The $50,000 Candlight Plan

For the AFR nothing screams progress like living in the dark.

On some evenings, Calvin Yeoh sits in the dark. The Australian Financial Review finds this admirable. I do not.

According to a glowing AFR profile, Yeoh, a management consultant from Sydney’s inner west, is a poster child for household electrification. He has spent nearly $50,000 transforming his home into a personal power station. He has solar panels. He has two batteries. He has a $2400 charger for his electric car and has installed a heat pump to avoid gas bills.

Yeoh plays the market to maximise his return using the electricity retailer Amber, which gives households direct access to real-time wholesale electricity prices. This allows customers to buy power when it’s cheap and, if they have a battery, sell it back to the grid when prices spike, turning energy use into a form of day trading.

He calls himself an “energy warlord.” The AFR treats him like a prophet. But the road to this Promised Land involves self-imposed energy rationing and ignoring large parts of the story.

Early on, the article breezes past a line: “…with energy prices on a seemingly relentless upward trajectory.” Hang on. I thought flooding the grid with wind and solar was supposed to drive prices down? That’s the AFR’s editorial position. Surely this admission warrants examination. But never mind.

The next paragraph quotes Yeoh:

“You need to remove the other energy sources in your home. If you use gas, you need to remove the gas.”

Yet none of the subsequent calculations include the cost of replacing gas ovens and heaters. Nor do they include the cost of the electric car. Depending on your choices, that adds $45,000 to $90,000. So some households may need to outlay $140,000 to reach the starting point of Yeoh’s nirvana of “free” electricity.

And to make his plan work you have to turn off the lights, the stove and the heating during evening price spikes. That’s not energy freedom. It’s energy serfdom.

Yeoh claims to have saved $12,000 since May 2023—around 24 percent of his $50,000 investment. That’s possible, but his annual electricity bill was clearly well above the national average. It’s also misleading, because while he claims to have avoided power bills, he’s still drawing electricity from the grid. His house doesn’t run on ideology. When the sun isn’t shining—as it often isn’t in winter—he needs the grid like everyone else.

I know, because I live in one of the most energy-rich homes in Canberra. And here let’s underline another point the AFR glosses: I am wealthy enough to have energy choices. Most Australians are not as lucky as Yeoh and me.

My rooftop solar system is rated at 13.12 kW. In 2024, it produced nearly 14,700 kWh—averaging 40 kWh per day, peaking at 59 kWh in summer, and falling to 14.5 kWh in winter. I also have two Tesla Powerwalls with 27 kWh of usable storage. They supplied 30 percent of my total energy use. In summer, I’m self-sufficient, if I manage our consumption. In winter, solar collapses and demand rises. Even with this best-case setup, I still imported over 1,600 kWh from the grid across four cold, dark months.

And that’s before I electrify everything. Add an EV, electric cooking, heating, and hot water, and I’d face a daily winter shortfall of over 50 kWh—more than 80 percent of my household needs.

Yeoh’s batteries store less than mine. If he heats his home, charges his car, and cooks dinner on a dark winter night, he burns through stored energy in hours. Then what? He falls back on an overstressed grid. The AFR should tell us that.

Yeoh and I are outliers. Around 40 percent of Australian households have rooftop solar, but only 4.6 percent have batteries. Fewer than 5 percent of those have more than one. That means homes like mine and Yeoh’s—large systems, dual batteries—represent a tiny fraction of all households. We are the privileged exceptions.

It gets worse because the grid-dependent poor are actually subsidising the wealthy “energy warlords”.

Households like Yeoh’s and mine are reshaping the market at the expense of those who can least afford it. By exporting power when prices are low and withdrawing during price spikes, we leave the fixed costs of grid infrastructure—poles, wires, maintenance—to a shrinking pool of full-time users. As more wealthy households semi-detach from the system, the burden shifts to renters, apartment dwellers, and the poor—those who can’t afford solar, let alone $50,000 worth of tech. The more we arbitrage the system, the more the energy-poor pay to keep the grid we all use running.

But the AFR doesn’t mention that. Because this isn’t about honest accounting. It’s about selling a dream decarbonised living, packaged as planet-saving virtue. A dream that collapses on contact with the real world.

And some of the other realities of the rooftop soar boom are starting to bite. Rooftop solar floods on to the grid when demand is low and disappears when demand peaks. More household batteries will temper this but they shift energy across hours, not seasons. No plausible number of home batteries can solve that.

In April, my electricity provider cut my feed-in tariff from 8 to 6 cents per kWh. Why? Because daytime wholesale prices have collapsed. Too much solar, too little demand.

My retailer’s notice on the tariff cut came with absurd tips on using energy: run heaters during the day and switch them off at night. Charge your EV during the day (what if you drive it to work?). Retool your life to suit the dysfunctions of a system built around wind and sunshine.

This isn’t progress. It’s energy devolution. It is rationing, moralised and rebranded. The rich opt out of system costs while the poor are told to adapt. Yeoh’s transformation isn’t a model. It’s an indulgence.

Yet the AFR brands it “good conduct”.

Where’s the scrutiny? Where’s the systems thinking? Where’s the honesty that most Australians will never be able to follow their hero’s lead?

This is where current energy policy leads: a two-tiered market where the privileged arbitrage the grid and the poor subsidise its maintenance. It’s distorted by ideology, burdened by fantasy, and increasingly divorced from physical reality.

The AFR should spotlight trade-offs, not sanctify outliers. It should investigate the real costs of the energy transition. It should grasp the economic damage the current policies are unleashing. We are on a pathway to managed decline, and nothing personifies that more than a rich man living in a dark house and declaring it a virtue. I look forward to the stories of shuttered factories under the headline of "productivity."

Australia’s leading financial newspaper is selling an electrified utopia. What we are actually building is brittle, costly and profoundly unequal. And if Yeoh has to sit in the dark to make his choices work, what hope is there for the poor? They won’t get a choice.