And it’s on for young and old! It was a race to the wardrobe to find the hi-visibility vests and hard hats as soon as our PM got the nod for an early election last week. Breathless, the two have traversed the land in the first week, trying to appear with as many workers and small business people as possible to squeeze in one camera shot. [Read more…]
Supply charges have no place in a 21st Century electricity network.
Do you know what I hate? What I truly despise? What causes black bile to bubble up from the deepest, darkest depths of my soul? Supply charges on electricity bills. [Read more…]
Government backed CEFC has joined forces with ET Solar Panels to power large Aussie businesses.
What do ET Solar Australia and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) have up their sleeves to promote ET solar panels for large commercial businesses in our country?
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And more than one model for financing solar energy. This was amply demonstrated last week with the release of the CEFC’s plan to stump up $20 million with the solar energy provider ET Solar in a new innovative partnership that has proved radically successful in overseas countries. [Read more…]
SA takes the medal for most solar systems per household.
The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show one in five households use some form of solar energy. The figures back anecdotal and other statistical evidence of a massive growth surge for solar that has occurred since the ABS first began publishing statistics on solar energy, back in 2011.
Then the figures were comparatively low with only around five percent of households using solar energy, said the ABS’ Karen Connaughton in a 3/12/2014 press release. However the change in just three years has been dramatic.
“Jump just three years, to 2014, and there are solar panels being used by fourteen per cent of all households.”, she said.
Add to this solar hot water and the numbers of households using solar energy in one form or another has jumped to 20 percent. [Read more…]
Were Victorians Sick Of the Liberal’s Anti Renewables Agenda?
Sometimes satire says it best. As one superbly entertaining online news company put it, this week saw the Victorian electorate dump “Whatisname” in favour of “Thatotherguy”. Labor’s Daniel Andrews (“Thatotherguy”) gave the federal Liberals a huge shake when he ousted the Liberal Party’s Denis Napthine, the first time since 1955 that a Victorian government has been ousted in one term. However we at SolarQuotes are digging deeper, asking how much the federal government’s prolonged and rasping attack on renewable energy played its part in the Vic Libs’ stunning loss. [Read more…]
Are solar roofs making solar power stations uneconomic?
Utility scale solar, or solar farms, are fields of PV panels which generate electricity that is fed directly into the grid. Currently we don’t have much of this in Australia. Over 99% of our solar capacity is point of use which is mostly on rooftops and the juice it does produce is first used to power the household or business it is on top of and then after that the excess is generally fed into the grid. [Read more…]
Pylons carrying electricity at $0.005 per kWh. Last Saturday.
I was at home on a cloudy Saturday morning in Adelaide last week, performing some much needed repairs on my puppets in between refreshing my knowledge of chemistry. (Apparently everything is still made of atoms.) Then I noticed through a crack in the wall that the sun had come out and I opened the electrically operated steel shutters to see that, although there were still patches of cloud around, most of Adelaide was bathed in glorious noon sunshine.
On a whim I decided to check what effect this break in the weather had on grid demand and so I went to the Australian Electricity Market Operator’s site. Fortunately I could do this via internet and so didn’t have far to walk. I saw there had been quite a steep decline in demand which apparently had gone hand in hand with the clearing skies. [Read more…]
The sweep of Coalition victories throughout the land has been abated with the narrow victory of the incumbent Weatherill government in South Australia but what does this mean for solar power policy?
As the always perceptive Giles Parkinson points out in his regular column for RenewEconomy, there is now some push back from state politicians over solar energy policy throughout the country. This (perhaps) as they understand (a) that the rest of the world is already moving towards a renewable future and (b) most importantly, ordinary Aussies have voted with their rooftops for a solar power policy.
“.. the return of the Jay Weatherill Labor government in Adelaide, the election of Will Hodgman in Tasmania, and the ambition of the ACT Labor government means that there are some counters to the apparently ideologically driven opposition to renewables in the federal government,” said Mr Parkinson. [Read more…]
Crowd Funding Solar Is A Growing Trend
Will crowdfunding solar replace more traditional methods of funding solar energy readers?
At the time of writing we appear to be headed for a clean sweep of conservative governments across Australia (with the exception of the outpost of ACT). Though it is possible that the relatively progressive Weatherill government may retain government in South Australia through postal votes, it must be considered that the governments throughout the country will trend away towards support for renewable energy including solar.
Perhaps the relevant question is: Would this be a bad thing? [Read more…]
The news of a Inquiry into Solar at Port Augusta is awesome! But let’s hope it is not hijacked by vested interests…
Recent efforts by solar activists to force the South Australian government to replace the current coal-fired station at Port Augusta with a solar thermal power station appear to have borne some fruit. Last week SA Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis announced the setting up of an inquiry into the feasibility of building a solar thermal power plant to replace the ageing fossil fuel plants that currently supply 40 percent of SA’s energy. [Read more…]
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