The figure alone explains the issue: electricity that is not lost on the grid is electricity that we did not have to generate, purchase, or transport. Every percentage point saved from losses improves the economics of the entire system, as grid efficiency means a generation plant we do not see.
However, our success in increasing the share of renewable energy has presented a new challenge: the sun and wind have become a fundamental part of the electricity mix, but the sun produces intensely during the day, while demand peaks in the evening. The known solution is storage, but the question is whether we always need to build massive storage plants that the electrical system bears the full cost of.
Australia answered this question in a different way that is worth studying. It treated home batteries as part of the energy infrastructure, not just as a means to reduce the citizen's bill. Through a government program, households and small businesses now receive support of nearly 30% of the initial battery cost, aiming to increase the system's ability to store cheap solar energy during the day and use it when demand is high.
The result was seen on the grid itself. In the first quarter of 2026, home and grid batteries transferred 1,115 megawatts from daytime to evening peak hours, easing price pressure during high demand periods. More than 400,000 home batteries were added in the twelve months leading up to July 2026, and households combining solar panels with batteries clearly had lower bills than those relying solely on the grid.
What prevents Jordan from turning some of its consumers into partners in managing the grid? A system can be designed to encourage the installation of batteries in homes and factories and connect them to a smart system that calls upon stored energy during peak hours. The consumer pays a lower bill, distribution companies ease peak pressure, the national system reduces the operation of the most expensive generation units, and the economy avoids investments built to cover only a few hours of the highest demand of the year. When the small battery is repeated thousands of times, it becomes a virtual storage plant of national size.
The regulatory environment for this shift is already taking shape. Time-of-use tariffs give consumers better prices outside peak hours and an incentive to change their consumption patterns. The Energy and Mineral Resources Regulatory Commission has explicitly stated that the benefits of these tariffs are doubled when renewable energy storage systems are available, charged outside peak hours and discharged during them. Current application has shown that shifting 25% of loads outside peak times will achieve annual savings for the covered sectors.
From here, it is difficult to justify investing billions of dollars in new generation capacity, then letting some of the electricity be lost on the grid, and operating expensive plants to cover a peak that lasts only a few hours, while part of this demand can be managed with storage and smart tariffs. The next step is to move from the concept of the consumer to the concept of the 'consumer producer and storer', through a national model that combines well-thought-out incentives for home, commercial, and industrial batteries, smart meters, time-of-use tariffs, and connecting qualified batteries to a central management system or virtual power plants.
This does not eliminate the need for large storage projects. Jordan needs a balanced mix of centralized and decentralized storage, and the strategy itself is moving towards introducing batteries and pump storage projects. The Ministry has announced a direction towards storage projects reaching hundreds of megawatts before 2030. But the grid we plan for today will not be a grid that produces electricity from a limited number of plants and sells it to consumers waiting for the bill. It will be a grid that deals with millions of points of production, storage, and consumption simultaneously. This is the real test for the coming decade.
The 113 million Jordanian dinars saved in 2025 proved that efficiency translates into budget figures, and the next savings are in homes and factories: in every battery installed at the right time, every load shifted outside peak hours, and every kilowatt-hour not lost on the grid. The cheapest electricity in Jordan over the next ten years will be the one we do not need to generate.
