WA gets more sunshine than other parts of Australia
so why aren't solar panels more common? Image
courtesy of iStockphoto

Western Australia should adopt a feed-in tariff electricity to promote solar energy use to capitalise on the State’s abundant sunshine.

According to Brooke Miller, regional director of BP Solar Australasia, the WA Government and those of other States should follow the lead of South Australia and introduce such a tariff to encourage households and businesses to sell their excess solar energy back to the grid.

Ms Miller made the call last week at a function in Perth organised by the WA Sustainable Energy Association, the peak business body for the sustainable energy industry in WA.

“Australia is the sunniest continent on earth, it is a solar nation but not a solar-powered nation – although it has the potential to be,” she said.

“We have the know-how … and we have the industry capability.”

In February, South Australia passed legislation so that that households and small energy consumers using solar panels will be paid twice the value of electricity they put back into the electricity grid.

The move makes the purchase of a photovoltaic (PV) solar unit more economic and has been widely hailed as an improvement on previous arrangements where surplus power was only matched dollar for dollar.

Ms Miller said there were plenty of Australians willing to embrace rooftop PV solar cell systems to produce their electricity needs and sell any excess.

“Since the increase in the PV rebate program last year, Australian families and households are embracing the technology like never before,” she said.

“The Australian business community is also awaiting the opportunity to turn their roofs into power plants.

“Part of our quest is to make everyone the CEO of their own power station – homeowners, small business, big business, farmers, government.”

Ms Miller said over the past five or 10 years Australia had slipped in its efforts to be a leading solar nation.

“In fact, there are about 46 countries around the world that have adopted these feed-in tariff laws, and they have overtaken our place as the leader in solar,” she said.

“We urge WA and all State leaders to make that choice and act with speed and determination to make Australia a solar nation through the adoption of effective feed-in tariffs across the country.”

Ms Miller’s call was echoed by the Sustainable Energy Association, which says Western Australia is ideal for solar power.

For instance, Perth receives more average daily sunshine than any other state capital in Australia, according to Bureau of Meteorology data.

“Yet we’ve gone backwards in solar in some ways,” says Dr Ray Wills, CEO of the WA Sustainable Energy Association.

“In 1992, according to an ABS survey in Perth, 26 per cent of houses in WA had solar hot water systems on their roofs.

“In 2006, when the survey was repeated, 13.5 per cent of houses had solar hot water systems, so we’ve gone backwards – and by half.”

But during that same period, he says West Australians really took in the message about saving water; with 30 per cent of homes having a dual flush toilet in 1992, a figure that climbed to more than 90 per cent by 2006.

“We got the message on water, but we lost the message on (solar) energy somehow,” he says.

So why hasn’t WA adopted a feed-in tariff for solar energy systems?

“We’ve been avoiding it. The arguments are there have been other mechanisms put in place to encourage people to take up PV, so we don’t need a feed-in tariff as well,” he says.

“But the reality is we need to change our energy use patterns so quickly that we need every tool in our tool kit to ensure renewable energy is being taken up and the supply of renewable energy is displacing the use of fossil fuels so that we don’t emit greenhouse gases.”

Dr Wills says it’s imperative for WA to take a leaf out of South Australia’s book.

“Absolutely, SA is really leading Australia in a lot of their renewable energy policies, they’ve got a very active program to establish wind power in SA, and the other states on the east coast are also working very aggressively to be a part of that picture,” he says.

“WA really is lagging behind other states in our approach to this issue and we need to get on board and really start to do something about establishing the solar energy, and more broadly, the renewable energy industries in WA.”