Time-of-use tariffs: who wins and who loses

How they work

Instead of one flat rate, time-of-use (TOU) tariffs price electricity by when you use it: an expensive peak window (typically early evening on weekdays), a cheap off-peak window (overnight), and a shoulder in between. The spread is large - peak rates can run several times off-peak.

Smart meters have made TOU the default offer for many NSW customers, sometimes without households really noticing they've been moved onto one. Your bill will say the words peak, off-peak or shoulder if you're on it.

Who wins

TOU rewards anyone who can keep consumption out of the evening peak: solar households covering daytime use, battery owners discharging through the peak, EV owners charging off-peak overnight, and anyone able to schedule pool pumps, dishwashers and hot water into cheap windows. For a solar-plus-battery home, TOU is usually an ally - your battery is a machine for arbitraging exactly this price spread.

It can also sharpen VPP economics, since peak-time energy is what programs pay most for.

Who loses

Households with unavoidable early-evening load and no storage - home at 6pm, cooking, heating, no ability to shift - can pay meaningfully more on TOU than flat rates. If that's you and you're not adding a battery, a flat-rate plan may simply be the better product.

The honest answer is arithmetic, not ideology: model your actual usage pattern against both structures. It's part of what we look at in an energy review, and it's a choice worth revisiting after solar changes your profile.