Renewables keep power prices low!

SA has no 'baseload' power nor any expensive coal-fired power stations. Instead of increasingly unreliable coal plants (Earing had about 6,000 hours of outages in 2024), SA has cheap, renewable power as shown by average annual wholesale prices for 2020-25 from the National Electricity Market (NEM) Dashboard (right).

The NEM Dashboard also reports wholesale prices by time of day. For the last financial year (July 2023-June 24) SA wholesale prices averaged less than 2 cents per kWh from 8 am to 4 pm (see table below).

The average consumer pays a lot more because of retail and transmission costs and because some pay a 'loyalty penalty', as Electrify everything's Neerav Bhatt found out to his cost.  Especially if you have a 'time of use' electricity meter, it's worth checking out energymadeeasy.gov.au every 6 months to see if you can save money by switching to a better plan.