Most businesses in Australia purchase electricity as a bundled retail product from a licensed retailer. The retailer takes care of the administration of the customer’s supply service, so that the customer need only turn on the switch and electrons start flowing, and a bill turns up each month. In the meantime, the retailer is doing [...]
Like many South Australians, Jemma B and her family installed a solar system from Tandem Energy to help combat our notoriously high energy prices. However, as for many solar owners, this did not result in zero net energy bill, or even credit, at the end of the quarter. Jemma suspected that she was not getting [...]
The Essential Services Commission has released its 2017-18 Energy Retail Offer Comparison Report which compares the electricity and gas retail offers available to South Australian residential and small business customers. It won’t come as a surprise that over the past 12 months average annual electricity retail offer prices have increased. Residential customers saw an average [...]
My Business Finance recently reported on the unsustainable nature of rising energy costs in their article “Energy bill shock: $500 a day not sustainable”. Indeed, for many small businesses, a rise in any expense line puts extra pressure on already stressed out owners, if not putting an end to the business altogether. Unfortunately, energy is [...]
When it comes to reducing your energy costs, targeting larger loads, or those used more frequently, makes a lot of sense. Big savings can often be achieved by making small adjustments to the way things are done, or when they are done. But sometimes, it’s the little things escaping our attention that are unknowingly contributing [...]
It is the last day of Intersolar today and I’m feeling it. Intersolar is the world’s leading exhibition for the solar industry and takes place annually at the huge Messe München exhibition centre in Munich, Germany. My time here has been great, not only from a business development perspective, but also for my own wellbeing, [...]
The recent Australian Energy Market Commission’s (AEMC) 2018 National Retail Energy Report highlights an all-time low in consumer confidence in the Australian energy retail market. Only one in four consumers believe energy retailers are working in their long-term interests, falling from 50 to 39 per cent on the previous year. Here in South Australia, consumer [...]
Greeting from fresh but sunny Munich. It is day two at Intersolar. There is so much happening here that it is easy to get sidetracked and distracted. This morning I had to refocus with a pretzel and coffee to remind me that I am here to learn more about development in microgrids. What's on [...]
The primary purpose of my trip to this key European exhibition is to find out more about developments in demand response and micro-grids. I do have a list of companies I want to see, which I will cover in my Intersolar 2018 Day 2 post. Here is the best of what captivated me on Day [...]
The Australian energy market is always evolving, and the solar market is reflective of this. Increases to feed-in tariffs and decreases in the price of solar panels have provided a situation where larger systems are now tipped to save money and repay the investment in them over an equal, if not shorter, time than [...]