Shadowing Practice: Why Australia’s Solar Is So Cheap (And Ours Isn’t) - Learn English Speaking with Video
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About 1 in 3 Australian homes have rooftop solar.
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Here in America, it's less than 1 in 10.
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And Denver is sunnier than Melbourne.
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The difference is the bill.
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A 7 kilowatt system here runs a median of $28,000.
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That's $18,000 to $24,000 more than the exact same system costs in Australia.
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Up to 7 times the price.
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Australia is a rich western country like the US and it went solar for one reason above all others.
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Money.
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The revolution in the lucky country is a product of cost, which has been going down, under.
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I know exactly how we got here, because I've lived it.
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When I put solar on my own house, the panel sat there for months waiting on paperwork.
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Australia treats a solar install like buying a refrigerator.
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We treat it like a zoning hearing.
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And their head start is compounding.
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Australians are adding home batteries at a rate of 2000 a day, and the flood of storage helped to drop the cost of generating power by 12% in a single quarter.
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electricity for everyone, including the people with nothing on the roof.
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So what does Australia know that we don't?
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What's the gap costing you and what would it actually take to catch up?
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I'm Matt Farrell, welcome to Undecided.
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This video is brought to you by Incogni.
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Here's the part that stings.
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America literally invented photovoltaic technology that we know today.
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Germany provided the market for it and China industrialized it.
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So how is it that the lucky country is eating our lunch after slathering it in electron Vegemite.
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There's a big obvious reason why solar is taking off faster in Australia than the US.
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It's the first of several.
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Right now, American energy policy is actively anti-renewables.
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The Trump administration's energy policy is slowing down solar.
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This year, he got rid of tax credits that existed for solar at the end of 2025.
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Although far from perfect, they made residential solar 30% cheaper.
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And that's not all.
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Trump spent $2.6 billion taxpayer dollars to stop wind projects and development, funneling that money into fossil fuel extraction instead.
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And he's fired renewable energy lab researchers, canceled renewable money from farmers and ranchers, and slashed billions in energy grants to states that didn't vote for him.
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This is setting America back.
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Canary Media expects peak annual solar installs to be held back for an entire decade.
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These policies make solar more expensive and they convince people to be less enthusiastic about renewables.
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But while this explains what sets America behind Australia right now, it doesn't explain how we got here.
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We can't just pin all of this on Trump.
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America started falling behind two administrations ago, back when Washington was actually trying to help.
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To see how we really got here, we have to go back decades and we have to go to Australia.
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And later I'm putting my own solar invoice on the table.
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43 panels, one number at the bottom, and a gap so big it still bugs me.
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But first, a word about paperwork of a different kind.
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Every permit and application I filed had my name, my address, my phone number sitting right there on it.
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That information doesn't stay on that form.
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Okay, so back to Australia and how they made solar boring.
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Australia's solar dominance took decades to build and almost none of it was about technology.
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It was about money and one very weird quirk of how their electricity market works.
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There are some, let's say, structural factors that made solar a more enticing option on Australia than America.
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First off, the price of energy is just higher there, and
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that continues to today. $0.28 per kilowatt hour in Australia is 40%
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higher than the average of $0.20 per kilowatt hour here in the US.
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The higher the price, the greater the incentive to go with the renewable sources.
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I feel the pain.
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The cost per kilowatt hour delivered in Massachusetts is over $0.30, which is part why I wanted to go solar myself.
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The price is also less predictable.
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Retail energy costs skyrocketed in Australia earlier this century.
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Their utilities poured money into infrastructure that the grid just didn't need.
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The more they built, the more profit they were guaranteed.
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It's a bonkers quirk of the Australian utility structure known as gold plating, and it cranked up retail prices.
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If your energy price goes up 195% in 15 years, as it did in the state of Victoria,
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you're You're going to see Crikey hop in your Land Rover and head to the bush in search of a cheaper alternative.
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Or at least something like that.
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In response to this really wild energy market, Australia pursued policies aimed squarely at building the consumer market.
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It still does.
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They made it easier to buy and sell solar panels and batteries.
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This began in the early 2000s and as solar prices plummeted during the Great Recession, solar installations took off.
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Germany wrote the playbook with the first subsidy scheme.
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When Australia copied the German model and ran in a senior climate, Australian energy strategist Dr. Gabriel Kuyper put it plainly, none of us would be here without them.
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Australia's version included rebates that sometimes covered the entire cost of the solar panels plus feed-in tariffs
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that paid households for the energy that they fed back into the grid.
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The national rebate started at $8,000 Australian for a small 1 kW array.
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In parts of the country, that was more than the sticker price of the panels themselves.
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Critics attacked these schemes as an expensive way to cut emissions, but according to The Guardian, it kick-started an industry of installers,
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salespeople, trainers, and inspectors, and quickly made solar a viable option for people beyond the country's wealthiest suburbs.
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It was messy and improvised, but it worked.
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In the second half of 2025, rooftop solar contributed over 14% of Australia's electricity, a doubling of its contribution from just 2020.
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By comparison, small-scale solar contributed less than 2% of US electricity in 2023.
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So, I know what you're thinking.
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Didn't America have a significant tax credit for solar?
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We did.
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But we also pursued a policy to promote and protect American solar producers during the 2010s when solar began to take off.
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Policymakers had good reason to do this.
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This was the Industrial Strategy, a world away from the renewable denialism that dominates the federal government today.
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In 2011, the US solar industry was dying.
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China's manufacturing success led to plummeting prices and industry-wide bankruptcy.
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American manufacturers sued and regulators agreed that Chinese companies had sold panels here for a fraction of their fair market value.
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A company called Solar World Industries America out of Hillsborough, Oregon filed the petition that started all of this.
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They got their tariffs, but it didn't save them.
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The German parent company filed for insolvency in 2017
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and what was left of the American operation was sold off to a rival the next year.
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We built the wall and the thing that it was protecting died behind it anyway.
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There were a variety of policies the government could have turned to, but they chose protectionism.
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The solar industry lawsuits kicked off four rounds of tariffs targeting solar exports from China and elsewhere between 2012 and 2019.
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The tariffs helped a handful of manufacturers.
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They slowed down everybody else.
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Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research found that subsidizing production instead could increase domestic production, employment and welfare.
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So what would it take for the US to actually catch up on solar?
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Even if the US could wave a magic wand
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and replace tariffs with producer subsidies and revive the tax credits that it had just last year, it would still not be on track to catch up with Australia.
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That's because of the structure of the American incentives and regulations is a mess.
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Let's start with the incentives.
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American solar tax credits were annoying to sign up for.
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You had to apply for them on your taxes after paying the full price upfront, which stops a lot of people from buying them.
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By contrast, Australia makes it easy.
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Very easy.
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Your solar installer automatically deducts your solar credit from your invoice.
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You don't even have to do anything.
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Less work for the buyer means more people will buy.
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So Australia beats us on the incentive design, and then beats us again on the design of the entire system.
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Or in the American case, the many systems.
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In Australia and much of the rest of the world, buying solar is like buying any appliance.
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You call up someone and just get it installed.
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Bill McKibben laid this out on the Ezra Klein Show.
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America has around 15,000 separate jurisdictions, and every town and county has its own zoning code and its own team of inspectors.
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We are tying up solar in so much red tape that the sun can't get to the panels.
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These rules have neither rhyme nor reason.
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Illinois requires paper submissions, approved by different departments in a very specific order.
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Colorado requires paper and online submission, and can spike your application if you don't name your files according to their very specific rules.
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Remember those panels sitting on my roof waiting on paperwork?
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This is the machine that kept them there.
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Look, I love literature, but there's no reason getting panels connected to the grid should be a Kafkaesque nightmare.
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Combined, these rules slow down solar adoption or stop it entirely.
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And every one of them carries a price tag.
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Permit power puts the non-hardware costs of solar in the US, the design, project management, sales,
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permitting, inspections, and interconnection at a whopping 78% of the total installed cost.
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This is something I've talked about for years.
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That tangle of extra rules is costing us big time.
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Before we start printing Australia t-shirts, I owe you the other half of the story.
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All that success came with a hangover.
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When millions of homes push power into the grid at the same moment, midday demand collapses.
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The Australian energy market operator has been sounding the alarm about minimum operational demand for years.
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these energy ministers now require backstop mechanisms to be in place for the emergency response.
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Three different things get blurred together here, so let me pull them apart.
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The first is the backstop.
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It's an emergency lever and it only comes out on mild sunny days
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when there's so much solar that demand on the grid drops dangerously low.
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The operator can remotely dial back your exports for a few hours and it only applies to newer systems.
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Your panels keep powering your house the whole time.
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Fair, boring, and it keeps the lights on.
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Then there's the second thing, what your exports are worth.
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Victoria used to guarantee a minimum feed-in tariff.
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As of July 2025, it doesn't, and retailers set their own rate.
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The only rule is that it can't go below zero.
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For context, the last minimum the state ever set was 0.04 cents per kilowatt hour, with a daytime varying rate of exactly zero.
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Nobody's billing you here, the check just got a lot smaller.
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Third, South Australia went further.
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It charges for exporting in the middle of the day, about $1.50 a month, to help pay for the $80 million grid upgrade.
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That's a fee that's pushing power into a grid that already has too much of it at noon.
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Whatever you use inside your house is still free.
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So the deal that built Australian solar, fat rebates and real money for your exports, mostly doesn't exist anymore.
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Australia solved costs and then ran straight into the next problem, which is a problem I'd love to have.
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What's left is a country with so much cheap daytime power that the hard problem is soaking it up.
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And solar does knock off at sundown after all.
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So home batteries are the sponge.
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Australia knocked 30% off of the upfront cost in July of 2025 and installs hit $2,000 a day.
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Same 30% we just threw away.
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It doesn't have to be this way.
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The success of solar in Australia comes down to paperwork.
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The Charged Initiative sent a delegation down there in 2026
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and they found Australia's low costs are the product of a streamlined permitting, lightweight installation rules and strong audit-based installer accountability.
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It's boring stuff guys.
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Boring, achievable stuff.
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Emissions aside, Americans could be saving so much more with different approaches to solar.
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And I could show you exactly what that gap looks like because I paid for it.
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So let me put my own invoice on the table.
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43 panels, 17.2 kW on my roof.
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Sticker price? $55,384 before rebates.
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That works out to about $3.22 a watt.
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Now price that exact system in Australia, before any rebate, about $15,300 US.
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89 cents a watt.
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Then run the incentives on both sides.
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My federal tax credit and my state credit brought me down to $37,784.
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And I had to wait until tax season to see a dime of it.
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The Australian rebate comes off at the the register and brings them down to about $11,200. $55,000 against $15,000 before help.
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$38,000 against $11,000 after help.
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Either way, I paid about 3.5 times what the Australian pays for the same panels on the same roof.
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That's lower than the 7 times you see in the headlines, but 3.5 times is still absurd.
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Here's the part that should bother you.
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The subsidies cancel out.
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Take them away from both countries and the gap is the same.
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Whatever made my system cost 3.5 times more, a tax credit was never going to fix it.
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I know where a big chunk of my extra $40,000 went.
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My installers got most of the panels up
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and then had to take a bunch of them back down because my town wanted a roughened inspection that nobody knew about.
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This is something specific to my town, but not unusual.
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My panels went live in October, but my battery didn't turn on until May.
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In Australia, you fill out a form online and get approval the next day. $40,000, most of it paperwork and soft costs.
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Permit power ran the numbers.
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Reform permitting alone and by 2040 an extra 18.2 million families could install solar.
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A 155% increase, saving $245 billion.
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Add in a reduction in tariffs and stop the directly anti-renewable policies of the Trump administration, and America could easily save billions more.
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Africa is so far and so unnecessarily behind on solar that improvement can seem impossible.
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But the basic fact is that even explicit anti-renewable policy can't stop the energy transition here.
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90% of the power added to the grid last year was from renewables.
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US solar generation has grown every single year since 2006 and there are now 6 million solar installations in this country.
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There are two real reasons to be optimistic.
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First, the AI build-out is putting brutal pressure on energy bills.
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pressure was essential to Australian success.
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Second, look at Texas.
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It's the number one solar state in the country and it got there on cost and easy permitting.
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Deep red state, cheapest electrons in America.
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Nobody had to win on a culture war.
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They just made it easy to build.
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America and Australia both have the sun and the size and both have a fossil fuel industry pushing the other way.
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America falling behind is a choice and choices can be unmade.
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And here's my take.
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This is a paperwork problem and that's what makes this so maddening.
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Give us one national standard for residential solar instead of 15,000 versions of the same rulebook.
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Put the permit online and automate the approval.
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Texas and Australia both show what happens next.
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Do I think we'll actually do it?
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Not quickly.
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15,000 jurisdictions don't hand over control just because it would be cheaper for everyone.
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But this is the rare problem where we already know the answer.
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We just have to be bothered enough to do the paperwork about the paperwork.
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So what do you think America could do to catch up to Australia?
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What policies would be the most effective?
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Jump in the comments and let me know.
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You can also check out extended cuts of many of my videos over on Patreon.
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If human-written and researched videos matter to you, Patreon support helps a ton.
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And a big welcome to News Supporter Plus member Steven Mempa.
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The link's in the description if you'd like to join, but just watching, subscribing, and turning on notifications is awesome.
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And check out my follow-up podcast, Still to be Determined, and we'll keep this conversation going.
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Keep your mind open, stay curious, and I'll see you in the next one.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Why Australia’s Solar Is So Cheap”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: solar, Australia, panel, America, energy. This video has 240 sentences and 2934 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:21. The speaker talks at a natural 179 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| renewable adjective | /ɹɪˈnu.ə.bl̩/ | Able to be renewed; capable of renewal. |
| paperwork noun | /ˈpeɪ.pɚˌwɝk/ | Routine work involving written documents. |
| grid noun | /ɡɹɪd/ | A rectangular array of squares or rectangles of equal size, such as in a crossword puzzle. |
| rebate noun | /ˈɹiːbeɪt/ | A deduction from an amount that is paid; an abatement. |
| tariff noun | /ˈtæɹəf/ | A system of government-imposed duties levied on imported or exported goods; a list of such duties, or the duties themselves. |
| kilowatt noun | /ˈkɪ.ləˌwɒt/ | One thousand (10³) watts, an amount of power large enough to power such things as a typical home appliance (e.g., a microwave oven, a toaster, or a hair… |
| incentive noun | /ɪnˈsɛntɪv/ | Something that motivates, rouses, or encourages. |
| installer noun | One who installs. | |
| permitting verb | /pəɹˈmɪ.tɪŋ/ | Used in an absolute clause to indicate that the statement modified by the clause (typically an expression of intent) will only be fulfilled if not impeded by… |
| bore verb | /boɹ/ | To inspire boredom in somebody. |
| install verb | /ɪnˈstɔl/ | To connect, set up or prepare something for use |
| invoice noun | /ˈɪnˌvɔɪs/ | A bill; a commercial document issued by a seller to a buyer indicating the products, quantities and agreed prices for products or services that the seller has… |
| subsidy noun | /ˈsʌbsɪdi/ | Financial support or assistance, such as a grant. |
| installation noun | /ˌɪn.stəˈleɪ.ʃən/ | An act of installing. |
| backstop noun | /ˈbæk.stɒp/ | An object or a person put in the rear or in the back of something to reinforce, hold, support. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| slow down verb | To decelerate. |
| take off verb | To remove. |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). |
| fall behind verb | To be late (for a regular event) |
| back down verb | To take a less aggressive position in a conflict than one previously had, or has planned to have. |
| build out verb | To develop or expand (a system, structure, project, etc.). |
| call up verb | To retrieve from personal or computer memory. |
| catch up verb | To pick up suddenly. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Let's start with the incentives.
- You don't even have to do anything.
- Remember those panels sitting on my roof waiting on paperwork?
- This is something I've talked about for years.
- Do I think we'll actually do it?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | has been going · has been sounding |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is brought · be held · being sold |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've lived · I've seen · I've talked |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | cost, which has · problem, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 35 contractions and reduced forms, such as can't, didn't, doesn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: enthusiastic /ɪnˌθjuːzɪˈæstɪk/, theft /θɛft/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: installation /ˌɪn.stəˈleɪ.ʃən/, emission /ɪˈmɪʃ.ən/, submission /səbˈmɪʃən/, jurisdiction /d͡ʒʊɹɪsˈdɪkʃən/, inspection /ɪnˈspɛkʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: installation /ˌɪn.stəˈleɪ.ʃən/, jurisdiction /d͡ʒʊɹɪsˈdɪkʃən/, achievable /əˈt͡ʃivəbəl/, hangover /ˈhæŋoʊ̯vɚ/ ~ /ˈhæŋɔʊ̯vɚ/, refrigerator /ɹɪˈfɹɪd͡ʒ.əˌɹeɪ.tɚ/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like renewable, paperwork, grid.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.