^Australia seems to be addressing the "fleecing" problem:
Not really. That "free power" is just the government paying the electricity bill for consumers, rather than them paying it themselves - so it is taxpayer money being given to power companies.
It isn't a totally awful policy, in that it partly redresses the current situation, whereby taxpayers subsidise wealthy homeowners who can afford solar, at the expense of the (mostly poorer) non-homeowners, and those without the capital to take advantage of the subsidy.
But it's "not awful" by accident, rather than by design. And it won't lower the net amount that consumers pay for electricity, it will probably increase that amount - but will hide the increase in taxes, and possibly by placing the non-tax portion of the increase into the bills of those who already have solar power installed. The exact losers will be (intentionally) hard to determine, but they will nevertheless
at best lose as much as the winners from this policy gain, and after bureaucratic overhead and some 'skimming' by the power companies, the losers will likely lose somewhat more than the winners gain.
Australian electricity markets are an utter basket case, and prices are inevitably going to have to rise, sharply, if we are to avoid widespread blackouts; The government can try to hide the price rise by putting it on taxes rather than power bills, but that won't alter the fact that Australians will end up paying, one way or another, for the long term neglect of our power grid, and for our insane political insistence on doing the physically impossible - you cannot have a zero emissions electricity supply in a developed nation without either nuclear power, or massive hydroelectric schemes, or new storage technology that still doesn't exist (and is unlikely to be physically possible to ever build); and Australia cannot massively increase hydropower for geographic and climatalogical reasons.
This is what happens when you ask politicians to solve engineering problems; They ignore any engineer who says it's
impossible to meet all of their policy goals, and then pass laws saying that those policy goals MUST all be met.
Sadly, you cannot amend the laws of physics by a vote in Canberra.
Electricity must be affordable, available 24x7 on demand, generate zero net carbon dioxide emissions, and not be generated from nuclear fission. That's the law. It's also physically impossible.
The solution is probably to reverse the privatisation of electricity transmission and supply infrastructure, and to accept that grid construction and maintenance should be funded through general revenue (ie income tax); Embark on a massive project to repair and rebuild the grid at taxpayer expense, raising income tax rates to pay for it; Repeal the laws against nuclear power generation; Pass laws against the mining of coal; And build several dozen nuclear powerplants, mostly close to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.
None of these things could even be
contemplated by a major Australian political party today, without causing the electoral massacre of that party at the next poll, as Peter Dutton recently demonstrated.
So we
will have a lot of expense, and or widespread blackouts, in the next decade or so. Eventually, things might get bad enough to persude the voters to stop demanding the impossible, but don't hold your breath.
