Rooftop solar is now becoming so prevalent in Australia that in many suburbs the number of homes with solar outnumber those without.
According to analysis from the Australian Photovoltaic Institute, using data from the Clean Energy Regulator, the leading cases of such suburbs occur in Queensland and Western Australia, with WA’s Baldivis, a semi rural area about 50km south of Perth’s CBD, posting a remarkable percentage of 69 per cent solar homes.
It is followed by Queensland’s Elimbah (63 per cent) and Tamborine (Queensland). (We’re also pretty sure than Yanchep is in W.A., and not Queensland as per the APVI table).
The towns and communities with the highest aggregate amount of rooftop solar are listed below, but are once again dominated by postcodes in Queensland and Western Australia, with Bundaberg leading with 30MW, Hervey Bay 26MW and Mandurah 23.5MW.
The locations with the most amount of solar all up are dominated by those areas with large-scale solar farms, so Nyngan, Moree and Broken Hill in NSW dominate the list, followed by Monash in the ACT and Geraldton, and then Alice Springs.
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of One Step Off The Grid, and also edits and founded Renew Economy and The Driven. He has been a journalist for 35 years and is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review.
This post was published on April 27, 2017 11:43 am
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Educate me about what happens when 50% of homes have solar and overproduction occurs during the day. Is it absorbed by businesses and industry or do electricity rates go to zero or negative or what? And does this mean that battery storage is the ticket?
Solar energy exported into the Grid acts a bit like water pressure, and will go wherever there is an open tap, or in this case, a load that draws electricity from the grid. It may go to the neighbour, or further away to a business. The destination does not affect the electricity supply charges for consumption, metered at each premises, and those homes exporting power are considered generators, with their exports being metered, and retailers paying the generator the feed-in tariff rate for each metered kWh.
Installing batteries may take 7-12+ years to break even, compared with simply buying energy from the grid, whereas solar only will usually break even in less than half that time. As batteries become cheaper, and install costs drop, battery storage will indeed be the ticket to freedom, for tens of thousands, if not millions of homes...because thousands have already taken the plunge into battery storage, ignoring the long payback time.
The Yanchep mentioned in the first table is 46 h (4,425.3 km) via National Highway A1 from the Yanchep in QLD.
While it is great to see the progress happening, where is the total number of dwellings coming from to calculate the percentages in these tables? Going by the APVI website, it seems the number of dwellings is still coming from the 2011 census (2016 data is not yet available). The problem with this is where there is areas of high growth of dwellings, it will incorrectly inflate the percentages, as you are including solar on houses that were not built in 2011.
Baldvis for example, had an forecast estimate of 11,800 dwellings in 2016, double that of the 5765 mentioned in the top table. In the 2015-2016 financial year alone there was 820 new dwelling building approvals for Baldvis.
I think you would find many of the suburbs mentioned are areas of rapid growth in the past few years and will be impacted by the same issue.
Baldvis had 11,552 dwellings in 2011