Fri 9 May

Peter Anderson likes to joke that he has an aversion to paying power bills.

It's what drove him to install solar panels at his home in Sydney in 2019.

And it's what convinced him to go one step further and get a battery in 2022.

"The funny thing about it was that our solar installer, when I first spoke to her, she's like, 'Oh, you don't need a battery,'" Mr Anderson recalls with a laugh.

"I said, 'It's not about needing a battery, it's about spite, taking money away from the power companies.'"

'All seemed reasonable'
Like a growing number of consumers, Mr Anderson was enticed into buying a battery by the lure of a deal.

In his case, it was from one of the key energy retailers in Australia, AGL, which was offering about $1,000 off the up-front costs of installing a system.

In exchange, Mr Anderson says he agreed to participate in a so-called virtual power plant, or VPP.

As part of a VPP, companies which are co-ordinating — or aggregating — households' batteries and other clean tech can use those devices according to the needs of the grid.

Mr Anderson says that in the first year after joining the scheme and getting the battery, he barely noticed a thing.

"It was all very gentle and easy going," he says.

"It was, 'Hey, this is what it is, we promise we won't do these things, we promise we will do these things, we knock a thousand bucks off the battery, we put you on a five-year deal to stay on the program for five years.'

"The idea of it was to help stabilise the grid in times of drama.

"So it all seemed very reasonable.

"And for the first year, I don't even think they touched the battery."

That all changed after a year or so when Mr Anderson says he started noticing some dramatic shifts.

For starters, he claims AGL placed him without proper warning on a complicated type of dynamic charge known as a demand tariff.

Under a demand tariff, consumers are charged according to their single greatest half-hourly period of electricity use from the grid across an entire month.

The charges are designed to discourage people from using power from the grid at peak times but consumer advocates and even some regulators say they are incomprehensible, ineffective and unfair.

AGL denied it did not provide adequate notification, stressing Mr Anderson was given written communication flagging the change ahead of time.

On top of this, Mr Anderson asserts AGL also started "draining" his battery at times, forcing him to buy power from the grid at peak prices.

To compound his frustrations, he says the changes amounted to a double whammy — by forcing him to buy power from the grid at peak times, he claims he was driving up his costs under a demand tariff.

AGL has disputed this claim.

"They changed the way they use the battery," he says.

"It went from these little bites every now and again to just full on sucking the thing down to its 5 per cent reserve level, just dragging everything out of it.

"And you could map when they were doing that to when the price on the (national electricity market) had skyrocketed."


https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-09/claims-agl-drained-household-batteries-sp...