If your business is paying 30 to 45 cents a kilowatt-hour during the day, a well-sized solar system can knock a third or more off your power bill within the first year. For a warehouse in Frenchs Forest or a workshop in Charlestown running machinery from 7am, that’s often thousands of dollars a quarter back in the bank.

We install commercial solar and battery systems across Sydney, the Northern Beaches and Newcastle, and the maths has shifted. Feed-in tariffs have fallen to around 4 to 7c/kWh, so the real value now is using what you generate rather than exporting it. This post walks through what that actually looks like for a NSW business.

How solar cuts a commercial power bill

The savings come from self-consumption. Every kilowatt-hour your panels produce that you use on site is worth the full retail rate you’d otherwise pay — 30 to 45c — not the 5c export rate. Businesses that operate through the day naturally consume most of what they generate, which is why solar suits commercial sites better than a lot of homes.

A typical mid-sized system for a small business is 30kW to 100kW. As a rough guide, expect around $900 to $1,300 per kW installed before incentives, so a 50kW system lands somewhere between $45,000 and $65,000. The federal STC rebate (small-scale technology certificates) comes off systems up to 100kW at the point of sale, and for a 50kW install that’s commonly $15,000 to $25,000 off, depending on the STC market price on the day.

Payback for a well-matched system usually sits between three and five years, with panels warranted for 25. Get the sizing wrong — too big for your daytime load — and you dump cheap energy into the grid and the payback blows out. That’s the single most common mistake we see on quotes from other installers: sizing to the roof, not the load profile.

Where batteries protect operations, not just cut bills

Storage does two jobs. It shifts your solar into the evening or early morning shoulders when you’re still open, and it keeps you running through an outage. For a cold store, a medical practice or a café with fridges full of stock, backup isn’t a luxury — one afternoon blackout can cost more than the battery.

The NSW battery incentive can bring the upfront cost down further, and it now supports connecting batteries to a Virtual Power Plant for additional payments. We’ll model whether that stacks up for your usage — it doesn’t suit every site, and we’ll tell you when it doesn’t.

Worth being clear: true backup requires the battery to be wired for islanding, with the essential circuits split out. Plenty of installs get sold as “backup” but only power a couple of points, not the switchboard you actually need running. We work out which circuits matter to you before we design it.

The switchboard and metering gotchas

On a commercial site, the switchboard is where projects live or die. Older three-phase boards often don’t have the space or the fault rating to take a solar connection without an upgrade, and that can add $3,000 to $10,000 that a cheap quote conveniently left out. On our site visit we open the board, check the main switch rating, the available ways, and whether the network fuse can even handle the export.

Then there’s metering. If you’re on Ausgrid across Sydney and the Northern Beaches, or Endeavour further west, export limits and connection approval differ. Many commercial sites need a formal network application, and larger systems may be capped or require a zero-export or export-limiting setup. We’ve seen systems installed and left switched off for weeks because that approval wasn’t lodged early. We handle it at the quote stage so your commissioning date is real.

One more thing we check: your interval data. Your retailer can supply 12 months of half-hourly consumption. That tells us exactly when you use power — not a guess — so we size the array and battery to your actual load rather than a rule of thumb.

What a good commercial quote includes

A quote you can trust spells out the panel and inverter brands, the STC value applied, any switchboard or metering upgrades, the network application, and a self-consumption estimate based on your data. It should show projected savings in dollars, not just kilowatt-hours.

For businesses, there are tax angles too — depreciation and, at times, instant asset write-off thresholds. We’re electricians, not accountants, so we’ll flag it and suggest you run the numbers with yours. What we can promise is that the engineering behind the quote is sound and the timeline is honest.

Talk to us about your site

Every commercial job is different — a Mona Vale showroom draws power very differently to a Newcastle fabrication shop. The best next step is a free on-site assessment where we open the switchboard, pull your interval data and give you real numbers. Get in touch with Impressive Electrical & Solar and we’ll book a time that suits your operation.