(AU SMH) Tenants And Apartment Owners To Benefit From New Solar Power Scheme

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

The third of Australian households now locked out of solar power because they are renters or lack suitable roof-space for solar cells could soon save money and cut greenhouse gas emissions under a shared solar power ownership model.

A “solar garden” being installed on the rooftop of North Coast Community Housing in 2019.

In Lismore an alliance of community groups raised money to have 35.5 kilowatts of solar cells installed on the roof of the offices of North Coast Community Housing, with the extra cash from excess power generated being returned to tenants and community groups such as Brunswick Marine Rescue.

Each of the households who were part of the scheme received a credit of about $580 on their annual power bill last year.

That relatively small so-called “solar garden” will be dwarfed by a second project soon to built on farmland at Grong Grong, in the Riverina, where people will be able to purchase “plots” in a 1 megawatt solar garden, an installation large enough to supply power to about 333 homes.

Those who buy plots in what will be known as the Haystacks solar garden can expect to pay between $4000 and $4200 for a 3KW virtual plot, a price that is likely to be slightly cheaper than installing a similar-sized unit on their own roof.

Felicity Stening, managing director of Enova Community Energy, the energy retailer linked to the two solar gardens, says a similar model has worked well in the United States but has not yet taken off in Australia, in part due to regulations that have not kept up with new ownership models.

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“It took a number of years just to have the ATO recognise that the credit on the solar power bills should be GST free,” she said.

But she added that while Australia has the world’s largest uptake of domestic solar power, about 30 per cent of the nation’s households don’t have ready access to suitable roof space for their own solar panels.

Some live in apartments, others are tenants. Kristy Walters of Community Power Agency said some people want access to solar but do not want to cut trees down that shade and cool their homes.

A survey published on Tuesday by Energy Consumers Australia shows interest is high in new models of community ownership of solar power systems.

The survey, which has been assessing public sentiment over consumer energy issues twice a year for six years, found 55 per cent of all consumers said they were interested in buying power from a local community solar garden, and 71 per cent of family households expressed interest in doing so.

Labor’s energy plan, released earlier this month, includes a commitment to co-invest $100 million to support the creation of 85 solar banks, which would operate akin to the solar gardens.

Labor says the policy could allow more than 25,000 households to share in the benefits of solar power through a co-operative ownership model.

The Energy Consumers Australia survey, conducted by Essential Research, found that as energy prices stabilised over the past year, general satisfaction with energy services improved.

It found 82 per cent of household and small business electricity consumers were satisfied with their service, up 4 per cent from December 2020, and 67 per cent of households said they were satisfied with the value for money offered by their electricity service, up 31 per cent since the survey’s low point of December 2017.

“We’ve seen consumer confidence and positivity around energy rising steadily since 2017 and that has continued in the past year,” Energy Consumers Australia chief executive Lynne Gallagher said.

She said the influx of renewable energy into our system, paired with greater monitoring and enforcement powers for the ACCC, had brought down prices and consumers had noticed the improvement.

But she added that the survey showed consumers wanted more options and more creative thinking about how they and their neighbours might generate and store energy as a net-zero future approaches.

Links

• (AU SMH) NSW’s New England Renewable Energy Zone Sparks Flurry Of Interest
• (AU ABC) Study Finds Green Roofs Make Solar Panels More Efficient
• (AU The Guardian) Solar Power In Australia Outstrips Coal-Fired Electricity For First Time
• (New Yorker) Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap
• (Carbon Tracker) The Sky’s The Limit: Solar And Wind Energy Potential Is 100 Times As Much As Global Energy Demand
• New Report Hails The Decade Of Renewables As 2020 Hits Capacity Record
• 8 Reasons Why The Political Argument Against Climate Action Is Wrong