While Prime Minister Julia Gillard has announced that she is going to help Australians save up to $250 dollars in Electricity bills (ha ha), the Queensland State Gvernment released its "Estimating a Fair and Reasonable Solar Feed-In Tariff for Queensland" draft report.
Both Julia's announcement and the draft Queensland report hold out little hope that small solar households will get any real reforms.
Crikey reports that 5 steps are needed to reform the energy market:
Crikey's first step Cost Reflective-Time and location variable charges talks about the need to accurately reflect costs at peak times. Crikey's report also indicates "existing electricity generators pay absolutely no fees for use of the network that delivers their electricity to customers’ doors. In combination with subsidies for rural consumers this distorts locational decisions around where to put these generators:"
Other comments including "state-government-owned networks have a very strong incentive to undertake more expenditure than necessary to maintain a reliable electricity supply"
This is interesting as the Queensland report talks about avoided network costs by PV customers - "The electricity distribution business is currently liable to pay the amount of the feed-in tariff which is then credited to the PV customer by the retailer" (p3). As distribution network charges are regulated , the costs incurred by the distribution business in funding the current Scheme (PV) are recovered through higher network charges for all customers"
Does that sound like the Electricity Distributors in Queensland are annoyed at subsidizing PV customers for generating electricity and using it without having the network charges levied? Even though the PV customers are doing what good citizens everywhere do, try to regulate their actions to reduce their own charges, including that of not needing so much network charges?
So it looks like the Queensland PV customers will be charged more for having avoided network costs plus have a reduced Feed-In Tariff, thus making sure the nascent PV industry will struggle to attract more customers. Thus allowing heavy users preference for using more electricity!
Crikey also reports "Network businesses are allowed to recover all their direct costs plus a margin thought to be necessary to raise finance from equity and debt markets." Looks like they also don't like a little local competition by cost effective PV units either.
Big corporations regulated by State Governments punishing little people for investing in local generation in this fashion will be a sure way to encourage a backlash. At least I hope so. The Conversation's Andrew Blakers article "Set reasonable PV feed-in-tariffs or expect perverse outcomes"also points out these issues.
I'm no expert, but having invested my $$ in doing something good for me and the environment, I will be quite peeved to see big business knocking back my initiative.
Just as well I'm not living in Queensland.
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Greenstone Girl