Solar panel & Battery Specialist
Understanding your bill
How to Locate Your Electricity Usage and Plan Charges on Your Bill
We’ve highlighted the important details on three sample energy bills to guide you in finding this information on your own bill.
Electricity tariffs refer to the rates you're charged for your electricity usage, typically measured in cents per kilowatt hour (c/kWh).
This is the average daily electricity usage in kilowatt hours (kWh) for the house or building.
A kilowatt hour represents the amount of energy used when one kilowatt of power is consumed over one hour.
The billing period is usually monthly (30 days) or quarterly (90 days).
Your NMI or National Metering Identifier number is a unique number for your house or building’s electricity meter.
The Distributor is the company responsible for maintaining the electricity delivery infrastructure, including poles, wires, transformers, and substations. On your bill, they are listed under 'Faults and Emergencies'.
Electricity retail plans can vary greatly, with numerous tariffs and structures available, but they generally fall into two main
categories:
Single Rate Tariff
Time of Use (TOU) Tariff
In our first example, an Energy Australia bill shows a single rate tariff of $0.295592 per kWh (just over 29 cents per kWh). The customer pays this same rate regardless of the time or day.
The second bill from Origin features a time of use (TOU) tariff, where the rates vary depending on the time of day. These rates are categorized as peak (54.575c per kWh), shoulder (23.88c per kWh), and off-peak (14.129c per kWh).
Tariffs typically change on July 1st, as seen in this bill, which is common across retailers. In the seasonal TOU plan, peak rates are applied during weekday evenings, from 2 pm to 8 pm in summer and 5 pm to 9 pm in winter.
The daily charge is the same as the supply charge, a flat fee for supplying electricity to your property. (In example bill C, the daily charge is the supply charge plus the membership fee.)
The solar feed-in tariff (FiT) is the rate, in cents per kWh, that solar owners are paid for sending their excess solar electricity back to the grid.
When a solar system generates more electricity than what's being used by the household appliances and lights, the extra electricity is exported to the grid.
Typically, this payment ranges from 0 to 15 cents per kWh.
In the example of bill C, the plan offers two FiT rates: 11c per kWh for the first 10kWh exported each day, and 6c per kWh after that.
Some plans may offer different FiT rates for peak, shoulder, and off-peak periods.
Some electricity plans include a "peak demand charge," which is based on the highest electricity usage (in kW) averaged over a 30-minute period during peak hours (usually in the evening) within a 30-day period.
To calculate the demand charge, you take the maximum demand (for example, 2kW), multiply it by the demand tariff (e.g., 0.2571c/kW), and then multiply that by the number of days in the month. This means if you use a lot of electricity at once—by running several appliances at the same time—even once during the month, it sets your demand charge.
Example bill A
Single rate tariff/Energy Australia
Example bill B
Time of use (TOU) tariff/Origin Energy
Example bill C
Solar feed-in tariff (FiT) and peak demand tariff/Energy Locals