Where is the justification in dropping the 44c feedback to 0 if the owner of the property dies etc before the rebate finishes, especially if there are other members of the family living in the home. The feedback was applied to the property upon installation (that is what I was told at the time), now they have taken this away. I set up the system , so that if anything happened to me, my daughters , one severely disabled and one a full time carer to her would have this as an asset, to help them survive. They live in my home and unlike a married couple, if I die etc they loose the 44c rebate, This is so unfair considering it was one of the reasons I put it on in the first place. If you buy a property that HAS AN EXISTING SOLAR SYSTEM , with an existing 44c rebate, again they loose it, because the home changes ownership Again the FEEDBACK WAS ORIGINALLY APPLIED TO THE PROPERTY NOT THE HOMEOWNER. Again they have gone back on their word and no one has objected to this.

I doubt they’ll read it anyway so added a final line to prove they don’t. It said:
“I doubt you’ll ever read this much less reply but if you do read it please quote my last sentence.”

Dear Sir,

I note with rising concern the hostility toward renewable energy in general and solar power in particular. I am alarmed at the statements from the Prime Minister on the issue.

Does the government have a death wish? You will alienate many of your supporters and achieve nothing.

Well, worse than nothing. Are you aware that Elon Musk and Panasonic are building an enormous factory, the world’s biggest battery factory, to produce e-car batteries from an estimated $5k. Mr Musk plans to flood the world with cheap very large lithium batteries in just three years.

Three years. That’s how long you have to make your peace with the millions of Autralians who have PV solar panels. For five thousand buck who will hesitate to sling one or two of these under the house and simply disappear off the grid?

It might happen even if you are nice to us but it is certain to happen if you contiinue to cast us as The Enemy. Wake up to yourselves, you need us a lot more than we need you.

I don’t know why I’m even writing to you, just a courtesy I guess. Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn what you do, I’ll be gone anyway, the moment Mr Musk-Panasonic’s batteries appear on eBay. You’d better hope 700,000+ of my fellow solar enthusiasts don’t go with me, unless you’re happy to see the economies of scale in the energy industry go sailing away into history.

I look forward to your response.

Yours sincerely,
Mac Hoban

The average Australian is being fed a load of misinformation and disinformation about the need for rising power prices by the government and power retailer and distributors. If the entire cost of aging and inefficient power generation facilities and the real cost of using brown coal to generate electricity was presented honestly and transparently presented, the case for using energy from renewable sources would be a lot stronger. The poles and wire upgrades that have so greatly added to the cost of electricity to the consumer would have been totally unnecessary if modern distribution strategies were employed (microgrids, storage at both local and distributed generation levels and instantly variable base load generation modes eg gas turbines rather than coal fired boilers). The government needs to strengthen the RET and force suppliers and generators to use the aforementioned strategies – which would have been much easier if this essential service was still in government hands!

Renewable energy is the future. Yet, Tony Abbott is stuck firmly in the past. We will be left behind by the rest of the world. Tony Abbott is only concerned about the captains of industry that are making millions of dollars by keeping the situation at the status quo.

Why all this misinformation? There is an excellent article in the latest Monthly Magazine which clearly demonstrates that the reason electricity prices have increased so much is that power companies have spent billions of dollars on infrastructure that we don’t need! And we have paid for it! So how about a bit of honesty with all this …….hopefully we are starting to wake up!

The cost of putting 6 solar panels on my home to help the environment and reduce my bills all seems to have been a waste in my opinion. My bills are now half of what they were prior to putting up the panels due to the rapid increases in costs. I have no air conditioner or heater in my home, never use a clothes dryer, don’t run lights of a night and have the hot water system turned to a low temperature. I pay each year for the maintenance on my panels so they work at maximum efficiency so in the long run there has been no benefit to me from the panels monetary wise, just a huge cost for installation and ongoing maintenance. The only benefit of the panels is to the environment.

I work in the power industry and much of the time at a Hydro station and 3/4 of the people at the station also have solar power on their roof including the station manager. We are all aware of the cost structure being generation, distribution and retail and could see what was coming and tried to insulate our self’s as well as helping the environment. The main cost is in transmission and retail section, the power suppliers are making the profit not the generators and they want to keep it that way. Just watch out Queensland residents if the Newman government sells the power stations to the private sector you have seen nothing yet and power price rises are inevitable. If the private profit makers get hold of control with the help of the government they won’t care about us only their bottom line. BEWARE

Solar PV is good economically and good environmentally, a combination that is unbeatable (just look at the uptake rates if you need proof). Renewable energy is simply the new and popular way forward (again if you need proof look at scale of investments being made globally). Let’s not be a country still stuck in the 20th century, when the rest of the world is in the 21st.

Continued support of a non sustainable industry is not rational. Don’t ignored 5000000 voters for the sake of election funds from big power.

I put 6 panels on about 8 years ago, then a couple of years later, another 12. They perform wonderfully. I put the panels on, because I am passionate about doing my ‘bit’ for Global Warming mitigation. I am angry that we have both State and Federal Governments doing everything they can to hang on to using coal as our power source, regardless of the damage this will inflict on the very environment that sustains us. How responsible is that? What sort of government purposefully acts in a manner that will destroy environments, so causing health problems, catastrophic weather events, depletion of native flora and fauna, etc etc. Isn’t government supposed to govern for the safety and health of its people? Transparent, ADULT government – my foot.

I am sick to death of being accused of being the reason for power costs rising. We put in solar panels at a cost to us. It wasn’t free! We did it so we could generate our power and maybe put some back into the grid for OTHER PEOPLE to use. And that is what we do. We use a product and pay for it, we generate a product and sell it. Our input saves the power companies from needing to build larger and larger power generators, saving them, and power users, a lot of money. Why aren’t we praised for our efforts. The rest of the world embraces and encourages solar power. Good old Oz, still back in the dark ages, doesn’t want this whilst they can make the public pay and pay for a product which government, and big business, get a lot of money from. Time to grow up folks.

I believe in climate change, and put solar power in my home to help with issue. If America can put more into solar then why can,t Australia . Europe had Wind power and Solar power every where. Ore is it that coal people are giving more MONEY to government

What justification is there for dropping the 44c feedback to 0c when a home with an existing solar system is purchased ? The feedback was applied to the PROPERTY upon installation, not to the homeowner!

Keep the RET going, enough of electricity hikes by greedy power companies. We invested in solar so we cannot only help the environment but to get a better deal on power prices. It is NOT the RET driving up power prices, it is the greedy companies and their lame excuses about having to upgrade their damn cables, poles etc etc., people had enough, you cannot draw blood out of a stone.

Age of entitlement lingers in one industry

BERNARD KEANE
Crikey politics editor

ALCOA, ALUMINIUM INDUSTRY, BELL BAY, CARBON PRICE, DAN TEHAN, ELECTRICITY PRICES, KURRI KURRI, RENEWABLE ENERGY TARGET, SMELTING

A manufacturing industry owned by foreign multinationals, employing only a small number of heavily unionised workers, in receipt of generous government subsidies justified because the industry is considered “important”: how will it fare now that the age of entitlement is over?

Based on the experience of the car industry, you would expect Treasurer Joe Hockey to be slashing its subsidies and chasing it out of the country, to the cheers of his backbench delighted the era of mollycoddling is over.

Not so the aluminium industry: a group of 25 Coalition backbenchers led by Dan Tehan is calling for subsidies for the smelting sector, via a full exemption — rather than the current partial exemption — from the Renewable Energy Target.

Smelting is one of Australia’s most heavily subsidised industries, and one of its least efficient: it is closing despite decades of generous government handouts. The reason it’s not seen in the same light as the automotive sector is that subsidies primarily come from state governments rather than the federal government.

Until recently, smelting consumed around 15% of all electricity in Australia, all of it, apart from Tasmania’s Bell Bay, coal-fired power. By itself, smelting accounted for over 6% of our greenhouse emissions. It also enjoyed subsidies of, it is estimated, at least $400 million a year in current dollars, and probably much higher, either via long-term subsidised electricity contracts with state governments that linked electricity cost to the global aluminium price or, in Queensland, the subsidised sale of electricity generation assets. These subsidies were strongly supported — automotive industry style — by the Australian Workers’ Union, which even commissioned some “independent modelling” to argue smelting should be exempted from a carbon price. The subsidies were put in place — in some cases many decades ago — by state governments keen to create big regional manufacturing job centres, in an age when cheap coal-fired power was seen as a marvellous windfall for eastern Australia.

For all those handouts, we got several billion dollars a year in aluminium exports, but comparatively few jobs — 5,000 across the six smelters operating in 2011. And despite the subsidies, since then Norsk Hydro has closed its Kurri Kurri smelter in NSW and Alcoa announced early this year it was shutting its Geelong smelter next month.

The reasons are simple: Australia’s smelters are old, and grossly inefficient compared to foreign competitors; to be viable even with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in subsidies, they need massive investment. That brings us to the other problem: the world aluminium price, despite a small recovery this year, has been declining for years due to a glut of production capacity, much of it in new, far more efficient (and far less emissions intensive) smelters in countries like Qatar. Alcoa has been reducing its smelting capacity worldwide since 2012. No one is lining up to given Australia’s remaining smelters the investment they need.

The result: despite decades of handouts, the Australian aluminium smelting sector is dying, and for reasons unrelated to a carbon price, or to the Renewable Energy Target, or even the Australian dollar — although the latter isn’t helping. It is an old, under-capitalised industry facing competition from newer, better rivals in a market saturated with capacity. Propping it up, as Tehan and his colleagues want to do, only prolongs the inevitable.

Still, it’s funny how the age of entitlement lingers on in the minds of some within the government.

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