No Power Bills? Here’s How Solar Can Help You Slash or Eliminate Your Electricity Costs

Solar panels generate electricity during the day, which your household uses first. Any excess solar is exported to the grid, and your energy retailer pays you a Feed-in Tariff (FiT) for every unused kilowatt-hour (kWh).

Example:

• Your solar system generates 40 kWh during the day.

• You use 20 kWh during the day and export 20 kWh to the grid.

• At night, you use another 10 kWh from the grid.

• If your FiT and electricity rates are aligned just right—you could break even or even come out ahead.

Sounds too good to be true? It’s not—but system size, your usage habits, and your energy plan all play a role.

While it’s nice to get paid for exporting excess solar power to the grid, the real financial benefit of solar comes from using that energy within your home.

Every kilowatt-hour of solar electricity you consume directly offsets the amount you'd otherwise pay your energy retailer, typically saving you around 22 to 30 cents per kWh, depending on your billing type.

In comparison, exporting that same kilowatt-hour to the grid only earns you about 5 to 12 cents per kWh, depending on your energy plan. That’s a significant difference, and it’s why we carefully size our systems to help you maximise self-consumption and get the most value from your solar investment.

1. Flat Rate Billing: If you're on a flat rate (e.g., 24 cents per kWh), this is your direct savings for every kWh of solar energy used in your home.

2. Time-of-Use Billing: Common in Ausgrid areas, this billing model charges more during peak times. For solar, we usually ignore off-peak rates (10 pm–7 am) since solar panels aren’t producing energy then. You can average your peak and shoulder rates to estimate savings, typically around 30 cents per kWh plus GST.

Traditionally, we sized solar systems for the fastest payback period. However, more and more households are opting for larger systems, choosing to maximise solar production and minimise power bills.

The benefit? You can cover a greater portion of your usage and export enough to offset even more of your grid electricity costs. With solar panel prices at all-time lows, oversizing is becoming a smart move.

Here is a screenshot of a real bill. This is a 1KOMMA5° customer with a 3kW solar system. The energy charges show a household with a flat rate of power, with three levels based on the amount of power used during the quarter.

The first ‘block’ of power is the most expensive, and then as a house uses more power across the quarter the price of electricity drops slightly, in this case from 22.9 cents to 22.1 cents a kWh.

‘Peak consumption’ refers to the main meter in your meter board, and is used to differentiate from an off-peak or controlled load, which is a common setup for electric hot water.

The bottom half refers to the feed-in tariff. In this bill, on average 4.3kWh of solar power per day wasn’t used in the house and was exported to the grid. The credit applied to this bill is $22.61. 

Your electricity bill won’t say how much money you saved by using your solar power for this electricity doesn’t run through your meter. The bill is simply going to show you how much grid energy you used, and how much excess solar energy you sold back to the grid. Your total solar usage is recorded by your inverter, which you can access through the inverter’s online monitoring platform.

The 1KOMMA5° Team will never try to sell you a solar system that is larger than what you need, so please ask us for advice on what you are trying to achieve with solar power and we will be happy to help. Typically we will aim to reduce your power bill by 30%-70%, however, we have many happy customers who no longer pay for their electricity, just like in the example above.