Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Who could have seen this coming? Comfortable middle class householders making money selling rooftop solar back to the grid, cash strapped governments greedy for new sources of revenue…
Rooftop solar panel owners could be getting charged fees to sell energy back to the grid
By Nick Harmsen
Posted Thursday 16 July 2020 at 8:35pmHouseholders with rooftop solar panels and batteries have reacted with fury to proposals which could see them charged for exporting power to the electricity grid.
Over the past decade, state governments have actively incentivised households to feed their solar into the grid, by offering generous feed-in tariff schemes. Most have now closed to new entrants.
But now, welfare groups and transmission company SA Power Networks (SAPN) have asked the Australian Energy Markets Commission to change market rules to allow charging of household exporters.
They argue that under the current system, households without solar could be unfairly burdened with the cost of augmenting power networks to cope with the increase of new panels, which is already placing a strain on the network in states with heavy solar penetration like South Australia.
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Solar owners furious
The idea has drawn a furious response from many solar panel owners, including Adelaide man Michael Preus.
“People will just disconnect them, and tell them to get stuffed, that’s what I would do,” he said.
Mr Preus said he had installed his household solar PV system to save money and help the environment, but was now questioning his investment.
“We’ll never, ever in our lifetime recoup our investment, the return is just not there.”
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-16/rooftop-solar-owners-could-be-charged-to-sell-energy-to-the-grid/12461748
This move echoes the Spanish Government move to impose a “sun tax” in 2015, though they later cancelled the tax in 2018. Spain now encourages householders to invest in energy storage, “self consumption”, to avoid flooding the grid with power nobody wants, because solar power peaks at the wrong time of the day.
‘People will just disconnect them,‘
I think that’s the idea behind this tax😎.
Just get them off the grid and all the problems go away.
Best,
Willem
The only FAIR way to do this is to charge people for the potential sunshine that hits their property. Whether they choose to harvest the sunshine or not, they need to pay their fair share of taxes.
And to keep things really fair, all clouds, trees and other forms of shade are to be ignored. We must adjust the tax to be higher the further you are from the equator so that there is not a latitude-entitlement.
For places where people’s rooms are on top of other people’s rooms (Apartments, hotels) we’ll consider each level a separate potential space and tax all of them as if they were separate sunshine covered land. No height entitlements in THIS tax.
The tax will be set to the maximum recorded output for the sun and will include all wavelengths – no shirking this tax!
As soon as this tax is enacted, we can get on with doing something similar with wind taxes.
Regarding “because solar power peaks at the wrong time of the day.”: The link cites demand peaking at 7-8 PM, but in late October (in California). In the summer, more solar power is generated, and demand peaks at a sunnier time of the day due to air conditioning. And because buildings have thermal mass, air conditioning can be cranked up when solar panel output is at its peak so it can be used a little less in the hours after solar panel output peaks, when temperature typically peaks.
So the utilities encouraged destabilizing the grid with millions of individual solar contributions and now want to charge people to pay to help to fix the problem they created.
So much stupid, so little time to mock it all.
Solar/PVs never made economic sense. Why should government policies related to PVs? But government politics often do make economic sense for those who have the right connections and politics.
SA currently has a feed in tariff of about 8 AUDcents/kWhr compared to average ex generator price of AUD 6.7 cents. In Victoria it’s about AUD 10 cents. Clearly solar panel owners are being subsidised by all other electricity consumers. And in SA rooftop solar at midday delivers about 650 MW of total generation of 2300 MW. Wind delivers 900 MW. Wind subsidy comes from the right to sell clean energy certificates currently priced at AUD 4 cents as well as receiving the 6.7 cents wholesale price.
I notice my fellow South Australian Nick Stokes is awfully silent on the issue
Enjoying his taxpayer funded pension I would imagine.
They wouldn’t even let me in to SA at the moment.
Well silver linings and all that
There was a bloke who worked selling solar panel schemes to U.K. households, on behalf of a company that made its living in this trade. When he moved on from this, he found a new calling advising households who wanted to sue companies that had sold them solar panel schemes, for mis-selling. Customers had been told both that their investment would rapidly repay itself from the power supplied to their homes and the power sold to the grid, and that they were helping the environment. They believed all of these things. Have some sympathy for Mr Preus, who thought he was helping the environment. That’s what the liars told him. And credit to the man who worked selling the schemes, then moved on to helping to sue the sellers. It’s an ill wind… I expect we are going to see quite a lot of fluent and mendacious adaptability of that kind, as the renewable and electric promises hit reality and physics (I don’t have the details to hand, but I guess I could find them – it was something to write about in the newspapers)
MarkG says July 25, 2020 at 10:42 am
“when we can magic cars out of nowhere and power them with high-pressure unicorn farts which recharge them in five minutes…
Some of us remember how we were all soon going to driving electric cars in the 70s. New generations, same old claptrap.”
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And some of us remember that electric utility vehicles were in operation during the 1950’s in the UK, for delivery of bottles of milk to houses in the suburbs, in the early hours of the morning. Electric vehicles were used in order to avoid noise pollution which would have awakened people from their sleep too early.
As I’ve mentioned before, a major reason why clean and efficient electric vehicles have not already replaced those disgusting, noisy and polluting, petrol and diesel vehicles, is because alternative energy supplies, such as solar, are not yet sufficient to reliably recharge millions of vehicles.
In other words, if everyone were to drive electric cars, if would make the economy more reliant upon fossil fuels.
I recall the 3 wheeler ones used. I got a clip around the ear from the milkman when me and a bunch of other kids drove one off down the street in one!