Opinion: Sunny Patches

Now we all know the government is prepared to kick in $8K towards your solar system, so long as you’re not pulling in more than $100K yourself in salary. But before you look at ways to reduce your income, best to check what you get for your money. And the answer is not much.

Even if you accept the government’s position that anyone earning lots of money should pay for their own solar solution, the $8K on offer won’t get you off the grid. All you’ll get is a good feeling because you’re helping the planet a little, but your power bill is unlikely to shrink by more than about $10 per month. Even after the rebate it’s going to take about 15 years to achieve ROI on your power plant. It just doesn’t make economic sense, even though you know it makes damn good environmental sense.

But why does it cost so much to go solar? Well, for starters, most of the kit comes from overseas, principally from that well-known bastion of endless sunshine – Germany. Say what? Yeah, go figure. The next most popular source is the good old USA which has an outfit going by the name of OutBack power offering solutions for….the outback. Hey! That’s our name! Not only have we squandered the lead in solar despite being utterly awash with sunlight, but we’ve even had our outback stolen!

Okay, so this solar stuff costs lots at the moment, and isn’t going to get cheaper until some latter day Henry Ford starts churning out panels at a ridiculous rate. However, the next question has to be why is the electric bill so cheap in comparison?

Well, that’s something the government could fix quite easily, just by making the solar rebate around $32K which would provide most of the power for most houses most of the time. Surely that’s cheaper than trying to discover clean coal, and a darn sight more palatable than hiking the power bill up by a factor of ten to match the price of petrol.

And a huge rebate on solar would also be a huge boost to local IT resellers – this solar stuff is seriously computerised and who is better placed to handle the sales and distribution? We are Chucky, we are.