My mate Darren* thinks what I do is bullshit (in a sort of nice way, but bullshit all the same)

He's been selling solar for a long time. He is a pretty great designer and seller of solar systems. He's a good guy, he installs good equipment. He charges a fair price, he takes care of his customers as best he can while keeping his business going.

And none of his customers have been able to keep their electricity bills from rising. 

After the initial drop in bills that comes from a new solar system, their bills creep up. Quarter after quarter they continue to rise until he gets the inevitable "Darren, I think there might be something wrong with my solar, can you please come and have a look?"

So, he tries to find time in between installation jobs, design sessions, general business paperwork, equipment ordering and sales calls to have a look at their solar system. That gets harder as he sells more systems, but he genuinely wants his customers to be happy and so finds time to take a look.

Below are the things he finds, and then complains to/asks me about on the sidelines of kiddie soccer. I try to explain why each of these things happen, and why they are going to get worse.

The Feed-in Tariff Went Down

This is because there is so much solar being generated that it is tanking the value of electricity.

It drops only when the sun is shining because every solar system in grid is making electricity at the same time. As soon as the sun stops shining the value of electricity goes up again. This is because the value of electricity is set by supply and demand in our grid - every 5 minutes. When there is plenty of supply the value of electricity falls. When there is too much, the value goes negative (generators must pay to generate).

This has been happening for a while now, and is getting worse to the point where people will need to pay money to export their solar electricity to the grid. It sounds crazy, but this has already begun in some states and is coming to all of them over the next couple of years.

I tell Darren that as people keep on installing more, and bigger solar systems they are making the problem worse, faster. The more solar that gets installed by people like Darren, the faster Darren's new customers are going to be feeling like they have been sold something that doesn't work to keep their bills down.

And they will be right. 

The Daily Charge Went Up

This is because electricity companies like money (in my opinion).

And electricity consumers make it easy for electricity companies to take their money by having an electricity bill. 

There is no easier way for an electricity company to take a consumer's money than to lift the daily or "supply" charge. Each day after the price rise, they get a little bit more of your money than they did before. They don't deliver more electricity, or better electricity, but they get more of your money.

And this makes them happy.

I think electricity companies are going to keep doing it, why would they stop? It has been pretty successful and it costs them nothing. Profits keep going up. What is anybody going to do about it?

Darren tells his customers to install more solar so that the money from the solar feed-in tariff pays the daily charges. But I just explained to Darren (see above) that the solar feed-in tariff is falling faster than ever, and will inevitably become a solar export charge. And then his customer is left with not only a rising daily charge, but also a cost to export his solar. 

As long as you have a billing relationship with an electricity company, they are going to get your money. It is literally their business to do this.

In a contest between Darren the solar guy and some of the biggest companies in the country, Darren (and his customers) lose.

The Peak and Off-Peak Periods Changed

I spare Darren the details, and say this is because the electricity system is changing quickly for lots of reasons (aging generators, climate change, lots of solar, EVs, electricity companies liking money, etc). 

For his customers it means that the timing of electricity charges (and sometimes feed-in tariffs) has moved, but their solar system doesn't know about it. If the solar system was correctly set up before the change, it was reducing the bill as much as it could. Once things change, the solar system is now increasing the bill by doing the wrong thing.

When Darren's customer changes electricity provider to chase a lower bill, things will change. 

When governments change energy policy to support this or that, things will change.

When the customer's electricity company decides to shake things up (for one reason or another), things will change.

Things change all the time and those changes reduce solar savings for the customer. Darren's solar customer has to stay on top of it or their bills will go up.

Because Darren sells the good equipment, he sold his customer a system that has an app and told that they "can manage their bill" with it. 

In most cases Darren's customers struggle to understand their electricity bill. This isn't because they are dumb, but for the usual reason. The task at hand is to try to decipher the charges and feed-ins and their timings, sometimes across seasons, taking into account weekends and public holidays, with automatically increasing usage tiers, and now with the addition of kVA or demand charge ratchets.......

....and then enter this into an app that typically provides only fields for daily, off-peak, shoulder and peak charges. Which is of course awful, and so they call Darren. He gets on the phone, or comes around to help, but things keep changing, and he "has a business to run".

There isn't even a set-and-forget, close-enough-is-good-enough compromise.

There is just rising electricity bills.

N.B. Darren doesn't sell technology to automatically sync up the behaviour of the solar system with the timing of electricity charges and feed-ins. Not because it doesn't exist, but because it isn't profitable for anyone to make and maintain it. Businesses who attempt it run out of money from trying to stay on top of the compounding complexity of the changes being made by the electricity companies. Just like Darren's customers.

The Customer is Using More (fair enough)

When people get a solar system, they start to use more electricity. 

As they should.

Using electricity is nice. It makes things more comfortable, easier, brighter, cleaner, faster. Once a person gets a solar system they figure they can get more of the nice things.

Especially because they were told by Darren that their new system is going to mean they have no electricity bills anymore. Darren believed that when he told them - he did the numbers. At the time the solar system was installed, things were finely balanced to probably just deliver that result.

But not if they increased their electricity consumption. There was no slack in the system design, Darren tried to keep the solar system price down to win the customer. Solar "is a very competitive market".

Then feed-in tariffs kept falling, the daily charge kept going up, electricity plans kept getting more tricky, and Darren's customer is now unhappy and asking Darren to come around and take a look to make sure everything is ok.

Now (Almost) Everyone is Grumpy

Darren's customers are upset that they were told they were going to have low/no electricity bills, and instead their electricity bills keep going up. 

Darren is upset that despite all of his careful design and installation work, customer care and lots of phone calls, his customers are unhappy with him. It isn't his fault, he "can't control what happens in the electricity system or how much extra the customer starts using".

Yep. He's right. Darren sells and installs solar. He isn't an expert in the electricity system. Darren is a good guy up against very large electricity companies.

He is on your side. But he isn't ever going to be on the winning side.

He just doesn't have the technology, knowledge, regulatory and maths skills to be a winner in one of the most complex (he calls it "bullshit" - I understand his frustration) industries in our economy.

Darren has no choice but to leave his customers with an electricity bill. He can only do so much.

And that's why solar installers are an electricity company's new best friend.

* to keep my solar selling friends guessing, I haven't used his real name (he knows who he is - hello mate)