Parents Politely Pressuring Pollies To Pledge More Solar Schools

Australian Parents for Climate Action (AP4CA) is calling on parents to urge  federal election candidates to make a pledge to support the group’s Solar Our Schools initiative – and providing tools to do so.

Non-profit and non-partisan AP4CA is on a mission to help Australian parents, grandparents and carers advocate for climate action to ensure future generations have a half-decent planet to live on.

The group’s major campaign is Solar Our Schools, which it has been pursuing for the last few years.

Based on Beyond Zero Emissions’ Million Jobs Plan, it involves grants for solar panels and batteries to be installed at all schools and early childhood centres across Australia – but grants for privately-owned schools and for-profit early learning centres would be means-tested. AP4CA says the plan would create 7,000 renewable energy jobs across Australia, enable 4,000 more teaching jobs through energy bill savings and avoid 1.38 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year.

AP4CA states more than 12,000 parents have put their support behind Solar Our Schools.

Candidates taking the pledge to support the rollout of solar and batteries for schools and early childhood centres in their electorates will get some warm and fuzzy coverage of their action through the group, however, AP4CA stresses:

“We do not endorse the party or candidate, instead, we celebrate their support for the Solar Our Schools policy.”

AP4CA says it aims to make climate action a non-partisan issue and to create a “race to the top” in embracing shovel-ready climate solutions.

Approaching Candidates Made Simple

AP4CA is providing various resources for parents wanting to put a bit of polite pressure on candidates to take the pledge. These include a tool that identifies and can send out an email with related text to the person’s local candidates; but specific candidates can be targeted and the text edited to suit. AP4CA encourages using the tool to approach all candidates in a person’s electorate at once, “to create a fair and level playing field”.

Thousands of schools across Australia already have solar panels installed, largely thanks to the National Solar Schools Program (NSSP), which resulted in a total of 4,897 systems installed by the time the program ended back in 2013. However, even with various initiatives at a state/territory level¹ since that time and the fact Australia’s solar rebate is available to schools, there are still bunch without solar panels, most wouldn’t have batteries and many systems installed under the NSSP were quite small by today’s standards.

Commercial solar systems are a perfect fit for most schools given their rooftop areas and electricity consumption profiles. Even if a school can’t achieve outright ownership for whatever reason, power purchase agreements (PPAs) can be entered into whereby a third party installs, owns and operates the system and sells the electricity generated to the school at a rate that can be lower than conventional mains supply.

The installation of solar panels can also provide great educational opportunities for students and encourage others in a school’s community to install a system of their own.