The first major meeting of the clean energy industry since the announcement of the Federal Government’s carbon pricing plan will take place at EcoGen 2011, to be held at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre from 5–7 September.

Approximately 500 Australian businesses will be required to pay for their carbon emissions under the plan, and much of the revenue collected will support investment in research, project development and employment growth in the solar sector.

Elements of the new legislation package of particular relevance to the sector include:

• The establishment of an Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) with responsibility for managing $3.2 billion in existing Federal Government funding for solar power technologies and initiatives to bring them to market, including the Solar Flagships Program and the Australian Solar Institute
• The commencement of a Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to invest $10 billion in businesses launching clean energy projects, and in transforming existing manufacturers to meet demand for photovoltaic (PV) panels and other solar inputs
• A $40 million Remote Indigenous Power Program to connect remote Indigenous communities to solar power
• The expansion of the Australian Energy Market Operator’s future development of the electricity grid to prepare for greater integration with solar power.

The Australian Photovoltaic Association has said that the CEFC and ARENA will be of particular assistance for large‐scale PV project deployment, and that theRemote Indigenous Power Program among other initiatives will assist the off‐grid PV market.

Australian Solar Energy Society Chief Executive John Grimes said “While the details [of the plan] are still being worked out, it is likely big solar companies will be able to access loan guarantees and equity investments from the CEFC.”

“Big solar is a big winner in the Clean Energy Future Plan,” Mr Grimes said.

14 July 2011

Original source click here.

The Climate Change Minister is expected to announce another scaling back of the solar credits scheme — the second such move by the government in six months — which will see the average rebate to households installing a 1.5 kilowatt system in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth or Adelaide fall from $6200 to $3720.

Today’s announcement, which comes as the government becomes increasingly concerned about the impact of rising cost-of-living pressures on its electoral stocks, is expected to save householders between $25 and $35 next year. This is on top of changes announced last December that were expected to save $12 a year.

This will be achieved by lowering the amount of high-cost power that electricity retailers must buy under the government’s renewable energy target. As it moves to confront cost-of-living pressures, the government will also today announce it will ask state and territory governments to make sure their feed-in tariffs “do not impose an unjustifiable burden on electricity consumers”.

Mr Combet will argue the scale-back was vital in light of continued growth in the industry and its impact on power prices.

But the government will honour existing written contracts to install small-scale solar panels made under current arrangements. Solar panels are granted renewable energy certificates based on the amount of power they produce. Electricity retailers must purchase the certificates at $40 each under the government’s amended RET.

Under the solar credits scheme, householders are eligible for an upfront payment worth five times the value of certificates their solar panels will produce.

That was to have been scaled back to four times from July 1 under changes announced in December but the scale-back will be deepened today when the government declares the multiple will be cut to three from July 1.

The move will hasten the phase-out of the scheme. The multiple will fall from three to two from July 1, next year and then revert to one from July 1, 2013.

Mr Combet will argue that strong demand for solar panels had continued despite December’s announcement, fuelled by declining system costs, the strong Australian dollar and economy as state and territory feed-in tariff schemes.

He will also argue the generous support for solar panels has contributed to a fall in the installation of solar hot water heaters. The drop in the multiplier will help reduce the oversupply of renewable energy certificates.

Under the solar credits scheme solar panel installation has ballooned. The number of installations supported by the RET grew from 15,000 in 2008 to more than 60,000 last year and 120,000 last year.

The Australian also understands the government has been concerned that the solar panel scheme was favouring affluent home owners, while renters and lower-income earners were subsidising the scheme through higher power prices.

The power generation business has changed so much over the last decade that electricity generated from solar energy will be cheaper than electricity generated from the proposed new nuclear plants according to a leading UK power supplier and US researchers.

“The cost of generating power from solar photovoltaic (PV) systems has steadily fallen over the last ten years while the projected costs of constructing the new nuclear plants have ballooned,” said Ken Moss, CEO of mO3 Power company.

“The cost of producing and installing PV cells has been steadily dropping for some years,” he said. “A PV system now costs about half of what it did in 1998.”  The average price of a PV module in 2010 was $1.50/kW and by mid- year that figure is expected to drop to a maximum of $1.10kW.

Research from Duke University in America supports this view. It concludes that the cost of solar power has reached the point of ‘Historic Crossover’ with the nuclear industry in North Carolina. The price of nuclear is expected to be 16-18c/kW as compared to solar PV at 14c in 2011.

“It can be predicted with some confidence that the same will be true in the UK by the time that the new nuclear reactors have been built,” said  Moss.

“Nuclear electricity’s strength is being able to provide CO2-free base load electricity to the grid, but nuclear is not flexible and can only operate 24/7. Therefore the future requires a mix of technologies with renewable and nuclear being able to provide a sustainable solution.”

Coming of age

“Solar PV’s time is now coming of age with predictions of 30 per cent of the world’s energy coming from PV by 2050. By which time economic storage of electricity will be possible and we will no longer need base load power stations or possibly even a grid!” he said.

“With its fuel for free, from the sun, solar electricity will be the mainstream clean energy for our, and our children’s, future!” said Ray Noble, Director at the company.  But it was  inevitable that future power bills in the UK will rise as new technologies conform to Britain’s carbon reduction commitment.

“The safety of our power production is a huge issue,” said Ken Moss. “An accident at a solar park would be a small local affair but an accident at a nuclear plant is a global affair. We have to ask ourselves if we want to be subsidising the building of so many new nuclear plants.”

mO3 Power says it plans to generate a Gigawatt from renewable power from solar parks in the UK and is prepared to invest £2.3 billion. It proposes to site its parks on industrial land, brown field sites and grade 3 & 4 farmland.

Original source: click here

These price increases can be put in perspective by looking at the impact they have on running an electrical appliance. For example, the cost of running a 100 watt light bulb, at Synergy’s current rate of $0.2083 cents per kilowatt hour, for 24 hours a day over the course of a year can be calculated as follows:

0.1 kilowatts p/h x $0.2083 per kwh x 24 hours x 365 days = $182.47

Given that the average Australian household consumes far more power annually than a 100 watt light bulb, and that it is common to find 2400 watt electric heaters, 250 watt LCD televisions, and 650 watt fridge freezers, it is easy to see that even a 10% increase has a big impact on the household bottom line.

Furthermore, the Business Council of Australia has predicted that residential electricity bills may double again by 2015, partially as a result of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and the continuing price pressures placed upon coal and gas resources from the booming economies of China and India.

With the extra incentive of these past and predicted future electricity price rises, combined with government rebates and feed in tariffs, homeowners have been installing solar power systems in greater numbers than ever before. In fact, according to the Clean Energy Council’s Clean Energy Australia Report 2010 (pdf) there were 105,520 solar power installations between January and September of this year. This is a 69.4% increase on the total installations for all of 2009, and a 556.4% increase on the number of solar power installations conducted in Australia between 2001 and 2008.

This high volume of solar power system installations is generating significant environmental benefits, as every kilowatt hour of electricity produced on a residential roof-top directly reduces the amount of electricity that must be produced via the burning of fossil fuels. As such, although electricity price increases may generate some short-term pain for household budgets, they are also helping to improve the health of our environment.

Original source click here

The concept for the so-called Dyson-Harrop satellite begins with a long metal wire loop pointed at the sun. This wire is charged to generate a cylindrical magnetic field that snags the electrons that make up half the solar wind. These electrons get funnelled into a metal spherical receiver to produce a current, which generates the wire’s magnetic field – making the system self-sustaining.

Any current not needed for the magnetic field powers an infrared laser trained on satellite dishes back on Earth, designed to collect the energy. Air is transparent to infrared so Earth’s atmosphere won’t suck up energy from the beam before it reaches the ground.

Back on the satellite, the current has been drained of its electrical energy by the laser – the electrons fall onto a ring-shaped sail, where incoming sunlight can re-energise them enough to keep the satellite in orbit around the sun.

A relatively small Dyson-Harrop satellite using a 1-centimetre-wide copper wire 300 metres long, a receiver 2 metres wide and a sail 10 metres in diameter, sitting at roughly the same distance from the sun as the Earth, could generate 1.7 megawatts of power – enough for about 1000 family homes in the US.

A satellite with the same-sized receiver at the same distance from the sun but with a 1-kilometre-long wire and a sail 8400 kilometres wide could generate roughly 1 billion billion gigawatts (10²⁷ watts) of power, “which is actually 100 billion times the power humanity currently requires”, says researcher Brooks Harrop, a physicist at Washington State University in Pullman who designed the satellite.

Since the satellites are made up mostly of copper, they would be relatively easy to construct. “This satellite is actually something that we can build, using modern technology and delivery methods,” Harrop says.

Satellites laden with solar panels that can beam their energy down 24 hours a day have been discussed for decades. California agreed last December to a deal involving the sale of space-based solar power. Solar panels cost more per pound than the copper making up the Dyson-Harrop satellites, so according to Harrop, “the cost of a solar wind power satellite project should be lower than a comparative solar panel project”.

So far so good, but there is one major drawback. To draw significant amounts of power Dyson-Harrop satellites rely on the constant solar wind found high above the ecliptic – the plane defined by the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Consequently, the satellite would lie tens of millions of kilometres from the Earth. Over those distances, even a sharp laser beam would spread to thousands of kilometres wide by the time it reached Earth.

“Two megawatts spread across areas that large are meaningless, less than moonlight,” says John Mankins, president of consultancy firm Artemis Innovation which specialises in space solar power. To beam power from a Dyson-Harrop satellite to Earth, one “would require stupendously huge optics, such as a virtually perfect lens between maybe 10 to 100 kilometres across,” he says.

He also points out that the wire could burn out due to the huge current coursing through it, although he has not performed the calculations to gauge the probability of that occurring. But he does say that a smaller version of this “clever and interesting” satellite could help power some space missions. “I could imagine uses for this idea outside of the plane of the ecliptic, such as helping generate power for something like the Ulysses spacecraft, which went around the poles of the sun.”

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19497-outofthisworld-proposal-for-solar-wind-power.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Unity students and staff, led by environmental author Bill McKibben, are toting one of the solar panels installed on the White House in the late 1970s at the direction of then President Jimmy Carter. The panels were removed by Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s, and later used by Unity to heat water in the college cafeteria.

The solar panels were Carter’s way of demonstrating his administration’s commitment to increased use of renewable energy at a time of sudden petroleum shortages and soaring gas prices. Solar power in the 1970s offered the kind of bright promise that wind energy does today.

Carter had the misfortune to be president when the world petroleum market burst out of its comfortable, predictable patterns.

Oil prices, which had remained below $2 a barrel throughout the 1960s, suddenly shot up in 1973 to over $11 as a result of the Arab oil embargo, causing sticker shock at the gas pump and widespread economic distress. The price more than doubled again in 1979 due to temporary disruption in oil supplies during the Iranian Revolution.

In a televised speech in April 1977, Carter painted a stark picture of our country “running out of gas and oil.” To help solve the problem, he proposed resorting to “strict conservation” and “permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.” Carter also advocated increased use of domestic coal (Scientific understanding of global warming through carbon-dioxide emissions was not yet well developed or appreciated by the general public).

Carter’s initiative was farsighted but fell victim to his lackluster personality, political clumsiness and just plain bad luck. Expensive oil, recession, inflation, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis led to his defeat in a bid for a second term in the 1980 presidential election.

Carter’s departure from office, coupled with lower world petroleum prices over the next two decades, effectively placed alternative energy on the back burner. Solar power, though it has expanded rapidly over the past 10 years, still only satisfies about 1% of U.S. energy needs.

While foreign oil dependence and the risk of sharp hikes in oil prices remain as looming problems, climate change has added new urgency to the call for an accelerated shift away from fossil-based and towards renewable forms of energy, such as wind, tidal, biomass and geothermal.

The Unity group hopes to persuade President Obama to install new solar panels on the executive mansion as a symbol of his commitment to renewable energy.

That should be easier to do than to persuade Congress to complete passage of a stalled bill that would significantly advance alternative-energy production – the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which cleared the House of Representatives on June 2, 2009.

The centerpiece of the bill, “cap-and-trade,” would gradually limit greenhouse gas emissions from utilities, large industrial plants, and petroleum and natural gas producers and importers, ratcheting them down to 80% of 2005 levels by 2050.

Emitters exceeding permissible limits would be given a choice of either cutting back or purchasing credits from other emitters who were below the limit. The system would make carbon dioxide emissions more expensive, thereby increasing the cost of burning fossil fuels and giving comparative advantage to renewable energies which are carbon neutral.

When the bill arrived in the Senate, it bogged down in a morass of overlapping committee hearings, competing proposals, fierce lobbying by the petroleum and coal industries, and uncompromising opposition by senators from oil- and coal-producing states, such as Oklahoma’s James Inhofe and Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu.

Not even intense public backlash against the oil industry due to BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, nor proffered legislative sweeteners for nuclear power, off-shore drilling and coal production, could dislodge it.

Last July, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave up trying to achieve passage, at least for the remainder of the year.

Though far more politically adept than Carter, Obama’s luck and timing on this issue may be no better than his hapless predecessor’s.

Obama has already expended most of his “political capital” on ambitious measures to bailout large banks and the domestic auto industry, stimulate the economy, reform health care, and increase regulation of financial institutions. He has little left with which to push his energy and environmental agenda through Congress.

Besides, with unemployment and foreclosure rates stuck at high levels, voters are anxious and angry at every elected official in Washington. The Clean Energy and Security Act would increase electric utility costs in the short run (though nowhere near the levels its opponents claim), and that could spell political trouble for anyone who supported it.

If, as widely predicted, November’s mid-term elections reduce or eliminate Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, the opportunity for passage of an energy/climate bill will become bleaker yet. Republicans are unlikely to sign onto another major Obama reform measure, even a watered-down one.

In the interest of not making a bad situation worse, perhaps the Unity group should ditch its solar panel – a reminder of one of America’s least lucky presidents – and substitute a windmill in its place. If all else fails, at least they can tilt at the windmill.

Source: http://www.sunjournal.com/guest-columns/story/907716

Energy Minister Peter Collier has announced State Budget funding of $23million to introduce a residential net feed-in tariff scheme, providing a subsidy to householders with new and existing photovoltaic, wind and micro-hydro systems.

The scheme will open for applications from July 1, with payments to be made from August 1.

It will be available for residential installations where the system is owned by the home owner, including tenanted properties.

“The net feed-in tariff scheme has been set at 40 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) on electricity exported into both the South West Interconnected System (SWIS) and regional grids,” Mr Collier said.

“This is in addition to the price paid under the existing Renewable Energy Buyback Scheme, which will allow householders to receive a minimum of 47c/kWh.

“This provides a genuine incentive for home owners to install renewable energy systems, which not only has a positive impact on the environment but it will also help householders manage their electricity bills.”

A feasibility study is also being undertaken into the potential for a similar scheme for businesses.

The Minister said the scheme would help system owners recover the cost of installing solar photovoltaic systems, with recipients receiving the net feed-in tariff payments for 10 years.

“The scheme will not require any changes in metering for existing system owners,” he said.

“The State Government recognises the substantial interest within the community to install household renewable energy systems, and the introduction of a feed-in tariff will provide an on-going benefit to households and the solar industry in Western Australia.”

Current system size under retailer buyback schemes, up to 5kW for Synergy customers and up to 10kW per phase for Horizon Power customers, will apply.

Both electricity retailers will administer the net feed-in tariff scheme on the SWIS and regional networks respectively.

Original source:
www.mediastatements.wa.gov.au/Pages/WACabinetMinistersSearch.aspx?ItemId=133582&minister=Collier&admin=Barnett

September 2010

Energy Farm this month made an agreement that will see more efficient high quality panels being imported into Perth in 250watt and 290watt sizes.  Designed in America and manufactured in India, the panels are of very high quality/efficiency and include longer warranties than many panels coming out of China.

Energy Farm sees this as a real step forward for the home owner who now has the option to put less panels on their roof due to these highly efficient modules and they make a great addition to our growing list of panel brands and options.  To top it off, they are a great looking module, the image pictured above is a closeup of a panel that is on one of our staffs roof!

State Energy Minister Peter Collier officially opened Kwinana’s 120-megawatt ‘Swift Power’ station, which is operated by the Ky Cao-led Perth Energy.

he gas-fired power station is said to have quick response capabilities, taking just five minutes to reach full capacity.

“This will assist with increasing Western Australia’s capacity to manage intermittent power on the grid from renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar,” Mr Collier said.

“The station will also increase reliability of supply during high demand periods and add significant security during system emergencies through its capacity to quickly switch fuels from gas to diesel.”

The extra power capacity to WA will make it easier on the state’s grid system, particularly during hot days in summer when air conditioners can put pressure on the system.

The opening of the Perth Energy power station also follows the State Government’s cap on Verve Energy’s total capacity at 3000MW.

Perth Energy on its website said Verve is currently producing some 34000MW of power however that will decrease when some of the utility’s oldest plants retire in the next several years.

The plant will also help the grid accommodate more renewable energy generation, helping the government achieves its share of the national target of 20 per cent by 2020.

The Marble Bar-based Horizon Power’s Pippunyah power station was today opened by Mines and Petroleum Minister Norman Moore.

Mr Moore said it was the first time a combination of technology – solar and diesel – was used in the world.

He said it ensured the plant had a very high level of solar energy penetration and a reliable supply of power to the town. Marble Bar, in the east Pilbara, is Australia’s hottest town.

“The station is powered by the biggest tracking solar farm in Australia,” he said.

“The 1350 panels – an award-winning design of SunPower – move on their axis to follow the path of the sun and produce a generating capacity of 1160kW.” Mr Moore said regional WA, particularly the Pilbara, was critical to the rest of the nation and the State Government was proud to support leading-edge technology that was efficient, reliable and environmentally friendly.

Pippunyah Solar Diesel Power Station was only one of many renewable energy projects under development by Horizon Power, including solar-diesel stations in the remote Aboriginal towns of Kalumburu and Yungngore (Noonkanbah).

The Marble Bar station started powering the town in May but its testing program was only finished at the end of July.

The station is named by the community’s Njamal people after the river that runs beneath it.

The same solar-diesel hybrid generation model has been used to develop and build a power station at Nullagine, 88km south of Marble Bar.

This station, powered by 900 single-axis tracking solar panels, is under construction and expected to start supplying the town in October.

Source: http://www.perthnow.com.au/business/news/private-kwinana-power-station-opens/story-e6frg2qu-1225907833659