Home / News & Insights / Free Power From 11am to 2pm: How Sydney Households Can Stack the Solar Sharer Offer With Solar and Pay It Off Faster
Since 1 July 2026, something genuinely unusual has been sitting in the NSW electricity market. Under the federal government’s Solar Sharer Offer, often called the midday saver, participating retailers now have to offer households a plan with completely free electricity between 11am and 2pm, every single day, capped at 24 kilowatt hours.
Read that cap again, because it is the detail almost everyone has skimmed past. The average Sydney family uses roughly 24kWh across an entire day. The free window is theoretically large enough to cover a whole household’s daily consumption, provided you can get that consumption into the right three hours.
You cannot, of course. Nobody cooks dinner at midday and nobody turns the lights off at 2pm. But there is a way to effectively move your evening into the free window, and it is the reason this offer makes a properly designed solar and battery system more valuable, not less. Here is how the pieces fit together, and how the maths can work out to a system that pays for itself from the first bill.
The offer came in as part of reforms to the Default Market Offer. From 1 July 2026, electricity retailers in NSW, South Australia and south-east Queensland are required to offer at least one residential plan with a free daily window: 11am to 2pm here in NSW, with free usage capped at a minimum of 24kWh per day. Some retailers have gone further, with a few plans offering larger free allowances.
The important fine print:
That last point is the catch for households without solar or a battery. If you cannot move meaningful usage into the middle of the day, the slightly higher rates the rest of the time can eat the benefit. Which brings us to why this offer and home batteries were made for each other.
A battery does not care when it gets charged. Point it at the free window and it will happily fill itself with free grid power between 11am and 2pm, then run your home through the afternoon peak, the evening and overnight, exactly the hours when the Solar Sharer plans charge their highest rates.
A 13.5kWh battery like the Tesla Powerwall 3 fits comfortably inside the 24kWh daily cap with room left over for the dishwasher, the washing machine, the pool pump and an EV topping up at the same time. Larger modular systems, like those from Sigenergy, can be sized to carry bigger households through the evening entirely.
Meanwhile, your solar keeps doing what it always did. Through the morning it powers the house and charges whatever the grid has not. Outside the free window it offsets those higher daytime rates directly, which makes each kilowatt hour of self-consumed solar worth more on these plans than on a flat tariff. And exports still earn their feed-in credit.
The end state for a well-designed system looks like this: solar covers the day, free grid power and solar fill the battery around midday, the battery covers the night, and the grid portion of your bill shrinks toward the daily supply charge and not much else.
Here is where it gets interesting for anyone who has been putting solar off because of the upfront cost.
With $0 deposit, interest-free payment plans, a solar and battery system becomes a fixed fortnightly repayment instead of a lump sum. The question is no longer “can we afford the system”, it is “is the repayment smaller than the money the system saves”. If the answer is yes, you are ahead from the first bill, before the system is even a week old.
Here’s an illustrative example, using round numbers rather than a quote. A family averaging 24kWh a day on a typical Sydney tariff might be paying somewhere around $2,500 to $3,000 a year for electricity. Move that household onto a Solar Sharer plan with a correctly sized solar and battery system, and the usage portion of the bill largely disappears: the day is covered by solar, the battery is filled by free midday power and excess generation, and the evening runs off the battery. What remains is the supply charge, some winter top-ups and the odd cloudy fortnight, offset in part by feed-in credits.
If the system’s interest-free repayment comes in below the amount that just came off the bill, the household is cashflow positive from day one, and every quarter of savings from there is effectively paying the system off. The federal battery discount under the Cheaper Home Batteries Program takes a further slice off the battery price before finance is even calculated, which is a large part of why the repayment can sit below the old bill in the first place.
The honest caveat: this only works when the system is sized to your actual usage and tariff. An oversized system inflates the repayment past the savings. An undersized battery leaves you buying peak-rate power every evening. The design is the whole game.
For a Sydney household wanting to stack the offer with solar, the sequence looks like this.
Check your meter. If you do not have a smart meter yet, your retailer arranges the upgrade, and it is worth doing regardless.
Compare the plans, not just the free window. Retailers structure their Solar Sharer plans differently, and the rates outside the window and the feed-in tariff decide whether a given plan suits a solar household. This is worth doing after your system is designed, not before, because the right plan depends on the system.
Set the battery schedule. Modern batteries and hybrid inverters can be programmed to grid-charge inside the free window and hold reserve for the evening. This is a configuration detail most installers never touch, and it is the difference between a battery that merely stores solar and one that also harvests three hours of free grid power every day of the year.
Shift what is easy. Dishwasher delay-start, washing machine timers, pool pumps and EV charging all belong between 11am and 2pm now. None of it requires anyone to be home.
The Solar Sharer Offer changed the design brief for solar in Sydney. A system quoted off roof space alone ignores the fact that the grid now gives away 24kWh a day at lunchtime, and the systems that will perform best under these rules are engineered around consumption profile, battery scheduling and tariff structure together.
That is how we design every system at NEO Energy: a site assessment, your actual usage data, and a system sized so the repayment sits below the savings from the start. If you would like to see what the numbers look like for your home, request a free quote and our engineers will model it for you, rebates and all.
