Solar Sharer: three hours of free power a day, and the catch to check

What the Solar Sharer Offer actually is

From 1 July 2026, energy retailers in the Default Market Offer regions — New South Wales, South Australia and South East Queensland — must offer households a plan that includes at least three hours of free electricity in the middle of the day, when solar generation across the grid is at its peak. In New South Wales and South East Queensland the free window is 11am to 2pm.

Three details make it more interesting than a typical promotion. You do not need rooftop solar to take it: the scheme shares the grid’s midday solar surplus with everyone, not just people with panels. It is open to renters as well as owners. And within the window, households can access up to 24 kilowatt-hours of free electricity a day, which is more than many homes use in a full day.

It is not automatic. It is an opt-in plan you sign up to through a retailer, and it requires a smart meter, because the retailer has to be able to measure your usage in half-hour intervals to know what fell inside the free window.

Why it exists: the midday problem

Australia has so much rooftop and large-scale solar that the middle of the day has become a genuine operational problem. Around midday there is frequently more generation than demand, which pushes wholesale prices very low and sometimes negative, and the system operator has to manage an oversupply it cannot easily store.

Paying households to use power at exactly that moment is a far cheaper fix than building more storage or curtailing generation. That is the logic behind the offer: it is not charity, it is demand shifting. Understanding that is useful, because it tells you what the scheme is optimising for — moving your consumption into the middle of the day — and therefore who benefits most from it.

The catch: what happens outside the free window

Free power for three hours is only free in a meaningful sense if the other twenty-one hours are not more expensive to compensate. This is the single most important thing to check, and it is why the offer is regulated rather than left to marketing: the Australian Energy Regulator oversees the Solar Sharer Offer specifically to ensure customers also get a fair deal outside the free-power period.

Regulation reduces that risk; it does not remove the need to compare. A plan with a free midday window and higher evening rates can easily be worse for a household that is out all day and cooks, heats and charges everything after 6pm. The same plan can be excellent for a household that works from home, runs a pool pump, or can move laundry, dishwashing and car charging into the middle of the day.

The honest test is not "is three hours free better than zero hours free". It is "what does my whole year cost on this plan versus the cheapest plan I could otherwise be on". Those are different questions and they frequently have different answers.

Who it genuinely suits

Solar Sharer rewards flexibility. If you can genuinely move a meaningful share of your consumption into an 11am to 2pm window, the arithmetic can be strong — particularly for high-consumption, shiftable loads. Pool pumps, hot water on a timer, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers and electric vehicle charging are the obvious candidates, because none of them care what time they run.

It suits far less well if your consumption is concentrated in the evening and cannot move, or if the bulk of your usage is heating and cooling driven by when you are home. And if you already have rooftop solar, the calculation is different again: during that midday window you may already be self-consuming your own generation, so free grid power in the same window may displace far less than you expect. In that case the question becomes whether it is better to export at your feed-in rate or to use free grid power and keep exporting — which depends on both numbers.

Our time-of-use vs single-rate guide covers how window-based tariffs reward different households, and the free appliance running-cost calculator shows which of your appliances are actually worth moving.

How to decide without guessing

Because the offer trades a free window against your rates the rest of the time, it cannot be judged from the headline. It needs to be costed against your real usage shape — how many kilowatt-hours you use, and when.

That is exactly what EnergySorted does. It costs every plan available in your area against your actual usage, including time-of-use structures, and ranks them cheapest-first with no retailer commissions influencing the order. If a Solar Sharer plan is genuinely your cheapest option it will surface as such; if the evening rates outweigh the free window for your household, that shows up too. Compare on your real bill.

If you have solar, it is worth reading our solar feed-in tariff guide alongside this, since the interaction between a free-import window and your export rate is the part most likely to surprise you.