Solar without a battery: the surprising loser
It feels intuitive that solar owners should love free power schemes. In practice, panels-only households gain the least of anyone. The free window runs through the middle of the day — 11am to 2pm in Victoria, NSW and south-east Queensland — which is exactly when your panels are already producing. On a sunny day, free grid power has nothing to do: your house is running on solar anyway.
What the free window actually does for a solar home is displace exports. Every kWh of free grid power you use is a kWh of your own generation pushed out to the grid instead, and exports are worth very little now. Victoria deregulated its feed-in tariff from July 2025 with no minimum floor, and the NSW IPART benchmark sits at 3.4 to 6.5c/kWh and is not binding on retailers. Realistically, midday exports are worth 0 to 5c/kWh. Swapping self-consumed solar for free grid power saves you a few cents per kWh at best.
Where the window genuinely helps solar homes is cloudy days and winter, when panel output drops and the grid fills the gap for free. That is worth something, but it is a fraction of the headline benefit — and the higher rates outside the window still apply every evening, all year.
Batteries: the biggest winners by far
A home battery turns a three-hour free window into an all-evening one. Charge the battery for free between 11am and 2pm — up to 21 kWh or more depending on capacity and inverter size — then discharge it through the evening peak, where rates on some free power plans reach 60c/kWh. You are buying at zero and consuming at the most expensive time of day.
The Victorian government estimates the battery strategy adds $674 a year on top of ordinary usage-shifting savings, taking the total benefit of the Midday Power Saver to up to $1,102 a year for a battery household. No other setup comes close.
The timing is no accident. In the first year of the federal battery rebate, to 1 July 2026, Australians installed 457,439 home batteries. Free power windows are partly designed for exactly this fleet: soak up the midday solar glut, carry it into the evening, and take pressure off the grid at peak.
Battery owners should also look at GloBird ZEROHERO, a virtual power plant offer built specifically for them: $0 grid charging from 11am to 2pm, plus credits for avoiding grid use between 6pm and 9pm. Whether it beats the regulated schemes depends on your usage, but it belongs on the shortlist.
EVs: a big prize, if the car is home
An EV is the single largest flexible load most households will ever own. A 7 kW home charger running for the full three-hour window takes on 21 kWh — roughly 100 km or more of driving range — every day, free. For anyone working from home, retired, or on shift patterns that keep the car in the garage at midday, that is the strongest simple case for a free power plan there is.
Two caveats. First, the 24 kWh daily cap: a full three-hour charge uses 21 kWh on its own, so an EV plus a battery plus a hot water reheat will blow through the cap, and everything over it is charged at plan rates. Second, if your car is only home at night, compare the free window against dedicated overnight EV plans instead. The OVO EV plan, for example, charges around 4.5c/kWh between midnight and 6am with no daily cap. Six hours at 4.5c often beats three hours at zero once the rest of the rate card is factored in.
Which setup wins at your place?
Our free power savings calculator models solar, battery and EV scenarios against your actual usage.
Calculate my savingsStacking the combos
The setups compound. Solar plus battery means the battery fills from panels on sunny days and from the free grid window on cloudy ones — free evenings all year round. Add an EV and the household can pull 20-plus kWh of free energy daily between car and battery, provided the cap is managed by staggering big loads across days. A solar-battery-EV household that organises itself around the window can push its grid energy costs close to supply-charge-only territory for much of the year.
Does free midday power kill the case for buying solar?
Short answer: no, but it changes the shape of it. Panels generate free power for self-consumption from early morning to evening, not just for three hours, and they keep doing it on plans and schemes that do not exist yet. Self-consumption is what pays a solar system off, and nothing about the free window touches that.
What does get thinner is the maths for panels without a battery. Exports are worth almost nothing, and the one thing panels-only homes uniquely offered — free midday power — is now available from the grid for free anyway. Meanwhile batteries, which capture cheap or free midday energy from any source and spend it at 60c evening rates, look better than they ever have. If you are quoting a new system in 2026, the battery is no longer the optional extra.
Our take
Rank them honestly: battery owners should almost certainly opt in, EV owners should opt in if the car is reliably home at midday and check overnight EV plans if it is not, and solar-only households should mostly give free windows a miss unless a battery is on the shopping list.
Whatever your setup, compare the full rate card, not the free hours. A plan that gives with the window and takes with a 60c peak can lose to a boring low-rate offer, and the only way to know is to run your own numbers.