The Australian government is floating a scheme that would share the benefits of solar power with everyone on the grid, offering totally free electricity to ratepayers in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining the strongest.
Australia is a sunny place. It’s kind of known for it. It’s the sunniest continent, and the sunniest country outside of the Middle East/Africa, with extensive photovoltaic power potential across its entire territory.
In recognition of that, Australia has been installing lots of solar power. Formerly a coal-heavy nation (for which coal is still its 2nd-largest export), solar and wind have rapidly taken over Australia’s electricity grid, pushing coal and methane gas out of the equation.
This has taken a big chunk out of Australia’s electricity-related climate emissions, and of course resulted in clean air benefits as dirty coal is pushed out of the grid. And climate emissions matter a lot for Australia, a country that is becoming more unbearably hot and suffering more fires due to climate change. (Though Australia is also a great example of how global cooperation on environmental issues can fix a huge problem, as they are the primary beneficiary of global action on closing the hole in the Ozone layer)
It’s not all rainbows and unicorns though. A certain amount of power is provided through burning of natural gas, which used to be quite cheap. As I understand it, this was because we had our own cheap supply and then sold on the rest for international export. A few years ago we shifted that priority to exports, which meant that local prices for our own gas shot up. This translated into higher energy prices. As for the percentages now with solar, I’m not so sure. The gas increase was enough to impact CPI in a meaningful way and it doesn’t seem like prices are really down?? Though yeah my anecdote is not a study.