With families facing increasing energy costs and the indication that the current state government intends to remove the subsidy on solar power, I will advocate that this decision be re-examined.
The popularity of the scheme has been its own downfall. As more solar systems are added, more financial strain is placed on the electricity providers who have to buy back any unused energy from the consumer. As the number of premises creating their own energy increases, less is purchased from the supplier and therefore their revenues are reduced. To make up the difference, the price of energy goes up. Creating more demand for people to go solar. The root cause of this issue is the requirement for the electricity provider to purchase at a higher rate than they charge the consumer. If the buyback rate was equal to the purchase rate some of the financial pressures would be lessened.
Unfortunately, this is not the only reason energy charges are increasing. The extra load on the electricity infrastructure caused by the increase in the mount of available energy on the grid at any particular time means that the energy companies have increased maintenance costs.
One major issue I experienced personally during the 2011 floods was having lost power from the main grid.
While I had a perfectly good working mini-power station on my roof, it was totally useless.
The rectifier, the device which turns your direct current energy from the solar panels into alternating current to be fed to the grid, requires two separate power sources to work.
So, it needs both the external grid feed, and the solar cells to be generating at the same time to activate.
Technically, there is no reason why, in cases of emergency, the cells cannot provide energy to your house without the grid feed. It would simply be a matter of correct wiring and adding additional fuse protection.
At least households could run refrigerators to save food from spoiling.
Many homes in Queensland still rely on on-site waste water treatment. This requires pumps, and pumps require electricity.
The pubic uptake of this clean energy alternative has been amazing. In fact it has become so popular that the Federal government intends reducing or removing the subsidy. click HERE to read the relevant news article.
As of September 2011 it was estimated that 1 in 15 homes in Queensland had opted into the solar scheme.
You could easily ask the question, if it’s so good why do power prices keep going up. There are a number of factors involved. Solar is not 'Base Load'. This means it cannot be relied upon to continually produce the same amount of energy, 24x7. It is totally dependent on the weather. No sun = No output.
You cannot effectively store the excess energy you are creating.
Imagine a suburb of 100 homes. If each had a 1.5KW solar system.
Take an average day. The systems are putting out 1.3kw each.
There is now 130kw of energy being fed to the grid. It is not like water where you can let some run off and store it somewhere.
It is limited to physical boundaries. You would have seen power transformers on lamp posts around many suburbs. Imagine this as a one way value.
Energy gets fed from the 11kva lines, which are the main carrier feed to these transformers which then step it down to around 440v 3-phase, which is carried on 3 wires. It is then delivered to your home on 2 wires as 1/2 of that, 220v-240v.as normal household supply.
The transformers do not work in reverse. They cannot take energy from the 240v side and feed it back into the 11kv side. It’s like trying to push water up hill. The amount coming down is greater so it cannot happen.
What this means is your solar energy is only available to yourself and your immediate neighbors within the geographic boundaries of those transformers.
There have been cases of transformers being damaged because there is too much excess energy.
When there is excess energy, it has to be dissipated someway. You cannot destroy energy, you can only convert it. So, in this case it gets converted into heat.
Now you can see the problem being faced by the electricity providers.
They have an infrastructure which was not designed to carry so much energy and constantly need to upgrade. At the same time, they have to pay households who have solar panels for each KW hour they produce.
This then effectively reduces the amount of money they have to upgrade, so they have to increase the price.
It's a vicious circle.
One suggestion might be to adjust the feed in rate to make the costs neutral. Households get paid the exact same amount as they are being charged by their provider.
However, that does not address to issue of the householder wanting to recoup the cost of their solar system.
It may well be worth investigating the possibility of linking the price of carbon to households with solar systems.
Examine the energy calculations from Origin Energy.(Qld)
http://www.originenergy.com.au/files/hep_sm10.pdf
From their calculations, if you take the potential size of a solar installation i.e. 2kw you should be able to calculate how many kg of carbon it can save a year.
For Queensland multiply by 1.04.
And you must remember you are never going to get 2kw output of any 2kw installation, it’s not physically possible due to various factors.
But if we assume we get an average of 1.5kw/hour over a 10 hour period during a day. We get a total of 15kw per day. At best we can expect 5475kw/year.
This would mean that particular household has saved ( 5475 x1.04 ) 5694kg of carbon.
With the carbon price of $23/tonne the carbon credits should be equal to $130.94.
A tax deduction of $130 should be allowed.
We no longer have a situation where the energy provider has to pay their customers for energy. It becomes revenue neutral. The money they save is then able to be used to upgrade their infrastructure. This should, in turn, begin to minimize the need for price increases.
Again, making an assumption that energy costs 20c/kwh the household can save $1095 on their energy bill. Which would mean after 4 years the system has almost paid for itself.
While the numbers here are purely speculative and there is a huge number of factors which can make it change for the better or worse, I think the basic idea is sound and I would actively campaign for this to be implemented.
Read more details on Carbon Pricing
* Greenhouse gas conversion from National Greenhouse Accounts (NGA) Factors Handbook, Australian Government, Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency - 29 June 2009.