Our family used to pay at least $600 a month for electricity.

Obviously that had to stop. Now, after investing in a solar system and a battery, I pay about $65 a month.

Families are unique. Mine’s no different. I’m a dad with physical disabilities caused by a neurological condition and a parent of a son with an intellectual disability.

Creating a home environment where we can both do the things we need requires a lot of electricity. Now it no longer requires an enormous electricity bill.

We’re lucky enough to own our own home. Families are all driven by the same desires – to provide a safe environment where our family can grow and thrive.

Our son relies on routine and exercise to stay well and swimming is an integral part of his world. For us as a family, that means keeping an outdoor pool heated for 10 months of the year so that he has a place to self-regulate.

I live with a progressive neurological condition that makes it hard to grip, reach, turn switches or handle temperature changes. Air-conditioning and home automation are not conveniences for us.

When your health depends on your environment, you can’t just switch everything off to save money on the bills.

So we made a decision. We invested in rooftop solar and a battery. It was a big upfront cost, the kind I know many families simply don’t have sitting in the bank – almost $20,000. But it has changed our lives.

Our system was costed on generating enough energy to cut our electricity bill by $250 a month. With a saving of $3000 a year, our payback period was 6.7 years.

By choosing time-of-use plans, and optimising when we use high-powered devices, we’ve cut our costs by much more than that. And the proportion made up of renewable energy powering our family home has soared from under 20 per cent to 85 per cent.

Millions of Australians are paying too much for electricity because the system rewards polluting electricity retailers and punishes consumer loyalty.

Stay with the same provider for years and you’re often slugged with higher prices. It shouldn’t work that way.

Some of the biggest electricity retailers are also some of our biggest major polluters, making hefty profits from the same ageing and unreliable coal clunkers and expensive gas that are causing climate pollution and driving all of our energy prices sky-high.

When those old coal clunkers break down, which – by the way, they frequently do – our energy prices spike. Consumers take the hit.

My family isn’t alone in making the switch to solar and batteries to power our lives. More than one in three Australian households have rooftop solar. That’s a lot of families saving real money, for many thousands each year.

Here’s the hard part that we can’t ignore – not everyone can afford what we did. Renters often miss out entirely.

We need stronger protections from the government so that savings reach households, not just retailer profits. We need to make it easier for landlords to install solar and ensure renters can reap the benefits.

We need to keep building renewable energy and storage – and fast – so that wholesale electricity prices fall for everyone.

A new report from the Climate Council, Power Games: Who’s driving high power bills? makes clear that without renewable energy everyone’s power bills would be even higher, with renewable energy the only thing pushing electricity prices down, cutting $417 off the average household bill in 2024 – a collective saving of $3.8 billion. Personally, we saved much more than than $417.

The longer we delay the renewables rollout, the longer families remain exposed to volatile fossil fuel prices, global gas markets and unreliable coal.

Renewable energy isn’t an abstract policy debate for me. It’s about whether I can keep our family home accessible and working for the needs of me and my family.

It’s about whether our son can swim each day. It’s about whether families, who are already carrying all the unique things we all do as working parents in one of the most expensive cities in the world, have one less source of financial stress.

And it’s about doing what’s in my power, to curb climate pollution – or at least stop my family from paying the climate polluters out of our pockets.

Paul Barry is a Sydney publisher, consultant and writer. He lives with a rare form of motor neurone disease that limits his speech and movement

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