The Solar Sharer Offer: 3 free hours a day — but is the whole plan cheaper?

From 1 July 2026, every sizeable electricity retailer in NSW, south-east Queensland and South Australia has to offer a plan with three hours of free electricity in the middle of every day. It’s called the Solar Sharer Offer, it’s opt-in, and it exists because midday wholesale power has been dirt cheap for years — the grid is swimming in solar at lunchtime — and that cheapness never made it to household bills.

Free power sounds like a no-brainer. Whether it actually is depends entirely on your daily rhythm — and on one comparison most people won’t think to make.

How it works

• The free window: 11am–2pm in NSW and SE QLD, 12pm–3pm in SA. Every day.
• The cap: up to 24 kWh a day free — far more than most homes could use in three hours, so effectively “whatever you can run in the window”.
• Who can get it: anyone in those regions with a smart meter — renters included, and you don’t need solar panels. Retailers with more than 1,000 customers must offer it; Origin, Red Energy, Engie, OVO, Dodo and Sumo were among the first out.
• Not in Victoria (or other states) for now — it’s tied to the regions where the national default offer applies.

Who wins

The free window is only worth what you can move into it. That favours:

• Anyone home at lunchtime — working from home, retirees, parents at home, shift workers. Run the dishwasher, washing machine and dryer at midday instead of 7pm and those loads cost nothing.
• Timer-friendly appliances, even if you’re out. Most dishwashers and many washing machines have delay-start. An electric hot water system on a timer is the big one — water heating is one of the largest loads in the house, and it doesn’t care what time it runs.
• Pool owners — the pool pump is made for this. Several hours of pumping, every day, moved to free.
• EV owners who can charge at home at lunchtime, even one or two days a week.
• Summer pre-cooling: run the air conditioner hard for free before 2pm, coast into the evening peak. (Works for winter pre-heating too, though the window is earlier than the heating peak.)

As a feel for the size of the prize: every 3 kWh a day you genuinely shift into the window is worth around $390 a year at a typical 36c/kWh rate — before any difference in the plan’s other prices, which brings us to the catch.

The catch: “free” is three hours — a plan is 24

Here’s the bit we’d want a friend to hear before signing anything. Retailers don’t have to make the Solar Sharer version of their plan cheap overall — early examples have already paired the free window with higher supply charges or higher rates outside the window. If your evening usage is priced higher to pay for your free lunch, you can come out behind.

So the only comparison that matters is the whole bill on the whole plan: take your actual usage, assume the loads you’d realistically shift, and compare the Solar Sharer plan’s total against your current plan’s total (all rates and the daily supply charge). Energy Made Easy lists every plan side by side. Ten minutes, and it’s the difference between a genuine saving and a marketing headline.

If you already have solar

In theory the free window overlaps the hours your panels are producing, so you’d gain less than a solar-free household. In practice, it depends on how much your system actually covers at midday — and for a lot of real systems, that’s less than the brochure said. East- or west-facing panels peak outside the window; shade from trees or a neighbour’s second storey often lands in the middle of the day; and a smaller, older or dusty system simply may not keep up with a hot water tank, a pool pump and the house at once — especially in winter.

Here’s the way to think about it. On a solar home, a midday load is paid for one of two ways:

• the part your panels cover costs you the forgone export — about 4c/kWh (cheap, and the free window doesn’t change it);
• the part they don’t cover comes from the grid at your full rate — about 36c/kWh. That’s the bucket Solar Sharer makes free.

A worked example (illustrative — plug in your own numbers): say your hot water and pool pump run at midday, and between orientation, shade and winter output your system leaves about 4 kWh a day of that coming from the grid across the year. That’s 4 kWh × 365 days × 36c ≈ $525 a year — wiped to zero inside the free window. A big north-facing system that genuinely covers everything saves close to nothing here; a part-shaded east-west 3kW system saves real money. Your meter data (or your retailer’s app) will tell you which home you are: look at how much you still import between 11am and 2pm.

Whichever it is, do the same whole-plan comparison as everyone else — and check the feed-in tariff on the Solar Sharer plan hasn’t been trimmed while you weren’t looking.

The verdict

• Genuinely good if you can shift real load into the window — hot water on a timer, pool pump, midday laundry, EV charging. That’s potentially hundreds a year, for free.
• Marginal if your usage is all evening and can’t move.
• Never sign on the free hours alone — compare the full plan against your current one first. If a bill needs decoding before you switch, that’s exactly what our free comparison tool and the guide are for.

Scheme details: AER Default Market Offer 2026–27 final determination (window times, 24 kWh cap, participating retailers as at July 2026). Worked shifting example uses the 36c/kWh typical rate from the Decode Energy Home Energy Saving Guide (AU 2026 edition); your rates and the plan’s other charges will determine your actual outcome.