded network customers and small businesses. Both are ineligible, so the question does not arise.

Run your own numbers first

The three households above are hypothetical, and a real bill will not match any of them exactly. The calculator near the top of this page is built for that reason. It takes your own daily usage, your own split between the free window and the peak, the SSO rates for your network from the table above, and your current plan’s rates, and returns an estimated yearly bill for each.

To fill it in, take your total kilowatt-hours from a recent bill and divide by the number of days in the billing period. If your retailer’s app or online account shows usage by hour, it will give you a rough idea of how much falls between 11am and 2pm (12pm and 3pm in South Australia) and how much falls in your network’s peak. Two notes on the rates. Ausgrid customers should enter the blended 3pm to 9pm figure of 51.67c rather than 63.72c, because the peak rate applies for only eight months of the year. On networks with more than two charged rates, such as Energex and SA Power Networks, enter as the other-times rate the one that covers most of your remaining use. If your usage data does not show hourly figures, estimate cautiously, and test a pessimistic peak share as well as an optimistic one. The gap between the two answers is a useful measure of how much the decision depends on behaviour you have not yet changed.

The rule of thumb that falls out of the arithmetic is simple. If the calculator shows the SSO ahead only when you assume a large drop in evening use, make that change first and check the next bill before switching. If it shows the SSO ahead on your current habits, the offer is likely worth a closer look. The free hours are real. The peak that follows them decides who comes out ahead.

Sources: Solar Sharer Offer: is 3 hours of free power worth it?, Finder (https://www.finder.com.au/energy/solar-sharer-offer-calculator); Households are about to be offered 3 hours of free power, RenewEconomy (https://reneweconomy.com.au/households-are-about-to-be-offered-3-hours-of-free-power-who-should-sign-up-and-who-should-think-twice/); Response to Default Market Offer 2026-27 and Solar Sharer Offer, Energy Consumers Australia (https://energyconsumersaustralia.com.au/sites/default/files/2026-05/media-release-eca-response-dmo-26-27-solar-sharer-offer.pdf)