Leading energy efficiency expert Alan Pears has written extensively on the issue. He laments how power companies have been given a misguided sense of entitlement when it comes to making a buck. They expect over-sized profits and governments are happy to oblige them. The sizeable donations they give to Labor and the Liberals doesn't hurt their cause, either. Policymakers continue to protect the electricity industry from change and discriminate against emerging technologies, ensuring the status quo continues.

Partly it's due to governments – both Labor and Liberals – cowing to the demands of profit-hungry electricity companies who are chasing the bottom line before the coal industry inevitably closes up shop. And partly it's due to a lack of vision from governments who can't seem to imagine our electricity system being any different to how it is now.

It's a greedy mark-up that only serves to line the pockets of power companies, and it's being facilitated by the Victorian government. So why is the government doing this, when it should want to encourage renewable energy?

But since January 1, these households are now paid between 5 and 7¢ – even though electricity companies can on-sell that very same electricity for up to 29¢ per kilowatt hour. This means your power company can now pay you 5¢ for solar energy you produce, and then charge your neighbour 29¢ per kilowatt hour for using it, even though the electrons have only travelled next door.

Victorians with rooftop solar are being ripped off. The state Labor government recently ended the Transitional Feed-in Tariff (TFiT) scheme and the Standard Feed-in Tariff scheme (SFiT). Over the past five years, these schemes had ensured solar owners were paid at least 25¢ per kilowatt hour for energy they fed back into the grid.

A fair feed-in tariff for solar power should be the same amount that it costs to buy the energy from an electricity company – the 1-for-1 unit price previously provided by the SFiT scheme. Pears outlines that research on the implementation of a 1-for-1 feed-in tariff in other jurisdictions finds the benefits outweigh the costs and that fair feed-in-tariffs impose no significant price increase for other customers without solar panels. In fact, rooftop solar brings down wholesale electricity prices, lowering electricity prices for everyone.

Solar households have done the hard work to stump up the capital to buy the solar panels. They have saved our community money by not needing extra grid infrastructure, and they have also made a contribution to mitigating climate change. Why should an energy company be the one to make a huge profit from the investment of solar households across Victoria?

The government claims that the higher feed-in tariffs served to attract initial investment in solar energy, and can now be retired having done that job. But this logic only makes sense if you're thinking within the scope of four-year election terms and don't want to incentivise any more solar power into the future.

In reality, we're facing long-term challenges in climate change, natural disasters, energy insecurity, and more. Solar energy isn't a temporary solution to a temporary problem – renewables are our future and must be encouraged.Cutting the solar feed-in-tariff also has an ugly social consequence that the government has conveniently ignored. If we do not incentivise solar households to stay on the grid, through fair feed-in-tariffs, they will simply buy batteries (like the Tesla powerwall) and go "off-grid", storing their energy for when they need it themselves rather than feeding it into the grid. While this sounds attractive for an individual, it could have terrible consequences for our energy system, as only those who can afford batteries go off-grid.

This leaves fewer people (mostly lower-income households) on the grid. The dwindling numbers of people left on the grid will be responsible for the costs of maintaining it, which will get more expensive as more people leave. This is not a fair situation, especially for Victoria's lower-income families who'll be left holding the can. In the next decade solar will be the cheapest source of power in the world, and Australia is an untapped goldmine. Rooftops across the country could be put to work creating clean, cheap electricity. But this will only happen if our leaders, like Premier Daniel Andrews, get out of the old way of thinking about power and follow evidence-based policy which says feed-in-tariffs for solar must be set much be higher.