A quick review of Amber for electricity in Queensland

The very basic thing about Amber Electric is the pricing. And it’s also the most complicated.

I live in South East Queensland; bear that in mind when you read the below, because it may be different in other states. (And if you’re overseas, this is all in Australian dollars, not US dollars).

How a normal electricity provider charges

A normal electricity provider will make their bill using two charges:

• A daily charge (one electricity provider charged $1.27 a day last year);
• A charge based on how much electricity you use (that same electricity provider was charging 30.59 cents per kW)

Except it isn’t quite as easy as that. Instead, to manage the amount of electricity used in peak times (4pm-9pm), there’s an additional demand rate of 15.24 c/kWh placed on all customers. And here’s how it works:

1. Over the whole month, what was the most electricity you used at once in a half-hour block in peak times? (eg 2.5kW)
2. Take that energy use, and multiply it by two (to get an hourly amount) (eg 5kWh)
3. Charge the demand rate (15.24 c) per kWh (5 kWh) for every day that month (30 days) = $22.86 extra

So, it literally takes one forgetful half hour when you’re running the pool pump, the air conditioning, the oven and the tumble dryer, and you’re penalised for the entire month. D’oh.

I can see why they do it. It’s annoying. But the hassle for the electricity companies is if everyone uses all the electricity all at once, so fine to try to balance that somehow, I guess.

This is how any normal electricity company charges for electricity.

How a normal electricity provider makes most of their money

In the example above, the normal charge for electricity is 30.59 cents per kW used of electricity. That’s what this example electricity company charges you.

But when the electricity company buys electricity from the electricity generators, they are charged a different amount every minute. It might be 5 cents per kW; it might be $10 per kW.

Most electricity company pricing strategies are just one big gamble - they hope that if they pick 30.59 cents, the electricity that you use will cost them less than an average of 30.59 cents. That’s where the big profit is for them.

So, if you use a lot of electricity during the day, when prices might drop to 10 cents, then they make 20 cents profit from you. But, if you use a lot of electricity when the system is at peak demand (normally about 6pm) then you’re still being charged 30 cents, but they might have to pay 60 cents to the generator, and lose money. It’s just a gamble. And most of the time, they get away with it.

How Amber charges

Amber charges a little differently, with three charges (based on my latest bill):

• A monthly fee of $19.73. This is Amber’s profit.
• A daily charge ($1 a day). Amber gets charged this by the electricity grid, and passes it on without a markup.
• A charge based on how much electricity you use, at the time you use it. Amber gets charged this by the electricity generator, and passes it on without a markup.

The big difference here is the charge. As you can see above, Amber charges based on how much the electricity cost them in that half-hour. Sometimes electricity can cost 5 cents. Sometimes, it can cost $20. Amber passes that on.

Right at the top of this post is a graph showing how much Amber charged today - which is a wet, rainy day in Queensland. You can see that there was a low price of 14 cents, and a high price of 27 cents. So, I’m in the money here: my previous electricity supplier was charging 30 cents. Yay, go me.

But here’s May 16/17.

As you can see, May 16 started at about 22 cents, with a little peak during breakfast where pricing went up to 36 cents. Uh oh, that’s above the 30 cents that we were paying.

But then, just before 6pm, the price went up to $1.77. And then to $4.36! And then down to 33 cents.

Because Amber literally passes on the cost of electricity, it means things like this happen. Yikes!

The app is helpful

You can get the Amber app to give you a notification when electricity is above a certain amount; and you can get Amber’s pricing into things like HomeAssistant. I do that, because of course I do - so if there’s a price surge like there was just before 6pm, some things in the house just turn off to save electricity.

The app is very useful, with details about how much we have paid. As an example, our three-month average price is 19.2 c/kWh; much lower than the 30c we were paying.

Or… is it?

So how much have we saved?

Well, let’s compare bills year-on-year.

In January 2024, we were with Alinta, paying that 30.59 cents per kW I mentioned earlier. We used 624 kWh, and after their daily charge and the demand charge, we spent $259.84.

In January 2025, we were with Amber. We used 558 kWh, and after the daily charge, the demand charge, and the Amber fee, we spent $255.94. Our equivalent rate for the month was 27.88 cents per kWh.

So, how much did we save that month? Not much.

Let’s try a different month: Dec 2023, with Alinta we used 610 kWh, and spent $248.35. In Dec 2024, with Amber we used 645 kWh, and spent $285.65 (an equivalent of 28.65 c/kWh).

In short… it’s not saved us any money. It’s probably not cost us any money either, to be fair. But has it been a massive cost saving? No, not really.

But, James, don’t you have solar?

I do, yes. And perhaps that’s the reason why we’ve not seen as high savings as we might.

Our solar kicks in during the day, of course, so if there is 4kW of things running in the house, we’re in effect getting our electricity for free. Quite often, I’ll see Amber’s electricity pricing duck down to 5c or even lower during the day; but we’re not benefitting from that much, because our solar panels are probably supplying 100% of what we want, so we’re actually paying 0c regardless of which electricity company we use.

And, just as the electricity cost changes throughout the day, so does the solar feed-in tariff - the amount of money we can sell our electricity for. In fact, there are times during the day where we’re actually charged for dumping excess electricity into the grid. I’ve given access for Amber to control our solar panels to partially shut them off during this time, but even so, we don’t get paid much for our electricity.

Where it works, apparently, is if you have batteries. You can fill those batteries up during the day from your solar, and then in the evening when electricity is scarce and you’re being charged $4.36 for it, you can stick your electricity from your batteries into the grid and earn $4.36 instead. Amber can do all of that automatically: which has the benefit of using home battery power to manage the entire grid, theoretically making brownouts a thing of the past.

We don’t have batteries, because I’ve never felt that we generate enough excess energy for it to make a difference.

(In the above costings, I’ve not included solar. Alinta gave us a better rate for our unused solar than Amber does, incidentally).

So, a waste of time, then?

Meh, maybe.

I must confess, I went into this review thinking “it’ll be nice to show how much money we’re saving”, and I’m a little disappointed to realise that we’re not.

I thought we would - because we work from home in this household, we’re using things during the day when it’s cheap to run things, and I’ve got HomeAssistant to quietly help save electricity at times where it helps. It’s a bit disappointing that it hasn’t.

Look, it makes sense to me to pay the actual price for electricity.

But, we’ve been conditioned, ever since we had solar, to focus on getting the most out of the solar panels. I charge my car during the day, when a) the sun is shining, so most of the electricity is free anyway, and b) when the Amber pricing is low, so I’m hardly paying much anyway. And I’m geeky enough to work out how to automatically turn things off, like the pool pump or the hot water heater, when the price gets too expensive. (Nobody in the family has noticed that the hot water heater isn’t on between 4pm-9pm: the tank retains its heat very well).

So, has it saved money for us? No. But that’s just us. Perhaps it might for you.

Who I’m with now

Now I’ve realised that a) Amber isn’t saving me anything, and b) it’s all quite stressful being given lots of worrying alerts when you can and can’t use electricity, I’ve switched over to OVO Energy. The EV Plan offers free electricity between 11am-2pm (good for us when we work from home), and at a low rate of 8c between midnight and 8am (good for charging the car).

This link to OVO Energy gets you (and me) $120 if you use my signup code.