There’s now three things you can be sure of in life – death, taxes and mains grid supplied electricity price increases. Like most other states in Australia, the scene seems set for yet another major electricity price hike in Queensland next year.
While not good news for families, the prospect is likely to see increasing numbers of home solar power systems installed in Queensland as people rush to take advantage of current solar rebates and the state’s generous solar feed in tariff.
According to the Courier Mail‘s Robert McDonald, The Queensland Competition Authority will soon be releasing its draft recommendation for the next increase in the retail electricity price cap, effective from July 1 next year – and indications are a double digit increase is on the cards. That being the case, the Courier Mail article says it will represent a 70 per cent spike in residential electricity bills since the market was deregulated in 2007.
A perusal of submissions from energy companies regarding pricing restructure shows the usual suspects – and victims. The usual suspects being increases in costs for distribution, supply and long overdue infrastructure investments needed to cope with increasing demand.
As has become standard practice, renewable energy is also blamed. However, the finger pointing at renewable energy inputs such as home solar power systems is a symptom, not the cause. Rather than renewable energy being the culprit per se, it is the cost of doing business in a carbon-constrained world threatened by climate change; a world created as the result of fallout from fossil fuels such as coal having free rein in our electricity generation for decades.
As mentioned in previous articles, much of the need for solar power subsidisation is to offset the effects of decades of subsidies that fossil fuel has enjoyed; the era of cheap energy that never was. Yet, even in this environment, the subsidisation of coal continues. For example, it was recently revealed that the NSW government was planning to sell taxpayer subsidised coal to that state’s electricity generators for approximately $32 a tonne, far less than present contract prices of about $44 a tonne. Unlike renewable energy, the real financial costs of coal fired power generation are often indirect and hidden and the environmental costs of fossil fuels is only just really starting to be realised.
While renewable energy will continually be treated as a scapegoat for electricity rate hikes, the solar revolution is under way, thanks in part to these increases. Businesses and households in Queensland and across the nation are rapidly turning to home solar power as a way to reduce their carbon emissions and avoid the worst of the inevitable, rolling electricity price hikes – those they know are about to occur, but also the ones that will invariably follow.
