More and more schools realise that solar power is a viable option for their school community to reduce their carbon footprint. For example for 10 months, students at Sydney’s Pittwater High organised raffles and lobbied local businesses and finally raised $85,000 to go solar. "We could no longer sit on our hands and hope that others would do something about global warming," Pittwater High School principal Russ Cusworth said.
"We’re certainly not in it for the money. As a matter of fact it can be an expensive exercise for a public comprehensive high school like us." Photovoltaic or PV panels now run 10 classrooms and during the holidays the school is expecting to feed electricity into the grid, and supplying this renewable, clean power to the surrounding suburbs. "If a school can do this, so can a hospital, so can a shopping centre, so can a factory," Mr Cusworth said. Nevertheless Australia still does lag behind other countries in offering incentives for hospitals or factories to feed solar power into the grid.
Woolworths’ main liquor distribution centre in western Sydney has been purpose-built to carry $8 million worth of PV panels, but the leading food chain says it will not invest in them until there is a financial return on the solar panels. Woolworths’ sustainability manager Armineh Mardirossian says at this point solar energy is still providing the returns which a commercial operator would want. Energy Matters Marketing Manager Markus Lambert says commercial roof tops, together with residential roof tops, are needed to deliver driving scale for the solar photovoltaic industry.
While Australia receives a world record in sunshine, and therefore we have the potential to emerge as a solar nation, this will only be possible with the right policy support," Mr Lambert said. Mark Diesendorf, from the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales, says Australia needs to "build the market to bring the price down, so we can give a genuine incentive".
