Rooftop solar customers are losing their subsidies.

South Australian solar panel owners will be hit with higher power bills from this week, after the bonus feed-in tariff for feeding energy into the grid was ended.

By January 1 2017, hundreds of thousands of early adopters of rooftop solar across South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria will be paying more.

The Australian Energy Council said the incentives were designed to get rooftop solar up and running, which it has now done.

“To date the overly generous feed-in tariffs have been paid for by all South Australian households who've had to subsidise these very generous feed-in tariffs,” Sarah McNamara from the Australian Energy Council told the ABC.

“Which has paid people with solar panels a rate above and beyond that which would represent the actual value of the energy they're producing.”

But pro-solar lobbying group Solar Citizens says the amount paid for excess energy is too low.

“The price now paid in NSW, for example, where there's no regulated minimum price is about a quarter of the price of grid electricity,” a spokesperson for the group said.

“So effectively someone with solar is having their electricity bought for 6 cents by a retailer, sold to a neighbour for four times that amount.”

Solar Citizens rep Reece Turner is worried that the energy regulator in South Australia will scrap the minimum retailer feed-in tariff, as NSW did.

“To say the retail market, or the electricity market in general is competitive in South Australia, that's a claim made from a different planet,”

The Australian Energy Council says it worked well in south-east Queensland.

“Retailers are offering amounts varying from 4 cents per kilowatt hour, up to 11 cents per kWh,” Ms McNamara said.

“So there's a diversity in Queensland that tells us that healthy competition amongst retailers would occur even without that base rate being set.”