Page 546 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 21 February 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
He goes on:
All that said, the most important contribution from rooftop solar is through the “merit order effect”, explained in a recent paper by the University of Melbourne’s energy research institute, which showed electricity production from rooftop solar is brilliantly timed for when we’re inside and running our airconditioners and can substantially reduce the wealth transfer from ordinary electricity consumers to big power generators. Eighty-five per cent of the time, during peak demand periods when the highest prices occur in the electricity market, rooftop solar is there to dampen, reduce and keep a lid on extreme prices.
At just 3000 megawatts of solar, which is what Germany installed in December during the Christmas holiday break, we would be paying at least a billion dollars less for our electricity, amounting to a more significant saving on bills than if we choose not to encourage people to put more solar on their roofs.
Today the government—
the New South Wales government—
through IPART … is performing a review into feed-in tariffs to find a “fair and reasonable” price to pay enterprising householders for the solar electricity they produce. In the government’s terms of reference they were asked to recommend a price with “no resulting increase in electricity prices in NSW” and to make the scheme so that “the government would not pay”. They also asked for it to support a competitive electricity market. The University of Melbourne paper showed that a net feed-in tariff price of 35c to 40c a kilowatt hour, handled by the distribution companies, would lower electricity prices by more than it would cost to fund it and that the government’s existing low-income household rebate could be increased slightly to accommodate any shifting in network costs from solar to non-solar households.
He concludes his article by saying:
The reward from the merit order effect should not be handed to dirty fossil fuel generators as they are able to withdraw their service, choosing whether to supply and game the electricity market, sending electricity prices spiralling while on the whole solar households will reliably generate, day in, day out.
I think this is a very interesting article. So often we have debates about the cost of encouraging renewable energy, but we all know—and, in fact, this article demonstrates this—that the electricity market is very complex, and it is not a simple thing to come in here and say, “Feed-in tariffs will push up the price of power.” We need to look deeper into the operation of the market. I commend this article to members of the Assembly to read and to consider. I seek leave to table a copy of it in the Assembly today.
Leave granted.
MR RATTENBURY: I present the following paper:
“Creating electricity at home: the cleanest and most sensible option under the sun”—Copy of article from The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 January 2012.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video