Australia Offers Free Electricity Thanks to Solar

Over the summer, Australians in New South Wales, South Australia, and southeast Queensland began getting something most American ratepayers can only dream of: three free hours of electricity each day. The Solar Sharer program offers these free hours from about 11am to 2pm, when rooftop and utility solar panels produce more power than the grid can use. You don't need solar panels on your own roof to get the free hours. You don't need solar panels on your own home or even own your own home to benefit. You just need a smart meter and sign up with your utility company.

Pennsylvania households got the opposite news this year. PJM (our electric grid operator) saw capacity price increase by more than 1,000 percent compared to four years ago. It’s a cost that is hitting every pocketbook in Pennsylvania. Bills are going up, not down. And the gap between these two stories is not an accident in geography. It's a difference in what each grid has built.

Why Australia can afford to give power away

More than one in three Australian homes have rooftop solar. Rooftop installation costs less than $1000 per kilowatt before rebates, roughly a third of what US households pay for the same system. That density of solar means the country regularly produces more power than it can use at midday. Wholesale prices in South Australia are often negative on sunny afternoons.

The Solar Sharer program is a policy response — created to deal with extra renewable energy. Instead of wasting cheap power or forcing grid operators to cut back, electricity retailers pass the savings straight to customers and try to shift usage into the hours when the sun is doing the work.

The program provides two main benefits. Shifting electricity use to midday reduces the evening peak, when the grid will use more gas and coal and prices go up. With less strain at night, there is less need for the large batteries Australia has been racing to install to store the extra solar power.

Pennsylvania took a different path

Pennsylvania hasn’t just failed to grow its renewable energy — it made choices to hold it back. The Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard, the law that sets the minimum amount of renewable power, has not changed since 2021; Solar power is stuck at just 0.5%. The Governor’s Lightning Plan, which aimed to increase the standard and create incentives for community renewables as well as energy efficiency, was never given serious consideration. As a result, Pennsylvania ranks 49th in the country for renewable energy over the past decade. Solar barely registers in the state's generation mix.

This year, that gap widened on purpose. Pennsylvania exited the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the multistate program that puts a price on carbon from power plants. The State Senate has refused to take up clean energy legislation. Those inactions on carbon cutting were framed as protecting ratepayers from higher bills, but both left the door open to more volatile and expensive fracked gas.

Meanwhile, electricity demand is rising quickly, mostly because of data centers. PJM predicts 70 gigawatts of large load growth by 2038, with data centers as the main driver. Pennsylvania has nearly 21 gigawatts of solar and storage projects waiting in PJM’s interconnection queue, which has been closed to new applicants for years. Most of the new generation now moving through the updated process is gas, while solar and storage are only a small part.

This isn’t because there are not enough proposed projects. It reflects a set of choices , made in Harrisburg and in PJM's governance, to keep leaning on gas while clean generation and storage projects wait their turn.

The Commonwealth has a choice

The difference here is stark. More than 10 years ago, when I worked at the state Public Utility Commission, utilities also tried to shift when people used more electricity. But instead of offering free energy in the middle of the day, electricity rates were more expensive during working hours and cheaper at night and early morning. The rates were designed to reduce demand at peak usage times when high demand and limited supply led to price spikes. In Australia, an abundance of free, clean solar energy is helping homeowners save money. We use rates to manage scarcity. They use theirs to manage abundance.

This isn't about Pennsylvania not having enough sunlight. It's about a lack of political will, a state government that keeps choosing gas over storage and renewables, and a grid operator that’s slow to connect clean energy sources

Australia spent years building rooftop solar, and now its residents are reaping the rewards. In the same time period, Pennsylvania kept an out-of-date renewable standard, left its regional carbon program, and set aside a clean energy plan that had storage and transmission investment built in. Every year this continues, ratepayers continue to pay unpredictable gas-driven prices instead of cheaper, solar-powered ones.

Free electricity won’t be coming to Pennsylvania any time soon. But the decision about whether it could ever happen is being made right now, in the state Capitol and in corporate suites, not far off in the future.