Dan Mercer

The thing with this energy transition is wholesale costs tend to whipsaw around a lot more than they used to.

So you'll get a period where a heap of new wind and solar capacity comes online and now increasingly batteries too.

And it just means that there's more supply in the system, which obviously helps ease prices.

But this hollows out the business case for something like a coal plant, which is not only getting squeezed by renewable energy,

in production so it can't produce as much energy but it's getting less money for the energy it does produce so inevitably there'll be another coal plant that closes and the system will lose a big chunk of generating capacity that runs around the clock or can run around the clock and unless you've built enough capacity to replace that coal plant and then some prices tend to rise in those circumstances and so the cycle repeats

Then on top of this, the reality is we're going to be paying a lot more for poles and wires or the poles and wires part of our bill from now on indefinitely.

As this transition unfolds and we rely more and more on electricity rather than gas or oil to power our lives,

The network will need to be upgraded and expanded to cope with that.

We don't know exactly how much but even the AER itself has talked about a wall of capital expenditure that's coming in this regard.

So it's going to cost a lot of money as well and that all needs to be paid for by us.

Well, it certainly does sound good.

I mean, it's great marketing, if nothing else, and hopefully a little more than that.

So you're right.

The federal government last year announced it would require retailers to at least offer customers this thing called a solar share a deal.

The way it works is that consumers will get free power for three hours every day, although they will have to opt into the scheme.

It's not just going to apply automatically.

The Australian Energy Regulator, in this decision on the default market offer, has now put some more flesh on the bones of that scheme.

So we know that if you live in New South Wales and southeast Queensland, you can get free power from 11 a.m.

to 2 p.m.

And if you're in South Australia, you can get it from 12 p.m.