--- title: "The Next Solar Technology Race Will Be About Timing, Not Panel Efficiency" url: "https://techmagazine.io/insight/the-next-solar-technology-race-will-be-about-timing-not-panel-efficiency/" author: "Matthew Curnow" published: "2026-09-25" updated: "2026-09-25" --- # The Next Solar Technology Race Will Be About Timing, Not Panel Efficiency For most of the past two decades, the solar industry has been trying to solve a generation problem. How do we get more electricity from the same roof? [Panels became more efficient](https://nationaldirectory.com.au/post/ril-KU9ITF2cYDydAfVwwQ/how-long-do-solar-panels-last-). Inverters improved. System sizes increased. Rooftop solar went from a niche investment to a normal feature of Australian homes and businesses. That technology race has been remarkably successful. Australia now has **28.3 GW of rooftop solar capacity**, compared with around **22.5 GW of coal-fired generation capacity**. On a nameplate-capacity basis, the solar panels sitting on Australian rooftops collectively represent about **26% more capacity than the country's entire coal fleet**. Rooftop solar also supplied 14.2% of Australia's electricity in the second half of 2025. That does not mean rooftop solar generates more electricity than coal. The two technologies operate very differently. But it does tell us something important. **Australia is no longer short of solar-generating hardware.** The next big opportunity is what happens **after the electricity has been generated**. Should that electricity run the air conditioner? Heat water? Charge an electric vehicle? Charge a battery? Be exported to the grid? Or should another load wait until solar generation increases? For years, the solar technology race was about producing more electricity. I think the next one will be about **using every kilowatt-hour more intelligently**. ### Solar's first technology revolution was generation When I first became involved in energy efficiency and solar, most of the economics revolved around generation. How much electricity could a system produce? How many panels could fit on the roof? What size inverter was required? How quickly would the system pay for itself? Those questions still matter. But solar has matured enough that another problem is becoming increasingly obvious: **Generation and consumption often happen at different times.** A household might produce large amounts of electricity between 10am and 3pm while nobody is home. Several hours later, the same household may be importing electricity to cook dinner, cool the house, heat water and charge an EV. A business can have the opposite profile. A workshop, warehouse, office or retail site may consume a large proportion of its energy during the exact hours its solar system is producing. Two properties with identical solar systems can therefore get dramatically different financial value from those systems. The difference is not necessarily on the roof. It is what is happening **behind the meter**. This is why our [Smart Solar approach](https://energybuster.com.au/smart-solar/?utm_source%3Dchatgpt.com) looks beyond the number of panels that can physically fit on a property. Electricity consumption, the timing of that consumption and likely future loads can be just as important as generation. ### South Australia is already putting a price on timing This is not simply a prediction about where the electricity market might eventually go. In South Australia, the economics are already beginning to change. SA Power Networks describes the period between **10am and 4pm as the "solar sponge"** on relevant time-of-use network tariffs because that is when rooftop solar generation is typically abundant and electricity is cheapest for the network to supply. Since 1 July 2025, SA Power Networks has also applied an export tariff to retailers for certain excess solar exports. For residential customers with an interval meter, the first 9 kWh exported between 10am and 4pm each day falls within a free threshold. Exports above the threshold attract a 1 cent per kWh network charge to the retailer. Whether and how a retailer passes that charge through depends on the retail plan. At other times the signal can reverse. Under SA Power Networks' customer-choice Electrify tariff, retailers can receive a network credit for electricity exported between 5pm and 9pm during the November-to-March period. The exact cents per kilowatt-hour will change over time. The more important point is what the tariff structure is telling us. **Midday electricity is abundant. Evening electricity is more valuable. Flexible consumption has value.** For a long time, we thought primarily about how many kilowatt-hours a solar system generated. Increasingly, we also need to ask **when those kilowatt-hours are available and what we do with them**. That is a significant change in the economics of solar. ### Generating more isn't always the first answer Imagine a home exporting surplus solar around midday. Later that evening, the same household imports electricity from the grid to heat water or charge an electric vehicle. The traditional solar-industry answer might be to install more hardware. More panels. A bigger inverter. A battery. Sometimes that will absolutely be the right solution. But before making that decision, there is another question worth asking: **Can some of the property's existing electricity consumption be moved into the hours when solar is already being generated?** That question changes how we think about solar optimisation. Instead of treating panels, batteries, hot water, EV charging and air conditioning as completely separate purchasing decisions, we can start treating the property as **one energy system**. A useful way to think about the order of value is: - **Reduce avoidable energy use.** - **Use solar directly wherever practical.** - **Move flexible loads into high-solar periods.** - **Store energy when a genuine timing gap remains.** - **Export the remaining surplus when that is its best available use.** That sequence will not be optimal in every household, business or tariff arrangement. But it creates a much better starting point than automatically assuming the next solar upgrade has to be another piece of hardware. Sometimes the cheapest battery is the load you didn't need to store electricity for in the first place. ### Your hot-water tank is already a form of energy storage Hot water is probably the clearest example. When people hear the words "energy storage", they tend to picture a lithium battery mounted on the wall. But a hot-water tank is also storing energy. It is simply storing that energy as **heat rather than electricity**. That distinction matters. Domestic hot water accounts for around **25% of household energy use in Australia**. And unlike many household loads, water usually does not have to be heated at the exact moment it is consumed. If you need hot water for a shower at 7pm, the water can potentially be heated several hours earlier while rooftop solar is abundant. Research commissioned by ARENA found that Australia's domestic hot-water systems could absorb around **15 to 31 GWh of electricity per day** by heating and storing water when renewable generation is plentiful. A typical 300-litre domestic hot-water system can store roughly **15 kWh of thermal energy**, which is in the same broad range as many residential home batteries. That gives us a useful way to think about solar optimisation: **You don't always need to store the electricity. Sometimes you can store what the electricity was going to do.** Heat the water at midday and use the hot water at night. Pre-cool a well-insulated house while the solar system is producing and benefit from the cooler building later. Run the pool pump in the middle of the day rather than overnight. The electricity has technically already been consumed. But the **benefit** of consuming that electricity has been shifted forward in time. That is a different form of storage, and I suspect it will become increasingly important as Australian homes become more electrified. ### The EV could become the biggest flexible electrical load in the house Electric vehicles take the same idea further. An EV contains a battery that can be substantially larger than the battery installed on the wall of a typical home. Even before vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid technology becomes common, the act of **charging** an EV creates an enormous opportunity for flexible energy use. Imagine an EV arrives home with 40% charge. It does not necessarily matter whether the vehicle reaches 80% charge at 6pm, midnight or midday the following day. What matters is that the driver has enough energy available when the vehicle is next required. That flexibility changes the energy equation. If the vehicle is parked at home during the day, excess rooftop solar can potentially be directed straight into it. Instead of: **solar → battery → EV** you may sometimes be able to use: **solar → EV** Every conversion and storage step has a cost and some efficiency loss, so direct consumption can be attractive when it matches the customer's needs. This is why EV charging increasingly needs to be considered as part of solar design rather than as an unrelated appliance purchase. A household expecting to buy two EVs over the next five years may need a very different solar strategy from an otherwise identical household that expects to remain a one-car petrol household. The roof hasn't changed. The **future load profile has**. ### The cheapest kilowatt-hour and the most valuable kilowatt-hour are not necessarily the same thing There is another distinction I think will become increasingly important. Solar conversations tend to focus on producing cheap electricity. But the **cheapest kilowatt-hour to generate is not necessarily the most valuable kilowatt-hour to the household**. Suppose your solar system produces an extra kilowatt-hour at midday. Depending on your tariff and circumstances, you might have several options for it: - export it to the grid - heat water - charge an EV - charge a home battery - run cooling - operate pool equipment - power another flexible appliance Each option can have a different financial value. That means the optimisation problem is no longer simply: **How do I produce the most solar?** It becomes: **What is the highest-value use of the next kilowatt-hour of solar?** That is a fundamentally different question. And once you begin thinking that way, the solar system stops being just a generator. It becomes an energy-allocation system. ### Batteries are important — but they should solve a real timing problem None of this means batteries are unimportant. Quite the opposite. Australia is now installing batteries at extraordinary speed. The Clean Energy Council reported that **183,245 home batteries were sold in Australia during the second half of 2025 alone — more than were sold during the previous four years combined**. There are good reasons for that. A battery can capture surplus daytime solar and make that electricity available later in the evening. It can reduce grid imports. It can provide backup capability depending on the system configuration. And increasingly, batteries may participate in virtual power plants or respond to dynamic electricity pricing. We are also beginning to see the aggregate impact. AEMO analysed Victorian households during the state's maximum-demand day in the first quarter of 2026 and found homes with batteries were drawing an average of about **1.4 kW less from the grid during the evening peak than comparable solar-only households in the study sample**. That is a significant difference. As an illustration, if 100,000 homes simultaneously reduced peak grid demand by 1.4 kW, the combined reduction would equal around **140 MW**. That does not mean every battery will produce exactly that result. The AEMO analysis covered particular household samples and configurations. But it demonstrates why millions of distributed batteries could eventually behave like a substantial piece of electricity infrastructure. For the individual customer, though, the right question is still: **What problem is the battery solving?** How much electricity is being imported after sunset? How much excess solar is being exported? Could some of that midday electricity first be directed into hot water, an EV or another flexible load? How expensive is electricity during the times the battery would discharge? How much battery capacity is actually required? These are the questions that should inform the size and economics of a home solar and battery system. A battery should solve a measurable energy problem. It should not simply be the next item on the solar shopping list. ### There is another battery hiding in your house: thermal mass Hot water is not the only example of "storing the outcome". Buildings themselves can store thermal energy. Consider air conditioning. The normal way to think about cooling is reactive: The house gets hot, so the air conditioner turns on. But a solar-aware home can potentially operate differently. If the energy-management system knows the afternoon will be hot and rooftop solar production will fall later in the day, it may make sense to cool the building slightly more while solar generation is high. The walls, floor, furniture and air inside the building then effectively hold some of that cooling. Again, electricity has not been stored. **The service provided by the electricity has been stored.** This gives us three very different forms of behind-the-meter energy storage: **Electrical storage:** home batteries and EV batteries. **Thermal storage:** hot-water tanks. **Building storage:** heating or cooling stored temporarily in the thermal mass of a building. Looking at all three together creates a much more interesting optimisation problem than simply asking what size battery to purchase. ### The home is becoming a miniature energy system Until recently, most large electrical devices in a home operated independently. The solar inverter generated electricity. The hot-water system heated water. The air conditioner responded to its thermostat. The pool pump followed a timer. The EV charger charged a vehicle. The battery followed its own charging rules. Increasingly, all of those assets can produce data, receive instructions or respond to external signals. That changes what the home actually is. Instead of being a collection of independent appliances connected to the electricity network, it starts behaving like a **small energy system**. And this is not just theoretical. SA Power Networks' Energy Masters project is already testing this concept in South Australian homes. The project has coordinated heat-pump hot water, air conditioning, EV chargers, rooftop solar and batteries using home energy-management systems. More than 100 South Australian homes had already received coordinated installations by the project's second lessons-learned report. The important technological shift is therefore not necessarily making each individual appliance dramatically better. It is making all the appliances **work together**. ### The grid is increasingly interested in flexibility, not just generation The same change is happening at network level. For years, the energy transition was largely framed as a supply problem. Replace fossil-fuel electricity with renewable generation. Build more solar. Build more wind. Build storage. But as variable renewable generation becomes a larger part of the system, another resource becomes increasingly valuable: **flexible demand**. ARENA describes a range of flexible-demand opportunities including moving hot-water heating into periods of surplus solar, smart EV charging, controlling air conditioning during periods of grid stress and orchestrating batteries. The reason is straightforward. Imagine the grid has enormous amounts of inexpensive solar available at 1pm but households do not need that electricity until 7pm. You can solve the mismatch by moving supply. A battery does this. But sometimes you can also solve it by moving **demand**. Heat the water at 1pm. Charge the vehicle at 1pm. Run the pool equipment at 1pm. Pre-cool the building at 1pm. The result is the same underlying improvement: **electricity demand becomes better aligned with electricity supply.** In some cases, adjusting when an existing device operates could be cheaper than building additional infrastructure solely to meet the same demand later. ### AI enters the energy equation Artificial intelligence gets attached to almost every technology discussion at the moment, so I'm cautious about treating AI as an innovation by itself. A poor energy system does not suddenly become intelligent because somebody adds an AI label to the software. But energy management is one area where forecasting and automated optimisation genuinely make sense. Think about the number of variables a future home energy-management system may have to consider: - expected solar generation - cloud cover and weather forecasts - historical household consumption - battery state of charge - expected evening demand - EV battery level - the time the EV is next required - hot-water requirements - air-conditioning demand - electricity tariffs - export prices - import prices - network signals - flexible household loads A human can make some of these decisions manually. But most people are not going to wake up every morning, check tomorrow's weather forecast, inspect their battery state of charge, calculate expected solar generation and build a schedule for eight different appliances. Software can. Imagine the system asking one question continuously: **Given the energy we expect to have available, what is the highest-value thing we can do with the next kilowatt-hour?** At 11am, the answer might be heat water. At midday, it might charge the EV. At 2pm, it could charge the household battery. At 4pm, perhaps the battery should remain full because expensive grid electricity is expected that evening. On another day, the system may pre-cool the house because a hot afternoon is forecast. Many of those decisions do not require artificial intelligence. Rules-based automation can achieve a great deal. But as tariffs, weather forecasts, consumption behaviour and multiple controllable devices interact, optimisation software becomes increasingly valuable. The important innovation is not AI itself. It is **coordination at a level humans are unlikely to manage manually**. ### Solar monitoring is therefore becoming more important than ever This creates another change in what I think customers should expect from a solar installation. Historically, solar monitoring mostly answered one question: **How much electricity did my system generate?** That is useful. But generation alone tells only part of the story. A genuinely useful energy-management system should increasingly help answer: - How much solar did I consume directly? - How much did I export? - When did I import electricity? - Which loads caused those imports? - How much did my battery charge and discharge? - Was my EV charged using solar or grid electricity? - Could another appliance have been moved into the middle of the day? - How much grid electricity was avoided? - Are the system and major loads behaving as expected? Energy Buster already designs systems around site-specific electricity use, future energy plans and monitoring rather than simply selecting equipment from a standard package. That approach becomes even more important as the number of controllable energy assets in homes and businesses increases. You cannot intelligently optimise what you cannot properly measure. ### The next solar specification won't be a panel specification Consumers have traditionally compared solar installations using component specifications. Panel wattage. Panel efficiency. Inverter capacity. Warranty length. Battery capacity. Those specifications still matter. Quality [solar panels and appropriately designed solar systems](https://energybuster.com.au/solar-panels/) remain the foundation. But component specifications describe the hardware. They do not necessarily describe the outcome. I think the next generation of solar buyers will increasingly need to ask different questions. **What percentage of my solar generation will I actually consume on site?** **How much grid electricity will I still buy during expensive periods?** **Which loads in my property can be moved?** **How much midday solar am I exporting?** **Would hot-water control improve the economics?** **How will an EV change my consumption profile?** **What problem will a battery solve?** **How well can the major components communicate with one another?** **Can the system respond intelligently as tariffs and consumption patterns change?** Those are system-performance questions rather than component-performance questions. And I think that distinction will become increasingly important. ### We may need a new way to measure solar performance There is an even broader implication. Perhaps one day we will [judge solar systems using a metric](https://www.alternative-energies.net/what-adelaides-climate-teaches-homeowners-about-long-term-solar-performance/) that does not currently appear on most product brochures. Call it **solar utilisation**. Instead of measuring only how many kilowatt-hours the panels generated, solar utilisation would consider how effectively the property converted those kilowatt-hours into useful economic value. A simple version might ask: Of all the electricity my solar system produced this year, how much was either consumed at a valuable time, stored for later use or exported when exporting made financial sense? Two identical 10 kW solar systems could produce almost exactly the same amount of electricity but have completely different utilisation rates. One might dump large amounts of low-value electricity into the grid every afternoon while buying expensive electricity back in the evening. The other might heat water, charge an EV, cool the house and fill a battery before exporting its remaining surplus. From a panel-efficiency perspective, those systems look identical. From an **energy-value perspective**, they are completely different. That is the distinction I expect solar technology to become much better at measuring. ### Australia has already built a giant distributed power station There is a useful way to step back and look at the scale of what has happened. Australian rooftops now hold **28.3 GW of solar capacity**, compared with 22.5 GW across the country's coal fleet. We have effectively built an enormous distributed power station across millions of individual homes and businesses. But unlike a conventional power station, the electricity is being generated right beside millions of potential electrical loads. Hot-water systems. Air conditioners. Pool pumps. Industrial equipment. Home batteries. Electric vehicles. That creates an enormous opportunity. The first phase of Australia's rooftop-solar revolution was about **installing generation**. The second phase will be about **orchestrating generation, storage and demand**. That is why I don't think the next significant solar breakthrough will necessarily be a panel that is a few percentage points more efficient. Panel improvements will continue, and they will remain valuable. But there is potentially much more economic value available by improving the way an entire building uses electricity. ### The smartest solar system may not generate more electricity After roughly two decades watching energy technology develop, this is where I think the biggest change is heading. The solar installation of the future will not simply be panels connected to an inverter. It will increasingly be an energy-management system for the building. Solar will provide the generation. Batteries will provide electrical storage. Hot-water systems can provide thermal storage. EVs will introduce large flexible loads and potentially very large mobile batteries. Buildings themselves can provide some thermal flexibility. Smart meters and monitoring will provide the data. Software will decide when different assets should operate. And eventually, increasingly sophisticated optimisation may coordinate all of those decisions automatically. That changes the basic question we should ask when designing a solar system. Not simply: **How much electricity can we generate?** But: **How do we extract the greatest possible value from every kilowatt-hour we generate?** Australia has become extraordinarily good at putting solar panels on roofs. The next technology race is about what happens after sunlight becomes electricity. The smartest solar system of the future may not generate dramatically more electricity than a high-quality system installed today. It may simply waste far fewer opportunities to use that electricity well. --- Matthew Curnow is the Managing Director of [Energy Buster](https://energybuster.com.au) and a long-standing leader in Australia’s energy efficiency and sustainability sector, with experience dating back to 2006. He plays a hands-on role across the business, overseeing deployment, customer coordination, technical support, and installation teams, while regularly working directly with clients both onsite and remotely. Recognised as a thought leader in the industry, Matthew contributes to major advisory groups across government, community, and energy networks, including multiple SA Power Networks panels and working groups. His influence extends beyond Energy Buster through his involvement in broader sustainability initiatives, past leadership roles in environmental advisory committees, and guest lecturing at the University of Adelaide. Matthew’s expertise spans product development, energy market strategy, and customer-focused solution design. His work has supported the development of innovative energy services and contributed to milestones such as energy retail licensing and advanced efficiency programs. Driven by a strong commitment to environmental outcomes, he continues to shape practical, scalable solutions for businesses navigating energy costs and sustainability challenges.