When I spent several hours this week researching solar feed in rates to find out whether switching electricity retailers made financial sense, the conclusion I came to was a very Australian one: whoopie duck.
That means big deal. As in, not a big deal at all.
Here is what the numbers actually looked like. Our current retailer, one we have been with for 20 years, slashed our solar feed in tariff from $0.43 per kWh down to $0.02 per kWh after we upgraded our solar panels and added a battery. That is a brutal cut, and it sent me searching for something better.
The best replacement I could find after all that searching paid $0.08 per kWh for the first 8 kWh exported, then dropped to $0.01 per kWh for the rest. Since we are currently feeding in around 20 kWh daily during summer, that works out at $0.76 per day under the new retailer versus $0.40 per day where we are now. Sounds promising, right?
But here is where it gets sobering. In winter, our panels are shaded and export drops sharply, often to nothing. When I factored that in, I projected that the annual income from solar exports would be around 54% of the theoretical summer maximum. After accounting for a $64 switching cost, the net gain over staying put comes to roughly $72 for the entire year. That is about $1.38 a week.
So, whoopie duck.
What are solar feed in tariffs and why do they vary so much?
A solar feed in tariff is the rate your electricity retailer pays you for surplus power your solar system exports back to the grid. In Australia, these rates are set by individual retailers and can vary wildly, which is exactly why it pays to compare them periodically, even if the conclusion you reach is that switching is not worth the bother.
The reason feed in rates have dropped so dramatically over the past several years is simple: when solar was new and rare, governments and retailers offered high tariffs to encourage uptake. Now that rooftop solar is common, the grid is flooded with midday solar exports and retailers have less incentive to pay a premium for power they are receiving in bulk from thousands of households simultaneously.
Adding a battery changes the maths as well. A battery means you self-consume more of your generation and export less, so the feed in tariff becomes a smaller part of your overall solar equation. The value of the battery comes from the energy it stores for your own use at night, not from what you sell back.
How do you compare solar feed in rates between retailers?
The comparison process is straightforward but time-consuming if you do it manually. You need to look at more than just the headline feed in rate. The daily access charge and usage rate both affect your overall bill, and a retailer offering a higher feed in rate may claw that back with higher charges elsewhere.
For Australian households, the Energy Made Easy comparison site run by the Australian Energy Regulator covers most states, and each state has its own energy comparison resources as well. Victoria, where I am based in Melbourne, has the Victorian Energy Compare tool. The key is to model your actual export volume against the tiered structure many retailers now use, because that $0.08 rate only applied to the first 8 kWh in the plan I was looking at. Beyond that it dropped to $0.01, which is barely worth mentioning.
The bigger lesson hiding inside the solar maths
I went through all of this detail because I am, by nature, pedantic about small costs and small gains. If you do not watch the small outflows, they bleed you slowly without you noticing. But the same logic works in reverse when you are building income.
A blog post with some Adsense on it that brings in a dollar a day and sends 20 visitors to your sales page is not impressive on its own. A Pinterest pin that pulls 100 clicks a week is not going to retire you by itself. But when you stack these small income centres and traffic sources on top of each other, the numbers start to look different.
What you do with that trickle of traffic is what determines where you end up in a year’s time.
The piece most people skip is the conversion side. Getting traffic is one thing. Turning that traffic into subscribers and then into buyers requires a sequence that actually does the job. That is exactly what I built Stranger to Sold to handle. It is an AI-guided workbook that builds your six-part email selling sequence with you across eleven modules, checking your answers rather than just accepting whatever you type. You can query it on any aspect as you go, and everything you build stays yours.
It runs inside your Claude account, paid or free, and costs $97 as a one-time payment with lifetime access.
If you have traffic coming in and subscribers on a list but the sales are not following, this is where I would start.
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