New South Wales households will become the last in the country to be paid by a state government to feed their spare solar electricity back into the power grid.

State Climate Change Minister Carmel Tebbutt yesterday told ABC TV that the Government would pay a “feed-in tariff” for solar power not used by the household.

“What sort of return people get will depend on how sunny it is, will depend on how much electricity they can return to the grid,” she said.

Ms Tebbutt said the surplus power sent back to the electricity grid could attract a tariff of up to 60 cents per kilowatt, four times the cost of producing conventional electricity.

NSW is the last state to introduce the policy. It will come into effect next year, with the amount paid to be determined by a special taskforce.

Ms Tebbutt says the tariff would eventually cover the costs of installing solar energy panels.

“There’s already a rebate that’s available from the Federal Government for solar panels and what a feed-in tariff does, it allows people to pay off the cost of installing solar panels much more quickly,” she said.

“But it’s also important to note that it does return electricity back to the grid. That’s a really positive thing. It will help us also meet our renewable energy targets.”

Clean Green Council spokeswoman Andrea Gaffney says the plan could dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to pay off buying solar technology.

“We certainly welcome the announcement by the Government and are looking forward to working with them to finalise that particular program and scheme,” she said.

Ms Gaffney says it should be extended to industry.

“We certainly would encourage governments to expand it to the community sector, to the commercial sector, to the industrial precincts,” she said.

“Once the industries start to deploy hundreds of panels at a time, then we start moving down the cost curve a lot quicker and it makes solar PV panels a lot cheaper for everybody. ”

The Climate Change Minister will announce the tariff today.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/24/2427593.htm

The Clean Energy Council is calling for a national scheme that would see people paid for generating solar energy.

A report by Access Economics has recommended a gross feed-in tariff to drive investment in solar energy over the next 20 years.

Under the $16-billion scheme households and businesses would be paid for the energy they produce, even if they use it themselves.

Matthew Warren from the Clean Energy Council says it would trigger huge growth in the renewable energy sector.

“While we’ve had this huge boom in the residential sector, we’re still falling relative to the rate at which other countries are installing and deploying solar energy,” he said.

“So that suggests that while we’re doing very well, there’s still a lot of opportunities for increased take-up of solar power.”

He said it will have benefits for the power sector as well.

“They save a lot of costs in transmission losses and infrastructure build that we’re used to seeing with large scale energy sources like coal-fired power stations and gas power stations,” he said.

“So a gross feed-in tariff is a direct mechanism to fully compensate and reflect the value of that distributed electricity source.”

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/21/2426017.htm

The Greens say Federal Government MPs have stymied plans to develop renewable energy in Australia.

A Government-majority Senate Committee has recommended no immediate action to rollout a national renewable energy feed-in tariff to boost investment.

Instead, it says a uniform tariff should be carefully considered by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG).

Greens Senator Christine Milne says it is a delaying tactic.

“It is a mechanism for delay, it is a mechanism for the lowest common denominator and we will be standing here next year as the United States has zoomed ahead on renewable energy, as Europe continues to zoom ahead of renewable energy, as China does and all the jobs for renewable energy go overseas,” she said.

Senator Milne says a feed-in tariff is the is the right way to increase renewable energy uptake in Australia.

“Now this is the way to go for Australia. This is the way to deploy renewable energy and I’m really disappointed that in spite of the fact that there was overwhelming support for this, the committee recommended that it go through the COAG process,” she said.

“By saying it should go to COAG it is a recipe for making it never happen and everybody knows that.”

The Committee says the Commonwealth and States and Territories should work on a uniform tariff as quickly as possible.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/11/2415834.htm