Australia Has So Much Solar That It's Offering Everyone Free Electricity

Basically, it is 3 hours in the middle of the day and not everyone qualifies. If you have solar, then you wouldn't be paying anything during most of the day anyway. If you don't and you're a working adult, then you wouldn't be home anyway. Just from my observation, there's a lot of solar installations here and the power companies were starting to complain about grid stability and negative prices. The feed-in tariff(what I get paid for exporting my power back to the grid) is now very close to zero and I believe will actually drop to zero next year. Some states are now contemplating charging customers for the export.

So all in all, I think this announcement will have no effect on people's ability to afford the ever-rising energy prices here. The government did start a rebate for solar batteries recently though. And that had a beneficial effect on the prices and uptake for residences. Before that, the batteries would take too long to repay themselves and people were reluctant to install them.

The hard, and $$$ expensive, challenging, problem that has to be solved is storage of renewable energy on a massive scale.

( Personally I would just like the cheaper electricity that country was promised, instead of the price rises over the last few years.)