What every state pays for exported solar

Read the last column first. That ratio is the modern case for solar in a single number, and it is why the advice has changed from generate as much as possible to use as much of it as you can.

Victoria is worth understanding in detail because it is the clearest version of what has happened everywhere.

The Essential Services Commission set a minimum feed-in tariff every year for more than a decade. For 2024–25 it was 3.3 cents per kilowatt hour. Its final determination for 2025–26 set it at 0.04 cents — not a typo, four hundredths of a cent, a figure that would earn a household with a large system about thirty cents a year.

That determination never took effect. In May 2025 the Electricity Industry Act 2000 was amended to remove the commission's obligation to set a minimum at all, and from 1 July 2025 Victorian retailers set their own rates. The only floor left is that they cannot go below zero.

The reason is not villainy. A feed-in tariff is loosely tied to what electricity is worth on the wholesale market at the moment it is exported, and Victoria has so much rooftop solar that the middle of the day is now routinely worth nothing at all. The scheme worked, and this is what success looks like from the inside.

Western Australia does something no other state does. Its Distributed Energy Buyback Scheme pays a different rate depending on the time of day: 10 cents for power exported between 3pm and 9pm, and 2 cents at any other time, for the first 50 kilowatt hours a day, on systems with an inverter of 5 kW or less.

That is a five-to-one price signal pointing away from the middle of the day — which is when a north-facing roof does almost all of its exporting. It has two consequences worth taking seriously in Perth and nowhere else. A west-facing array, which normally looks like a compromise, pushes generation towards the window that pays. And a battery is worth more there than anywhere in the country, because it converts 2-cent exports into 10-cent ones or into avoided 33-cent purchases.

Our calculator prices Western Australian exports at 2 cents, not 10, because that is where a conventional north-facing system's exports land. If your array faces west or you have storage, the honest figure is higher.

The two best feed-in tariffs in the country are in the two smallest markets, and that is not a coincidence — it is the same fact stated from the other end. Neither has enough rooftop solar to have crushed its own midday wholesale price.

Tasmania has a regulated minimum set by the Tasmanian Economic Regulator, 9.276 cents from 1 July 2026, and it went up rather than down. The Northern Territory's Jacana Energy pays 9.33 cents at any time, plus a super feed-in tariff of 18.66 cents for exports between 3pm and 9pm — the Territory paying double for exactly what solar cannot supply on its own, which is the same signal Western Australia sends by a different route.

Three things, in the order they are worth doing.

Shift what you can into daylight. A hot water heat pump on a midday timer, a pool pump moved off the overnight cycle, the dishwasher on a delay. This costs nothing, and on a typical household it moves self-consumption from around a quarter of generation to around forty per cent. The calculator prices it for your household.

Size the system for what you use, not for the roof. Past the point where daytime generation exceeds daytime demand, every extra panel is selling at the rate in the table above.

Then, and only then, consider a battery. Its value is the gap between your feed-in tariff and your retail rate. That gap is now wide enough that the sums work in places they did not five years ago — but shifting load captures part of the same benefit for the price of a timer, so do the free version first.