The "peak" price they're talking about on that page is the average spot price over the peak electricity consumption time (7AM to 10PM weekdays).

It's not the highest spot price seen in the market. This time of year the east coast electricity market seldom spikes, but if you go to the historical data page you can see that in January this year the 30 minute spot price in Tasmania spiked above $2000/MWh four times (22-Jan 17:00, 23-Jan 12:30, 23-Jan 13:30 and 30-Jan 16:00).

There are many things you can defer, even at home. Mostly A/C related, but stuff like a self-cleaning oven or a clothes dryer doesn't need to run in the instant, necessarily. The dryer might be able to wait a few hours once the clothes are a bit dry (due to mold and such), as it needs to be ready when you get to it in the morning/afternoon. Until then, it only needs to prevent the clothes from water damage.

The oven can maybe just wait a day or a week even to clean itself. It usually works fine even if partially dirty, and just causes some smell due to thermally decomposing food contamination (cheese drips from pizza, etc.).

I don't need to defer anything, as I'm on a flat rate. I don't like peak metering, as it would forces me to micromanage things in a way that doesn't work for me.

I don't have a clothes dryer, they use too much energy. I just hand my clothes on an indoor clothes airer and blow a fan on them. I usually leave the heat pump set to 16 degrees C while I'm out, the combination of mild air temp and the fan dries most of my clothes over night anyway.

Hadn't even heard of a self cleaning over. I don't bake a lot, so there's that.

It seems odd that you worry about the energy a dryer uses, yet set your thermostat to 16 degrees when you're not even in.

Depends on whether they live somewhere hot or somewhere cold.

Youre Right! Parent is apparently from Tasmania, which I lumped together with the rest of Australia as "damn hot", while that apparently isn't the case at all.

Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth. Everywhere on the south coast of Australia experiences winters that necessitate heating, though perhaps not left on constantly.

That seems very odd to me. Maybe Australian regulations or trade situation is different and makes the math different, but in my area (SoCal), TCO for my rooftop solar installation was $0.08/KWh using a Net Present Value calculation, and utility solar is more than 2x cheaper than that. It’s very odd to hear wholesale prices above 10c when rooftop is so cheap.

Not really addressing your point, but a sidenote on the topic of Australian regulations -- Due to some subsidies/incentive schemes which came through in some states about 10 years ago, some residential Australian rooftop solar installations are selling any excess into the grid at a rate of 0.44/KWh and will be until (from memory) 2024.

Here the connection charge is less than $0.50 a day and electric is $0.095 per kWh.

(those are the retail prices for a small US town that isn't particularly close to any power plant)

Companies also need to pay tax and other per-kWh costs on top of the spot price: are you taking that into account?