Solar News -FiTs and Pricing

A couple of good news stories emerged this last week or so regarding home Photovoltaic (PV)  installations. The first story -" Solar Installations celebrate Grid Parity" was very interesting particularly as it followed closely on from the Victorian State Government announcement concerning a Transitional Feed in Tariff (FiT's) which will replace the Premium FiT many early adopters (like me) were lucky enough to get.
The goal of Grid Parity for solar was something I have been long awaiting, but am interested to hear that the Photovoltaic Association thinks we are attaining this so soon after the introduction of the recent set of incentives.
The second story by The Age reporter Paddy Manning showed over 418,000 households are generating more than 1.1 gigawatts of power from Photovoltaics. His comment "..there's mounting evidence FiTs are helping to reduce energy demand, defer infrastructure spending and lower overall electricity prices - contrary to the idea that paying some home owners an FiT increases prices for everybody else" This is good news indeed for those of us who felt investing money into home electricity generation was a sound investment.


It seems that contrary to the naysayers, FiT's and PV schemes are both helping to reduce power demand and reduce the cost of delivering these technologies to consumers, sufficently so to help make solar of similar price to electricity generated by coal stations and delivered to our houses via current power infrastructure.


My current electricity bill showed a small amount of electricity was fed back into the grid, even from a 1kWH system, 4 person home in cloudy, wintry Melbourne.

While changes to various FiT' schemes will reduce the incentives for more households to invest in rooftop PV, as well as probably the jobs available in these industries, we now have good evidence of the overall worth to both the economy and individuals. As often is the case, appropriate environmental ideas will provide sound  economies for households as well as the wider world.