The Australian government has announced that beginning July 2026, residents of three of the country’s six states will get three free hours of electricity every day, with the rest of the country to follow in 2027. This is because the country has put up so many solar panels that at midday, when the sun is highest, they’re producing truly massive amounts of power.
The free offer is a way to get Aussies scheduling their lives a little differently to take advantage of the surplus—one imagines that many of them will be programming their washing machines to run midday, and charging their EVs then, too. It’s a good moment to be selling ever-cheaper household batteries too, since Australians can fill them on the cheap power and then run their homes all night.
In the largest sense, this is truly remarkable news. For at least 700,000 years humans have worked hard to get energy—first by gathering firewood, more recently by scraping together the money to pay power bills. But now—thanks to our new understanding of how to generate energy from the sun—we can be relieved of that burden.
It’s potentially an epochal moment—in some ways as remarkable as the invention of agriculture or the Industrial Revolution. Back in the 1950s, the nuclear industry literally promised electricity “too cheap to meter.” Now, thanks to the largest nuclear reactor in our corner of the universe, that is entirely possible.
- Bill McKibben, writing in Katharine Hayhoe's Talking Climate newsletter. Emphasis in the original.
Australians offered free solar power | Petra Stock in the Guardian, 4 November 2025
Originally posted in Second Nature 047 (Jan 2026). Category clean power, tags solar.
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