"Over the past decade, state governments have actively incentivised households to feed their solar into the grid, by offering generous feed-in tariff schemes. Most have now closed to new entrants.

But now, welfare groups and transmission company SA Power Networks (SAPN) have asked the Australian Energy Markets Commission to change market rules to allow charging of household exporters.

They argue that under the current system, households without solar could be unfairly burdened with the cost of augmenting power networks to cope with the increase of new panels, which is already placing a strain on the network in states with heavy solar penetration like South Australia."