Feed-in tariffs are tiny now. Here is the self-consumption playbook instead
A decade ago Victorians were paid handsomely for exported solar. Today feed-in tariffs sit at a few cents per kilowatt-hour and keep drifting down, because midday solar now floods the grid. That change rewrote the economics of owning panels, and most advice has not caught up.
The core arithmetic
Every kilowatt-hour you export earns a few cents. Every kilowatt-hour you use directly avoids buying one at the full retail rate, typically ten times more. So the value of your system is decided less by how much it generates than by how much of that generation you consume on the spot. Moving usage into daylight is worth real money; exporting is a rounding error.
The playbook, in order of impact
- Shift the big appliances to daytime. Dishwasher, washing machine and dryer on delay timers or midday starts. This is free and worth doing the week your system switches on.
- Heat water with sunshine. If you have an electric or heat pump hot water system, a simple timer running it from late morning turns your tank into a battery made of hot water. This is usually the single biggest self-consumption win in the house.
- Pre-heat and pre-cool. Run the reverse cycle air conditioning an hour or two before the evening peak, using solar to bring the house to temperature, then let it coast. Your 6pm consumption drops exactly when grid power is dearest.
- Charge things at lunch, not midnight. Laptops, tools, e-bikes, and if you have an EV, as much charging as your parking pattern allows.
- Only then think about a battery. A battery is self-consumption bought with hardware. The habits above are self-consumption bought for free, and they improve the battery maths too because they shrink how big a battery you need.
What good looks like
An unmanaged household typically self-consumes 20 to 30% of its solar. With timers and habit changes, 40 to 60% is realistic without a battery. On a 6.6kW system, that difference is worth several hundred dollars a year, every year: more than most people saved by picking the cheaper installer.
A note on tariff shopping
Retail feed-in rates differ by a cent or two; retail usage rates and daily charges differ by much more. Compare plans on the whole bill, not the feed-in headline, and re-check yearly since rates move. If a plan offers free power windows in the middle of the day, that stacks beautifully with everything above.
The playbook needs no new hardware, just a delivery date and five timers. Start it the week the panels go live.