Solar power in Australia
For anyone who cares, I now have about 1020w of solar panels on the garage! This is an initiative of the government,
which is going to run out or more accurately change for the worse at the end of june.
The government pay $8000 to you for a start, and then, (Clear solar) at least, sell off the RECs for, a further 1 or 2
thousand. The system as standard is about $13000 so after it all and any other discounts you can get, you can end up
paying between about $150 now, to a couple of grand which I did a couple of months back. It's certainly worth doing for
the cost of the thing is a tiny fraction of the worth of the parts, but there are some pitfalls, that the advertisers may
happen to neglect to mention! These tend to revolve around the power meter you need to fully optimize the government
rebates on this system. The first problem is that you may have a fair bit of trouble even getting the meter. I don't know
what the wait is for it, but I have heard it can be a while! The second one as described to me by one of the sparkies who
installed it, is that these meters apparently measure power usage in half hour blocks, with the peek power listed for that
half hour. Basically, this means that if you spend a minute boiling a kettle for a coffee, you'll pay for over 1kwh => 2400W
at half an hour. This *Really* sucks, as you really only used about 1/15th of that amount to achieve that. It also means
that if you use an air conditioner, you'll pay for half hour blocks of 3kw even if you only ran it for a couple of minutes. I
really hope this guy got it wrong, but I fear he knows exactly what he's talking about, So, Be ware! I might be better off
not to push too hard to get the meter changed over. At least although the old mechanicals are not able to graph time and
give you the large 60c/KWH credits for what the solar system pushes back into the grid, you at least pay for what you
really use. The old mechanical meters will spin backwards if you generate power, but you only sell it back at the 15c rate
you buy it for. The average is you use less power. The other question I must ask, is what these new meters do with bad
power factor. As most of us tend to apply inductive loads, so the current lags the voltage, they could well charge you the
peek for both! If anyone cares, I'll write here once I have the facts!
To RECS.
I should describe this as I understand it, as it was fun finding out, but thanks to Tiki for most of the explanation of them!
Basically, this is a gamble on the part of Clear solar, and maybe other companies, where they are assuming that Carbon
trading will definitely happen in this country, and that when it does, you have to pay for causing pollution. You can also
gain money for negative pollution, I.E. generating solar or wind power. RECS are like units of credit as a price for X
amount of CO2 emission. If you generate "clean" power, and you want to do the phone book of paperwork to prove it, you
can make money in this trading scheme. What Clear solar are gambling on is that you allow them to claim the credits of
your system for 15 years at what they perceive to be market prices. This currently comes to over $2000, so makes a nice
big cut in the price of getting a system installed They then (hopefully) are able to do all that hideous paperwork which you
or I probably never would bother with, and get that money back on the market, Probably bought by a big ugly company
who wants to make a mess of the place and are prepared to pay to do it!!! Of course, if the scheme never happens,
someone could get Very bankrupt, but they are gambling on it happening in the next few years.
The current price of electricity here is somewhere around 15c/KWH.
so if you run a 1000W heater for 1 hour it's 15c. That will vary with different re sellers, (Thanks To Geoff Kennett for
making a hideous mess of our power distribution here in Victoria) but it's a rough average. If you currently have off peek
power, usually on a mechanical timer here, or Solwega controlled in other states, you get power for about half that price.
The new meters will graph these times and can also detect if the current vs voltage reverses, which then gives you 60c,
Yes, 60c per KWH back for what your solar system pokes back into the grid. (I wonder if you get peek credit over half an
hour for that!) So, it's definitely best for people who go off to work during the day and turn everything off during that time.
The ideal is to use no power during the day so you send out all the power you can, and do the dishwasher, tumble dryer,
etc. after about 11 in the evening. I think it might also be worth having, if you can get it for anything resembling a
reasonable price, a battery storage system so you can charge it off peek, and run things from it during the day while your
solar inverter pumps the grid.
I'm still yet to figure out what exactly the government gets out of all this investment, but I'm not complaining!!!