A warehouse bill is not a bigger version of a household bill. It is charged on a different basis — most of the pain sits in a demand charge set by a single half-hour of the month, which almost nobody explains and which you can often do something about.
Because the numbers moved. Australian industrial gas users have spent several years watching contract prices reset well above where they used to sit, and a cold store, where refrigeration dominates operating cost, felt that in a way an ambient shed did not.
At the same time the roof over every warehouse in the country turned out to be one of the better solar sites available, and the rules governing what you can put on it and claim for it have changed more than once.
Every page here that carries a price, a tariff or a scheme rule states the date its figures are current to, and the date by which we re-check them. The build refuses to publish one of these pages past its review date, which is a deliberate constraint on ourselves: a page quietly asserting last year’s gas price is not slightly out of date, it is wrong.
The equipment side of the same question — what it costs to run an LPG fleet versus an electric one — sits with forklifts and materials handling equipment. The operational side is under warehouse operations and efficiency.
10 guides
A warehouse can use exactly the same total electricity two months running and still get a much bigger bill in the second one. The reason is almost never the total kWh line — it is the demand charge, and it is set by the single highest 30-minute period of power draw in the whole billing cycle.
East-coast gas has not gone back to where it was before the 2022 crisis, and the ACCC's own reporting shows why: the government's "reasonable price" benchmark was already double the pre-crisis norm, and actual contract prices have since drifted above it.
AEMO publishes an annual forecast of whether the southern states will have enough gas on the coldest, highest-demand days of the year. The current edition pushes the risk out to 2029 — a year later than the previous edition said. That movement is the most important fact on this page: a forecast is a forecast, and this one has already changed once.
An LPG forklift fleet is not insulated from the wholesale gas story — bottled LPG comes from the same east-coast gas market that sets industrial contract prices. Here is what that exposure actually looks like in running-cost terms, and why it is a real factor behind fleets moving to electric.
A cold storage facility's energy bill is not spread evenly across lighting, HVAC and refrigeration. One system dominates, by a wide margin, and knowing that changes where an energy review should actually start.
Australia's own government assessment has found the country is using more refrigerant than it is legally importing, propped up by stockpiles built before quota controls began. For a cold store still running older plant, that is a capital-planning issue, not a compliance footnote.
A warehouse combines two things commercial solar economics reward most: a large, mostly unshaded roof, and a load profile concentrated in daylight hours. A federal policy change taking effect from October 2026 makes the middle size of system — the size most warehouses actually need — more predictable to finance.
A commercial battery earns its keep against a demand charge by discharging into a known peak window, not by storing energy generally. Whether that pays off depends heavily on how large and how predictable your peak actually is — and, in NSW, a new incentive scheme changes the math from September 2026.
Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia each run their own energy efficiency scheme with business-specific activities, and each is moving at its own pace. Some incentives relevant to a warehouse or cold store are new; at least one is currently suspended pending review. Here is what each state actually offers, checked directly with the regulator where possible.
NABERS Energy for Warehouses and Cold Stores is a purpose-built rating for this building type, not a generic office scheme applied loosely. Here is what it launched to measure, and what it does and does not tell you.