Solar can deliver in FiTs and starts

Matthew Wright

In the Icy German Winter, during the 12 days of Christmas, Germany installed more than 3 gigawatts of solar PV.

In comparison, for the past two and half years. our Federal Labor Government has been announcing, and re-announcing, its Solar Flagships program. And, as you might have guessed, despite the fanfare, nothing has been paid for or built. (Update, see our story on CS Energy quitting Solar Dawn consortium).

In May 2009, when Energy and Resources Minister Martin Ferguson announced the Solar Flagship program, he claimed the $1.37Bn on offer to build an additional 1,000 MW of solar generation capacity, "was funding on an unprecedented scale for the development of solar power in Australia."

Minister Ferguson's claim could only be made because successive Federal Governments have lacked any history of seriously backing solar.  The previous Howard led Government's record of closing down Renewable Energy based Co-operative Research Centres was shocking, and this Labor government has continued the tradition. Not through blatant attacks on solar as the Howard Government did, but through hollow announcements.

The hollow nature of our Government's announcements is clearly seen when we compare the amount of solar built in Australia to what Germany has achieved since May 2009. The Federal Labor Government announced its plans for the solar flagships project, chose two projects with an average size of 180MW, only to see them fail to get funding. In Germany, where they do things before they announce them, installed 18GW of solar. The Germans installed the equivalent of one hundred (100) Solar Flagships projects.

The Solar Flagships project at Moree is just 150MW. For comparison Germany installed 20 times this in December alone. They installed 3GW at the height of the German winter where the thermostat is often well below zero, and during the Christmas holidays.

In Germany, they’ve fired up the industrial machine and put workers on the job (105,000 in PV manufacturing and installation alone). They applied the most successful funding method – which is a Feed-in-Tariff – and implemented it properly. They are now ready to generate 4% of their electricity from solar this year.

The time for talk and hollow announcements is over. Its now time for this Labor government to get serious and legislate an appropriate Feed-in-Tariff scheme for getting solar constructed at all scales - commercial, large scale, baseload and residential, along with wind.  Its time to achieve some serious targets. Ultimately Australia needs targets of 15-20% from rooftop solar, 30-35% from large scale baseload solar and 50% from wind. These are the kind of targets that the world’s OECD leaders - Germany, Spain and Denmark are working towards – and we should too.