From 1 July, millions of Australian households will get three free hours of electricity in the middle of every day. That is the kind of sentence you couldn’t have written about energy policy ten years ago, and it says something useful about where the Australian energy transition has arrived today. We’ve spent years telling a story about scale: how many gigawatts of solar, how much wind, how fast can transmission get built. Those questions still matter. But the question that increasingly decides the pace of the transition is no longer how much clean electricity exists. Rather, it is when it is being used.

The federal budget handed down on 13 May reflects that shift, even where it falls short. So does the new Guarantee of Origin scheme. So do the batteries already re-shaping the evening peak.

What the budget did, and what it didn’t do

The headline number was $18.2 billion (AUD) in new net-zero spending over the medium term, framed under a new “energy sovereignty” banner. The government also clawed back about $1.3 billion in uncommitted funding from Solar Sunshot, Hydrogen Headstart and the Battery Breakthrough Initiative. Read literally, that is a retreat. The reality is closer to triage.

Those programs were designed to seed early-stage clean-industry manufacturing, and some of the projects they targeted either didn’t materialise or got more competitive without the subsidy.

In their place, the budget pivoted to measures designed to pull private capital in. The most important is the 50% capital gains tax discount for foreign investors disposing of qualifying renewable energy assets, a time-limited but unusually direct signal that Canberra wants international money on the Australian transition and is willing to give it a tax-favoured exit to get it here. Add $500 million-plus for the new National Environmental Protection Agency from 1 July, explicitly tasked with speeding up renewables approvals, and you have a budget that tries to remove friction from private investment rather than spend its way to scale.

What the budget did not do is also worth highlighting. Neither the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax nor Fuel Tax Credit scheme were touched. The Climate Council put this total combined annual fossil-fuel subsidy bill at $19 billion.

A budget that takes climate seriously cannot keep writing that cheque.

So, good or bad? It's the type of budget you write when you have decided the transition will be funded by private capital, not the Commonwealth chequebook, and the job of policy is to make that capital flow. It’s a defensible bet, although not a sufficient one. The fossil-fuel subsidy line will need to come down. But the direction of travel on the renewables side is the right one.

Why there’s room for real hope: timing is becoming policy

The more interesting story is unfolding in parallel.

In November 2025, Australia launched the Guarantee of Origin scheme, with the first Renewable Electricity Guarantee of Origin (REGO) certificates issued in March 2026. REGOs do more than replace the old Renewable Energy Target. REGOs certificates carry hourly timestamps. For the first time, an Australian retailer or buyer can prove that the electricity it claims as renewable was actually produced in the same hour it was consumed. This is technical machinery, and it is the foundation everything else in the transition rests on.

In parallel, the Australian Energy Market Commission’s Solar Sharer offer will give most households on the East Coast with a smart meter free electricity in the middle of the day. This 11am to 2pm free window is designed to push consumption into the part of the day when the grid is awash in cheap solar and wholesale prices are sometimes negative. This is the opposite of the assumption electricity markets have run on for 50 years, that the cheapest electricity is at night.

The batteries are already doing their part. In Q1 2026 alone, 4.45 GW of new grid-scale battery capacity came online in the NEM, more than doubling installed capacity year-on-year. Batteries tripled their daytime-to-evening energy shifting and set the wholesale price in about 32% of trading intervals. The old evening price spike, that moment when the sun sets, demand surges and gas peakers cleaned up, has been visibly flattened. AEMO’s latest quarterly read put renewables at 46.5% of generation, the highest first-quarter result on record.

The pieces are starting to line up. An hourly-aware certificate scheme. A price signal that rewards midday use. A battery fleet already moving solar into the evening. Australians who, given the option, will run the dishwasher at midday.

The practical part

The Australian transition will succeed or fail on whether retailers, large buyers and grid operators can match clean electricity to consumption every hour, displacing fossil fuels no matter the time of day.

That is what Granular Energy was built for.

Our platform manages certificate portfolios at annual, monthly, daily or sub-hourly granularity, helping market players manage, match and report on renewables every hour. Major retailers across Europe, the UK, Japan, the US and beyond use our platform to streamline registry interactions, automatically allocate certificates to end customers, and produce Scope 2 reports to audit standard. We've enabled many suppliers to launch hourly matching tariffs: in the UK for instance, Good Energy and TotalEnergies are matching consumption against output from close to 400 renewable generators on an hourly basis, demonstrating to energy buyers when they are and aren't covered by renewables, and helping them align both better.

Australia is in many ways ahead of the UK or the EU. The smart meter rollout is largely done. Our grid is digital. The REGO scheme has been designed with hourly granularity from the start, albeit a start that is still years away in 2030. The retailers who get there first will define the Australian green energy market for the next decade. That means offering hourly-matched green tariffs, giving corporate customers credible Scope 2 numbers, and standing a Solar Sharer-style midday tariff next to a 24/7 carbon-free option.

We intend to help build it.

Reach out

If you are a retailer, a generator, a large energy buyer, or a policymaker working out how the certificate architecture and the time-of-use architecture fit together in Australia, we’d love to hear from you.