Prática de Shadowing: Why Australia’s Solar Is So Cheap (And Ours Isn’t) - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo
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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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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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Você está praticando inglês com "Why Australia’s Solar Is So Cheap (And Ours Isn’t)" usando a técnica de Shadowing.
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.