Aussie bankers are finally investing in solar farms!
It can get a bit tiring sitting here at SQHQ listening to the solar narks peddling the age old line that “solar is completely uneconomic and will destroy our precious mining economy”.
Luckily a solar milestone flashed by our radar last week which drives yet another nail into the argument put forward by those who think that open cast mining is the true path to a 21st century economy.
This one certainly deserves a mention, partly because yet another box has been ticked along the way to the construction of a major Aussie solar farm but also because of its highly symbolic nature. Which may well be a very positive sign for the future of solar power in this country.
Banks Scrambling To Invest In Solar Farms
I’m talking about the news last week that the Spanish renewable energy giant FRV is in the final stages of awarding the financial mandate for the Royalla solar farm — on the outskirts of Canberra — to two Australian banks. This extended leg of the negotiations is drawing to a close after FRV checked the credentials of eight banks who wanted in on the action including some from overseas.
The highly symbolic nature of the process? Two things. That at 20 MW this will be Australia’s biggest solar farm and, perhaps more importantly, the first to be financed by Australian banks.
One of the keys to the future of solar energy — and renewable energy in general — is whether or not major projects such as Royalla has the banks support. Only banks (and Warren Buffet) can offer the type of long term funding capability needed to finance projects such as major solar farms.
The notoriously conservative banks have always been wary of funding new technology however the Royalla farm may act as a game changer with miserly bank managers all over the nation digging deep into their moth ridden pockets as funding for solar energy — previously a trickle — becomes a flood.
Too optimistic readers? Maybe? After all the shortfall for the remainder of the funding will be guaranteed by the hard-working ACT taxpayers (at about $13 per household per year). Perhaps the bottom-line conscious, balance sheet-wielding bank investors look upon this a less of a financial risk? However maybe, just maybe, the funding tide has turned in favour of solar energy.
Now FRV just needs to work on some local residents who don’t seem to be looking forward to the wonderful sight that is an 83,000 panel solar farm silently generating pollution free electricity:
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Which banks?? I have to sell their shares quickly before the losses show up in their financial returns.
ANZ, Macquarie, NAB, Westpac
“Too optimistic readers? Maybe? After all the shortfall for the remainder of the funding will be guaranteed by the hard-working ACT taxpayers (at about $13 per household per year). ”
Well of course Rich; if I was a bankster and realised that what ever happened; the black hole where profits are supposed to be is going to be filled up from unwitting tax payers via their govt – I would say that is a great investment!
The Rockefellers have gotten out of big carbon, because they sense that enormous losses are coming to that industry, due to cheap solar energy. I’ve said this before but 25% of Australia’s desert, is a Trillion square meters, enough to make a trillion tons of liquid hydrogen, a year. Souds impossible to ship, no that’s 20,000 ultra tankers, 10 offshore fueling rigs, each filling 6 ultra tankers at 50 million tons per day, or 60X50 million tons X 365 days a year.
We will be farming the sun, at 50 times the efficiency of bio fuels, mining the seas, for desalination water, turned into hydrogen through electrolysis. 3 billion tons a day of liquid hydrogen a day, 365 days a year and it can happen in just a decade. 1915 to 1925 they went from steam and horsepower, to cars and trucks, radio and electricity, in a single decade.
correction: bankers never put their hands in their own pockets – they put them in yours….