Solar Feed it Tariffs

Jacana Energy | Rimfire Energy

What is the Solar Feed In Tariff?

The solar feed in tariff is the payment of energy not used directly by your home from your rooftop or ground mount PV system. It is the surplus energy sent back to the grid. To qualify for the FiT your system size needs to comply with the Power Water class and type, more details can be found on the sizing table link https://sunoxi.com.au/power-water/
 Its important to note if your system is more than 5kVA per phase then the system is export limited and you will have it limited to 5kW per phase.

Every house and business that consumes energy, through the use of everyday appliances such as fridges, washing machines lights etc – to power these things you need to purchase energy from the power grid. The most common option here is Jacana Energy for Northern Territory residents. Jacana is a state owned entity of the NT government.

Billing for energy consumption is totalised in kWh (kilowatt hour).
Energy bought from Jacana is purchased at $0.26kWh, meaning that if your pool pump consumes 5kW of power, running it for 1 hour will consume 5kWh costing you $1.3 for that filtration cycle.
Jacana Energy Feed in Tariff

How much will my solar feed in tariff be?

Lets breakdown the example image to the right. This is a typical monthly bill for a 5 person household in the NT. As you can see this property has an exporting solar system indicated by the line item of ’Solar Feed In Tariff’ and the ‘$36.11 CR’ (credits) marking, meaning this property has sold energy to Jacana at a rate of 0.913cents per kWh (if you include GST).
By analysing this bill you can see during this period of time (30 days) the house hold purchased $199.23 of energy but sold back $31.11 worth of solar energy. If you factor in the flat rate of $46.6 for metering fees you are left with a bill of $178.33.
 
This property was installed with a 13kW + 10kWh solar package system.
It’s important to note that not all sized systems are approved a Feed in Tariff. For more information on eligability head here. 
Jacana Energy FiT

Solar batteries?

 If your property has solar batteries installed, that will mean your inverter will automatically prioritise filling your battery first, before selling to the grid. The inverter will prioritise the steps below in order;
  1. Power your home
  2. Charge batteries

Commercial Solar feed in tariffs?

Unfortunately there isn’t any better feed in tariffs for commercial properties, it is still the standard 9.13cents per kWh. A solar FiT for commercial systems are typically limtied to smaller commercial solar systems.

But keep in mind commercial properties are allowed to install much bigger solar systems, meaning that you will save more on a regular basis.

Will the tariff change?

It’s very rare that the Jacana changes their feed in tariff(FiT), the last recent change was in July 2022 where Jacana reduced all new installed solar feed in tariffs from 1:1 or 26 cents per kWh down to the 9.13 cents.

However this was the first change they had made since releasing the tariff in the first place. With competition from other energy companies coming into the NT market the feed in tariff will be a competative point of sale proposition and you may be able to get better deals from different energy providers.

Other Energy retailers & thier FiT

Other energy retailers such as RimFire Energy may offer a higher solar FiT however there may be a catch. The devil will always be in the detail.

The attraction of this to the home owner can be aluring however some analyses of cost benifit should be undertaken.

A recent deep dive blog by Sunoxi delves into this. You can read about it HERE

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