Why is your power bill so high?
Four things land on an Australian power bill: the wires, the generation, the schemes, and the connection fee. Here is what each slice actually costs, why the bill jumped in 2026, and the honest answer to the question that follows — "but aren't renewables cheap?" Every figure is sourced, because a number that can be knocked down is worthless.
1 · What actually makes up your bill
Shares are the long-running AEMC residential-price-trend decomposition and move a few points year to year by state and retailer; the daily supply charge is sometimes folded into "network" in other breakdowns — shown separately here for clarity. Source: AEMC Residential Electricity Price Trends 2025; AER State of the Energy Market; Energy Council of Australia.
2 · Why bills jumped in 2026
Rebate expiry (optics, not cost)
OpticsThe ~$300 federal energy bill relief that suppressed the number households actually paid in 2023–25 rolled off. That alone explains most of the eye-catching ABS annual rise — the underlying, apples-to-apples cost of supply is up closer to ~5%, not the headline figure. Both numbers are true; conflating them is the most common bill-shock error.
Wholesale up ~12–15%
WholesaleDomestic gas prices track the international LNG spot market (east-coast gas is now an export-parity price), coal units (Eraring, Liddell and peers) are running past planned retirement or tripping unplanned faster than firm replacement capacity is arriving, and dry conditions cut hydro output in the southern states — all pushing the marginal wholesale price up.
Network costs rising
NetworkRegulated network revenue is climbing to fund the transmission build (see The Real Cost / Hidden Costs trackers) needed to connect wind & solar zones hundreds of kilometres from load — cost overruns on HumeLink and VNI West are now flowing into determinations.
Environmental scheme costs
SchemesLRET/SRES and state schemes add a smaller but real slice; this component has broadly plateaued as the Renewable Energy Target matures, but still shows up on the bill line-by-line.
Stated honestly: The 37% ABS headline and the ~5% underlying rise are BOTH real numbers answering different questions — the first is what households paid year-on-year including the loss of a one-off rebate, the second is the change in the underlying cost of supply. Citing either alone without the other is misleading in opposite directions. Sources: ABS Consumer Price Index (electricity sub-index); AEMC Residential Electricity Price Trends 2025; AEMO NEM wholesale price data; AER State of the Energy Market.
3 · "But aren't renewables cheap?"
Yes — and that's worth conceding plainly, because it's true and it's not the whole answer. "Cheap" describes the generation input: the levelised cost of a wind turbine or solar panel, measured at the plant gate. It does not describe the parts of the system that actually land on your bill — the transmission needed to reach wind and solar built far from where people live, the firming and backup required because that generation is variable, and the scheme costs layered on top.
That is how the input price can keep falling while the household bill keeps rising: the network slice (line 1 above) has long been the single largest component of the bill, and it is now climbing to fund the transmission build-out this transition requires, while the system also has to pay for the 74GW of dispatchable capacity AEMO still plans to build by 2050 to back up a variable wind & solar fleet. Cheap generation and an expensive system are not a contradiction; they are the same fact seen from two different line items.
The fair rebuttal, stated: transmission and firming costs are not unique to renewables — every grid needs wires and backup, and gas and coal plants have needed their own network augmentation historically too. The honest version of this point is narrower: the SCALE and PACE of the current transmission build is larger than a slower, firmer transition would require, not that wires and backup are inherently a renewables-only cost.
4 · What would actually bring bills down
Reliability is cheaper than a rushed transition. Firm, dispatchable, affordable generation — gas as the bridge fuel, keeping coal capacity in service until genuine firm replacements exist rather than retiring it ahead of schedule, and nuclear as the long-run option Australia has banned by law — reduces the two things actually driving the 2026 rise: wholesale volatility (fewer forced outages chasing scarce firm capacity) and the need for a transmission overbuild to chase remote, variable generation. None of that requires abandoning renewables; it requires building the firm backbone first and letting wind and solar fill in around it, instead of the reverse.
The numbers, as they move
A short, sourced brief when the figures shift — a transmission blow-out, a wholesale spike, a milestone. No spam, no hype, just the receipts.