We Fixed a $2,400 Electricity Bill Live in 26 Minutes

We’re going to take a real electricity bill, sit down with it live, and show you exactly what’s wrong with it and how solar fixes it. Most people stare at their power bill and have no idea what they’re actually looking at. The usage charges, the daily supply charges, the feed-in tariff credits, it all blurs together. I’m Jason.

I’m Cam. We’re the owners of Source Energy Group, where we’ve designed and installed countless solar and battery systems for Australian homeowners. In this episode, we’re live breaking down a real bill, showing you line by line where the money is going, what a correctly designed solar and battery system would change, and what the same bill looks like after install. Welcome back, guys.

Thanks for joining us. Here with Cam, and today we’re breaking down this power bill and showing you, you know, what the solar and battery can do for you. We’ve just got a bill up here, and Cam’s going to sort of run through it with me, and we’re going to show you how to read it, basically, and what solar and battery’s going to do for you. Awesome.

So, on screen here, Cam, we’ve got It’s a page that probably confuses a lot of people, no one looks at. Yep. We’ve just scrolled to the page that breaks down all the charges that might be confusing for everyone. Okay.

As we go through, we’ll break them down in our little calculator, which I’m going to flick across here into this We’ll call it the savings and savings matrix. Okay. So, on these charges here, Cam, what what’s it made up of? There’s quite a few on here, isn’t there?

Yeah, there’s uh Well, obviously, you got your your average daily usage, a bit of a summary of your energy plan, just a little bit of an explainer. Uh understanding your bill, so your billing period, so from 2nd of January to 1st of Feb this one, over 31 days. That’s an important part to look out for, whether it’s 90 days or Some bills are monthly, some are quarterly, aren’t they? that’s it, yep. And nearly all are moving to monthly bills, but um some still haven’t yet.

It’s slow. Um but yeah, uh each each of it will have your your previous balance, which is brought over to this next billing cycle. Uh, and your new charges and credits are made up with general usage, general usage next, and then your daily supply charge. Awesome.

So, that’s a daily supply charge. Like, when I sit with someone, this is actually where I like to start. Yeah. Reason being is it’s actually something we can’t physically get rid of with the solar and battery by itself, is it?

No, no. We have to work pretty hard to get rid of him. There is There is ways to reduce that, which we can touch on um, towards the end. But, for now, let’s just go through the solar and battery, and I’ll just walk you through, I guess, how I walk through with a with a client.

Yeah, definitely. Uh, as I said, the supply charge is one that I like to start with. So, if we see here on uh those watching on YouTube, I guess see on screen where I’ve highlighted, it’s for this bill here, they’re getting charged $1.18 . four. Is that eight or three?

I haven’t got my glasses on. Uh, yeah. Basically, dollar just shy of a dollar 19 uh per day just for their connection to the grid. Okay?

Uh, what you got to remember, too, when you look at these bills, that’s adding GST on top of that. Okay? So, it’s basically around a dollar 20 per day on this bill. We have touched on in previous episodes as well, everyone has now received a notification that their supply charge is going up um, by 20 30 cents.

Okay? So, you might get a dollar 50, might get a dollar 70. We’ve seen some Some have seen dollar 90 and $2 per supply charge. Okay?

That’s per day. So, let’s have a look at what this looks like on your bill. I’m going to jump over here into this, and I’m going to enter in, and we’ll just use the figures on that bill. And it’s a dollar 20 by the time GST is added.

Yeah. So, you see here, I’ve got supply charge, and this is quarterly, okay, when this calculates this. So, just a $1.20 a day for a quarterly bill makes up $109 um of your bill is supply charge. So, even once we start designing a system here, and we always talk about designing a system for your specific household.

So, even once we start designing a system here for for the particular usage of this bill we’re going to look at, and we design it to get the usage, okay, so the usage, not the dollar value, but the usage is close to zero as possible. We’re still going to see $109 quarterly in a power bill, aren’t we? Yeah. Okay.

The only way to do anything with that to reduce that nowadays is GlowBird. a VPP, but I won’t jump into that yet, but we’ll come back We’ll circle back to that at the end. Okay? Does that all make sense? It definitely makes sense. it makes sense to you.

Yeah. I’m the customer. Um so, regardless what we do here and when we design, we’re going to see in this bill $110 a quarter minimum. Um quarterly, okay?

So, this is where I always like to start here and just set that expectation, okay? Yeah. We are going to try and get this bill close to zero as possible, but that is going nowhere. It’s actually going up as we’ve talked about in all our previous episodes.

Next thing we’re going to put on here, um we’ve got import and export from the grid. So, if someone already has solar, okay, they’re going to have an export to the grid, aren’t they? Yeah. This bill we’re looking at, they don’t have any solar.

So, what I’m going to put in here is the current average of 3 cents. So, what that means is anything that the solar system produces that you don’t use in the household, that’s going to get sent back to the grid, and they’re going to pay you 3 cents for that. Okay. If that’s not making sense yet, it will surely as we go through this process and see some um other parts of the graph.

This import, so this is what we’re using from the grid. So, what’s the daily average usage from the grid on this bill, Cam, that we’re looking at? Uh daily average usage is uh 74.96 kW. Okay, so on screen here, I’ve just scrolled up a little bit.

This is going to be different places on all bills. Might be page one on um some providers, could be page three, page two on other providers. Uh if you’re looking on screen here, this household currently using 75.96, like Cam said, per day on average for this billing cycle. For anyone listening or watching, this is uh AGL bill.

Yep. So, if you’ve got an AGL, it should be in a similar place. What I’m going to do, I’m going to take this 75.96. I’ll just round it to 76.

Okay, that’s close enough. And we put it in here. This is 76 kWh a day on average that this this household is using from the grid. Okay?

Um so, what we’ve done here, we just put the data on the actual bill. So, this is real live usage data. About the only thing I might do different is go back over the full year, 12 bills, and look for the most usage. Okay?

We’re just basing this one on what we’ve got in front of us. Next thing we want to do is work out how much of that 76 is getting used during the day, how much is getting used during the night. Depending on what type of bill we’re looking at, um Oh. There we go.

In this one here, Cam, this is just general usage, isn’t it? Yeah. So, on this bill here, like some bills will have peak, shoulder, um and they might have a tariff. Um 11.

Yeah. 30. Yeah. Uh and you can 33. 33, that’s the one. Um and you can get a general estimate of some of the nighttime usage, but the best thing is is if you’re, I guess, a working family, mom, dad, and the kids are all at school and work during the day, you’re probably going to be using more at night than you are during the day.

If you’re working from home and so on, you might have more um usage during the day or 50% during the day, 50% at night. Okay? Um so, if we come back into here, so got to put the import price in here. Okay, so on this bill here, the general usage, if we go to the general usage charges, they’re getting charged basically 33 cents by the time you add the GST for every kilowatt hour they use from the grid.

Yeah. Okay. So, we’ll come back into here. We put the 33 cents And then what we want to understand here is how much they’re using per day.

And on the bill there, Cam, it has that broken down for us, doesn’t it? What’s that? Yeah. So, 75.96 kilowatt hours.

Yeah. So, here on this AGL bill, we can see the average daily usage is 75.96 kilowatt hours per day. I’m going to bring that back in. And we’ll just round it to 76.

And we put it in there Okay. So, this has come to 2,398 per quarter. This bill, oh, we’re going to the bill. We’ve just got to get this matching.

So, this is like 713. That’s a previous one. $832 a month. So, if you multiply that by three, Cam, 2496. We’ve got 2398.

Okay, so it’s pretty close. All right. We want to understand how much we’re using at daytime. For this scenario, let’s just put it to a 50/50, but, you know, some households might be 60 60/40 60/40 day or 70/30, yeah?

Yeah. This scenario, let’s just put it in there at 50/50, so that comes down to 38 kWh during the day, 38 kWh during the night. Is that all making sense so far? Makes sense to me, mate.

I know it makes sense to you. All right. So, if we’re looking here on the screen, we can see there’s our quarterly bill, just shy of $2,400, okay? Right now over here, we’re looking at the net financial outcome.

There is no benefit cuz we haven’t installed solar or anything yet. If we have a look at this graph down here, though, now that we’ve got the bill information in, this is our consumption graph. And it does go up and down throughout the year based on different usage patterns that people generally have on on average, okay? So, what this consumption graph is, when we’re designing our system, that’s our target, so our production target.

We’ve got to meet that as a minimum, but generally we want to exceed it so we can store some power, don’t we? Yeah, definitely. Okay. So, from here, what we would do, we know our usage.

From this usage, we can now start to design a system. But, before we go chucking panels in here and getting all excited about what it could do, we do need to understand a few things, don’t we? Definitely. What are they?

Uh so, what what the customer’s uh going to be doing in the future, are they going to add to their home, uh are they going to have shading issues? Yeah, more for that house, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah. So, we need we need to know what the what board orientation the home is, how many panels they can fit on the roof.

Yeah. So, for this one here, we just brought up this house. This is pretty straightforward here. Uh this is actually the perfect house roof for solar.

Yeah, yeah, it’s quite good. It literally is. Other than being a two-story, it’s a perfect. Yeah.

Um so, I’m just going to this is not designing it, I’m going to get an idea of what we can fit on the roof here real quick. I just know by doing that we can fit quite a decent size on the roof, okay? So, we know we can get at least 34 panels. Now, this is not necessarily the design we’re going to do.

We’re just going to make see what we can fit just depending on what um we need based on that bill. All right. You could put a couple down in that lower level, couldn’t we, Ken? But now, this this is not the design.

Let’s just see what we need. I just want to get an idea of what we could fit if we need it. So, we’re up to 19 kilowatts. Okay, so we also need to understand what type of uh phases and everything that are on, don’t we, Ken?

Yep, that’s it. Single phase, three phase, uh dual phase. If it is single phase, this roof we’ve got here could actually handle the maximum, isn’t it, which is 20 kilowatts worth of panels? Yeah.

Um if it was three phase, well, we’re still good anyway, we know that. Okay? Yep. All right, so let’s come back into here into our design.

So, right now, we’re we’ve got our $2,400 bill. We’ve got our consumption target that um or our production target we’ve got to meet based on the consumption. So, let’s start adding some panels in here. Okay? 78 kilowatt.

Look, this is a house where I would max out to the 20 kilowatts anyway. Okay? We just had How many panels did I have on there? 40. Yeah.

If we really wanted to, we could put a couple more, but let’s just for this Okay. You see here, we’re now got the production is now starting to meet our consumption levels in this house. So, this household’s got quite large consumption. $800 for a month, it’s it’s quite big. But if we put that size solar on the roof, you look up here at the bill, you know, the $2,400 bill basically, solar alone is going to bring it down to around uh 1,100, give or take.

Okay? That’s going to vary between summer and winter. It might be slightly more in winter or slightly less in summer, but on average it’s going to come around that, isn’t it? Is the year-round estimate, yeah.

Yeah. So, solar alone, you know, we’ve done a episode on is solar worth it? Yeah. Well, solar alone is still going to do something for you, isn’t it?

But what we’ve got here, let’s have a look at this table. We’re going to produce 93 kWh a day. They got These guys are using 76 kWh a We’re basing this on using 38 during the day, and then they’re sending the excess to the grid at the moment. Okay?

Right now, just with solar only, they’d be sending 55 to the grid. But what that means is for that 55 kWh they sent to the grid over here, remember they’re only going to get about 3 cents for it, aren’t they? Yeah. Then they’re going to buy it back at night at 33 cents, aren’t they?

Yeah. So, what we need to do is take some of this 55 kWh that we’re sending to the grid, store it. store it here, don’t we? And that’s where the battery comes in. Definitely.

All right. So, let’s work at look at a battery. Now, I’m not going to go in too much into inverter selection. We’ve said on this one we’re just going to show you it’s single phase, okay?

So, this one will be the 9 kW inverter. Now, we’re sending 55 back to the grid. You could essentially go a full stack, couldn’t you? Yeah.

Okay. So, what I mean by full stack for those listening or watching, we use the GoodWe ESA. If you haven’t seen that uh or listened before, we constantly pump it. 8 kW worth of batteries stack up into, you know, three, four, five stacks to get your full stack of six, okay? That’s what we’ve got here.

So, one battery is not going to do my Oh, that’s the inverter, sorry. One battery, you know, it’s going to reduce the bill a little bit more. We’re going to two batteries, it’s going to reduce it a little more, and so on. Now, I just know looking at this, if we go five, it’s going to bring it down to 60.

If we went six, it’s not really going to change anything there, okay? I just want to touch on this. Remember at the start we I said it’s going to be about $130 or so of supply charge. Yeah.

Now, this is showing that it’s going to come down to 60. Look, there is that little bit of credit from the feed-in tariff that’s going to help do that. But, at the end of the day, I still always tell one, whatever we worked out at the start with the supply charge is the reality of what your bill is probably going to be. That makes sense?

Yeah. So, here we can do that with five modules, it’s going to see achieve the same thing, isn’t it? So, on this one here, Cam, would you put five modules or would you put six? Uh I’d probably uh wait and discuss with the uh customer.

Uh see see what they like if they’re if they’re going to be future-proofing the home, uh if there’s uh any additional anything that they’re going to be getting that might increase their usage or their daytime usage, it’s one of those Yeah. potential questions. Uh they they might want the six units just uh future-proofing for off-grid backup. Yeah. That’s definitely a valid point.

So, especially with the three hours of three power or the VPP that we talked about where you could reduce this down and take care of that supply charge. Yeah. Someone wanting to participate in that and do that might go screw it. Let’s just go to the full stack and put the extra six uh have the extra capacity.

Someone that’s not too concerned about that, can’t see themselves going down that path, might just leave at the five batteries. Yeah. You know what I mean? Uh another thing to consider is back to the design.

You know, we could fit another 1 kW of panels down on that bottom roof, but probably not going to do that, isn’t it? Cuz it’d be paying the house across the two levels. So, essentially on this house, it’s already maxed out with with the best outcome, isn’t it? Okay.

So, on this one here, essentially these guys are going to go from a 2,400 bill a quarter down to basically zero, depending on whether they go to a VPP or not. They’re either going to have their supply charge of around that $120 or $150. Or they participate, we say GlowBird or another VPP to then eliminate that part. Yeah.

Do you want to touch on how that works? Uh yeah, the way to eliminate that part would be uh obviously you can utilize your 3 hours of free power with GlowBird between 11:00 and 2:00. Uh I believe it’s 4:00 till 6:00 uh during your peak time. If you don’t draw any power from the grid uh whatsoever and you feed power back into the grid.

Uh it’s a percentage. I believe it’s 15% or something like that. Uh you get what’s called hero status and you get uh a dollar back uh per day. Um also another 50 cents or a dollar 50 or something like that for not pulling from the grid. yeah, so between 6:00 and 9:00. 9:00, that’s it.

Yeah. Yeah, 6:00 and 9:00. You can export your battery uh storage back to the grid and they’ll pay you 15 cents for up to 15 kWh, which I think the sums out up to about a dollar 50. It doesn’t sound like a match, but you do that every day.

A dollar 50 a day, that is what the supply charge is and it wipes it out. The zero hero parties, if you don’t draw from the grid on any given day, they give you an extra dollar. Yeah. So, well, actually it’s like $2 and something.

So, in total you can get about $3 a day from them. Yeah. So, again, that’s why I’m starting to call them. on our website and other stuff that we have out there, we’ve got a little slogan that says it’s not about how much you make, it’s how much you keep. So, it’s not so much about joining the VPP and you’re going to retire a million millionaire through your solar and battery.

It’s just about how much you keep for yourself and then you can make a little bit more just to get it down to zero. All right, it’s pretty straightforward. Straightforward to me. Straightforward to you.

Hopefully, it’s straightforward to you guys out there. Another thing we want everyone wants to know is their return on investment. Now, one thing that we do straight away, we go through this process with you and you’re going to straight away see your cost, see your return on investment. So, this one we priced up here, you know, it’s just under 5 years return on investment for this one.

Okay? If it’s a finance option, the graph will show you a different one over 10 years. Oh, click on that. Um this is all the information you’re getting straight up front.

Okay? There we go. Um that’s how you reduce your bill rather easy. Um it’s just whether it’s done right or not.

Yeah. Um one thing we do do, as I said, this is This is just one small part of it. We’ve got to understand your usage. We’ve got to check your infrastructure.

You know, is your meter box compliant? Is it single phase? Is it three phase? Um depending on where you’re located, it could be upgrades, could be relocation.

I’ll be digging a trench, putting it on the shed cuz you don’t want it on your house. But that is a big thing. We get asked that question all the time. Can it go on the shed?

Yeah, if you dig the trench for us. Uh another feature we we’ve we’ve spoken a fair bit. If you want to run through it with the viewers at the house, uh future electrification. So, things you’re going to add to your house.

Yes. That’s That’s actually probably the best part of this whole app. Okay. What sets ours apart from the rest?

I’d say that’s probably the best way to Yeah. We’re showing you how solar itself could reduce the bill by basically 50%. We add the battery to it. Look, this says $60.

We still don’t say anyone’s going to have totally no bill cuz you got that supply charge there. If you use the VPP, that can help reduce that. But, this is one of the things like why you got to design it to the household. So, this is on the bill that’s happened in the past.

But, if we come down to here and we take future electrification into account, in other words Uh um the customer’s going to get a Tesla. Yeah. Um and add an aircon in uh to their kids’ room cuz they’re expecting a baby. Yeah.

So, let’s see it. Let’s just start with an EV. So, you’re going to get an EV in the next 6 to 12 months. Each EV has a different size battery.

I’m just going to go here at 75 80. I think that’s pretty common size battery, okay? So, you see that 2,400 bill just by charging that EV to full the full 75 kWh once a week, that bill now increases to 2,900, doesn’t it? Yeah.

If you put that system on that we just said, and you got your EV, your bill’s going to jump back up to like $400 a quarter instantly, isn’t it? Yeah. Okay. What else were we adding?

We’re adding Was it splits or ducted? Uh just a splitty split system. Yeah. If we If we bring in probably I’m going to go with a 2.5 to 3 kW uh split system.

Uh I haven’t got 2. Sorry there. That’s all right. Yeah, 2 2 kW is probably pretty pretty standard.

There’s another 100 a quarter on your bill. Yeah. And you can see back here on this graph, our production target is dropping away from our consumption target, isn’t it? Yeah.

Now, if you have the roof space and you have the storage and everything like that, at this point you know you’re going to do these things in the future, you can design the system for it, couldn’t you? Yeah. That’s it. So, in this case here, we went with five modules at the start.

This is where we could go, all right, let’s add six. That’s going to help it a little bit, isn’t it? That’s just dropped essentially the the split system off. Yeah.

Now, the reason it’s only done that is because we haven’t added any more panels, haven’t we? So, realistically we need more production. But, on this particular roof here we could potentially put a little bit more, but remember it’s single phase. We can only put one more kilowatts worth of panels.

So, it’s probably not worth even worrying about that, is it? No. So, for everyone listening, your your peak capacity is 20 kilowatts of PV for a single phase property. Yeah.

So, in other words, based on all that information we got there the future bill would potentially be 3200 at the same 33 cents. Yeah. Okay. Now, this brings it back to the common question or the the common statement is I’ll still going to have a $408 power bill.

What’s the point? Yeah. Because if you didn’t have a $408 power bill, you’re going to have a $3200 power Exactly right. Let’s let’s take it back.

Like let’s remove the EV, take it back to no extra future electrification. Remove that. We’ve got the $2400 power bill. Yeah.

Okay. Remember this is the last bill at the 33 cent average rate. Yeah. What are they going up to now? charge.

Let’s let’s do it with the rates now. So, this is going to be minimum of $1.50. A lot of places are going to be Well, if you like, let’s use mine. Look at whatever Oh, we’ll use yours.

Use mine. So, uh my my feed-in is still at 3 cents. Yeah. Uh my daily supply is a dollar 69.

Yeah. Uh and then my uh import, so my usage charge is 29 cents. Now, but that’s going to go up as well. Or is that already gone No, that’s going up, yeah.

Yeah. So, look, you could change your bill provider in this case and they’re they’re $300 better off. Yeah. Okay.

There you go. Um one we’re seeing in Ergon, so Ergon for the majority of Queensland, anyone in that Ergon area uh it was about 35 cents was the average by the time GST and everything went on. So, that’s where it would have been around the 2500. Ergon’s just being now peak usage at night is 44 cents.

So, by the time you go through and average everything out, you’re going to be spending roughly 40 cents a kilowatt. Just that single increase on your next bill would jump your quarterly bill by nearly four $500. Yeah. So, is it worth it? 100%.

Oh, definitely. So, they’re not paying nearly $3,000, you’re paying $100 a quarter, which is nothing a month. Yeah. So, again, it’s a really easy process, uh easy to understand upfront.

Like, this is a big bill, it makes sense for big bills. Smaller bills, not so much sense. That’s when you do weigh up, you know, do I just pay for my power upfront for the first 5 to 10 years, which I still believe a benefit cuz then you got that excess cash flow. Uh but that’s entirely up to you.

Each to each to their own. So, uh yeah. Have a good day, guys. This is what we do for every single client.

We sit down, we go through their usage, we look at their infrastructure. You know, this is just a this is the main part, but it’s a small part of it. We’re going to obviously also check on site, do the site visit, confirm everything is uh ready to take it in, like the meter box, the battery location, uh and the roof condition and everything is is good to install. Okay?

But at the end of the day, no one lies in bed at night dreaming about the solar system they get. They lie in bed at night dreading the next bloody power bill. Okay? So, it all starts here, understanding the power bill, understanding what it can do for you.

Okay? If it makes sense at this point, then it’s like what panels, what inverter, and what do we do on site? If you’re looking to understand it properly and you want to get your system sized up, give us a call, uh submit an inquiry, and one of the team will take you through this exact