Beyond Solar: Changing The Way We Power Our Homes

And, and I think I said at the start, the grid isn't just the grid anymore.

It's these things that households have that can feed back into the grid, which is a, a newer thing.

Australia especially is...

I think it's described as a global leader in rooftop solar.

What makes our energy system different from other countries?

Yeah.

So Australia is a global leader in rooftop solar, so we, we do have around four million small rooftop solar systems in Australia.

And, um, yeah, more than 35% of houses in Australia have a PV system.

And while there are other countries like Germany and Japan that, that do have a lot of rooftop solar as well, you know, for example, Germany only has about 15% of households that have rooftop solar.

And probably the most comparable country would, um, well, not country, but the most- Comparable would be California.

Right.

And, um, California has about 20% houses with rooftop solar.

And is that just because both Australia and California are quite sunny? Is it that basic? [laughs]

Uh, [laughs] yeah, so there's a range of reasons why Australia has seen that really high uptake, but it really goes back to around 2000, Australia had subsidies for uptake of small solar systems suitable for houses.

But at that time, solar was really quite expensive, so the rates of uptake were pretty modest.

Um, but then in around 2007, those subsidies became really quite generous and, you know, politicians had realized that, that solar was really popular with households.

And so not only did we have a quite a generous rebate from the federal government, but also state governments introduced a feed-in tariff programs with, um, in some cases extremely generous feed-in tariffs.

And by feed-in tariffs, my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that if you generate electricity from those solar panels, you can effectively sell it back to the grid.

Yeah, that's right.

So actually, current feed-in tariffs are based on how much you export to the grid.

You're, you're paid for the exports, but actually many of those feed-in tariffs paid for all of the energy that was produced by the solar systems in those days.

So yeah, that was very generous, and as a consequence, we had really high rates of uptake of rooftop solar.

And then quite quickly, governments withdrew that support.

So it was, you know, a year or 18 months or, or something where we had a big boom.

But, you know, nevertheless, even after a lot of that really generous support was withdrawn, solar is still a really attractive prospect in Australia.