demand for the $150 million solar program, which provides rebates worth up to $8000, was running more than three times faster than provided for under the previous government’s budget, and that without a means test the program would have come to a halt after a few months.

It seems to me that the present government was faced with a serious distortion of their strategy.

I did hear the financial implications of no policy change and can’t recall the exact figures. But the subsidy was going to take a major slice of the allocated funds for renewable energy. So the Govt was faced with a significant distortion of their program in favour of a technology that has doubtful competitive and strategic worth, or pinch funds from elsewhere.

They weren’t voted in on a platform of taking an axe to Big Coal. That particular battle is further down the track, much as some of us would wish otherwise.

Germany is in an entirely different situation. They have committed to relatively deep interim targets, they chose to phase out nuclear some time ago and that position is difficult to turn around politically. They don’t have access to concentrated solar without getting it from North Africa or somewhere. Nor is geothermal a reasonable prospect. That leaves them with wind and solar photovoltaic, which they have to maximise.

I haven’t given up on Garrett yet. Penny Wong has the carriage of overall climate change strategy. Martin Ferguson is putting together a paper on energy security for the Government. Garrett is responsible for the nuts and bolts of climate change as well as for the environment portfolio generally.

The government does need a big wake-up call on the true nature of the task in climate change, but Garnaut’s report is the next item to watch. He has been making noises about the enormity of the task and the slim chance the human race has of getting through this one in reasonable shape.

Yet he too is not going to go one-out on this one if other nations don’t upgrade their approach. To do so would make himself irrelevant, unfortunately.

‘Enjoy life while you can’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange

There is a list of approved installers by the government and they are all electrical contractors, as far as i could see. Since the panels need to be, ‘grid hook up able’, one has no choice but to involve a sparkie.

Apart from the high cost of the actual gear the sparkies have a lot to answer for in bumping up the price of the overall package. They have pretty much a monopoly and have been swallowing up the grant bigtime IMHO.

Bear in mind that the industry hasn’t been killed - the original subscription target is still expected to be reached easily by those on incomes <100k. Those crying now were gearing up for an industry that was never there.

Wasn’t the problem that the subscription target was already reached and so they just wanted to kill it off without actually saying so? Would be interesting to see what what percentage of households who installed solar PV had incomes < $100,000 - given the cost of housing these days I’d guess its pretty small.

Which department was responsible for policy development and standards? that’s right, there wasn’t one, so one needs to be created, educated and briefed before a credible policy emerges. An $8,000 subsidy with no questions asked might float some peoples boats, but it’s a waste of money in the big picture.

Wasn’t the Australian Greenhouse Office responsible for a lot of the previous policy and standardisation?

There’s a very good chance current installations are in fact an environmental negative - why subsidise it?

I’d like to see some justification for the claim that solar PV is an environmental negative (rather than just not the optimal approach) - you think its worse than burning brown coal?

The way that it has been handled is a reminder to small business out there about the risks of getting involved with new technologies - the govt may change its mind and won’t care how much it hurts the small companies. Better to leave it to the large companies which can afford the losses.

I’m not arguing that there aren’t better ways to spend the subsidy money, but that the transition should have been handled a whole lot better. There is enough skepticism about the viability of the renewable energy industry as it is, and this doesn’t help. Labor just saw an opportunity to save a few $$$s and indulge in a bit of class warfare at the same time without thinking about the other consequences.

Not all sparkies can fall back on other work - pull the other one mate!
Who is the sparkie signing off on the installation then?

I agree with the renewable push and I think the coal industry has made plenty enough money over the years to be pushed out of the nest to fend for itself. It’s the start-ups that require the R&D, not the established industry.

Look, public money is supposed to go into renewable industries in the beginning. It’s what happened with coal, electricity generation and distribution infrastructure and countless other ‘public works’. The whole point is to define a broad, normative framework for the kinds of power generation we want to see and put the right sorts of policies place.

It will be much harder to resurrect the industry in a few years time after sending the solar pv entrepreneurs bankrupt

But it’s not at all. The PV panel manufacturers can’t keep up with world demand - a few thousand less in Australia is meaningless.
As for these so called ‘entrepreneurs’ - they’re electricians at the moment. Nothing more, nothing less. They’re doing effectively the same as the plumber who installs your hot water system - buy it for you, plug it in, turn it on.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for a solar industry. What is happening now is not an industry. Electricians are definitely not going broke in the current environment.

There’s a very good chance current installations are in fact an environmental negative - why subsidise it? I agree it would have been better if it were seamlessly cancelled and replaced with an alternative, but that’s some serious policy work that obviously hasn’t been done yet and given that it’ll be permanent policy it’d better be done properly.

Bear in mind that the industry hasn’t been killed - the original subscription target is still expected to be reached easily by those on incomes <100k. Those crying now were gearing up for an industry that was never there.
Sure, maybe it should have been catered for in policy a long time ago, but it wasn’t. That’s hardly the current mob’s fault.

Which department was responsible for policy development and standards? that’s right, there wasn’t one, so one needs to be created, educated and briefed before a credible policy emerges.
An $8,000 subsidy with no questions asked might float some peoples boats, but it’s a waste of money in the big picture.

Lets hope they get the big picture right, or at least a credible alternative emerges before the next election.

Peterc, from what i heard Rudd has plans for hybrid and electric government fleet car purchases. On the solar panel front it good to remember that up to, 10,000 dollar, low interest loans will be available to low income earners for energy saving schemes at the beginning of next year.

The installations might be reasonably efficient if the roof is facing the right direction and pitched at the right angle, but if anyone can name 3 suburbs in Australia that have more than 50% of houses that fit that criteria I’ll eat my mouse mat.

The can put the solar panels on frames on top of the roof to orient them in the correct direction at the right angle. Some people do think its rather fugly, but people do it anyway - its also not unusual with solar hot water systems.

My main issue with essentially removing the rebate for people who would be considering installing solar PV is that it was done before the carbon trading or feed in tariffs had been established. It will be much harder to resurrect the industry in a few years time after sending the solar pv entrepreneurs bankrupt.

So the net effect is a dramatic decrease in panel installation, which would have directly contributed to reducing emissions.

Carbonsink, I agree about hybrids - it is too little, too late and won’t be effective. The Productivity commission has pointed this out

[link], but apparently Rudd “knows better”!

GM Holden were trumpeting about exporting V8 utes to the US only weeks ago. Rudd/Labor should redirect all existing car industry subsidies towards cleaner low emission cars - both hybrid and electric.

The Government should also mandate these for there fleets - they have direct control over this. Unfortunately they choose to support the status quo.

Never confuse motion with action. Politics is failing us. Subsidised jobs wins out over climate change (e.g. logging & coal mining unions & a laggard motor industry)

I do get a little irritated by the reference to this so called ’solar industry’ though.
This ‘industry’ is a collection of electricians who are buying a product from a multinational and sticking it on a roof.
The installations might be reasonably efficient if the roof is facing the right direction and pitched at the right angle, but if anyone can name 3 suburbs in Australia that have more than 50% of houses that fit that criteria I’ll eat my mouse mat.
This ‘industry’ has sprung up in less than 12 months on the projection of 3000 installations from the former government which was doubled by the present one. That electricians in the currently over-inflated building industry are finding the installation of pre-packaged PV units more profitable than regular work, when there never was a long term future in it, tells you more than a little bit about the profitability of this ‘industry’ that’s currently massively (up to 50%) subsidised.

This current system of subsidising installation alone, rather than incentivising efficiency is a stupid dog, and should definitely have been put down. There are already well developed incentive schemes (see Germany and California) upon which we can model our much needed scheme upon.
I just wish they’d hurry up and get on with it.

Coal industry - what have they done with their profits for the last century so that they need us to subsidise their potential future? Just bizarre.

Its really, really disappointing to hear people at LP defend Labor’s progress on climate change since winning the election.

here here
I don’t think people have properly looked beyond the flashy names and sophistry of the Budget announcements. Although Labor didn’t break any promises in the sense of saying one thing and doing another, the devil was in the detail. The net effect of delaying subsidies and grants through the various innovation funds will be more money being pissed away by the coal industry on Potemkin-esque ‘demonstrations’ because they’ll be able to raise the money to be matched by the government in a flash.

It would be wrong to think that Labor is in any way serious about delivering the sort of structural reforms we need to tackle climate change. Sure the Greens had a different vision of what this would entail, but that’s what Labor promised to do.

You are parotting Garrett and Labor’s line, and it is just not relevant. What about the welfare they direct to fossil fuel industries? $9b per year is a lot of our money.

Its really, really disappointing to hear people at LP defend Labor’s progress on climate change since winning the election. Apart from the mainly symbolic gesture of ratifying Kyoto its all been unambiguously bad. Sure, subsidising rooftop PV might not have been the most efficient way of mitigating climate change, but ending the subsidy could have been handled so much better, by phasing it out over several years or by waiting until the ETS comes into operation. Just killing the PV installation industry overnight is poor policy and extremely poor politics.

As for the green car fund, words fail me. If Australia has competitive advantage in clean energy its in geothermal, solar thermal, and the like, not hybrid cars. I think Toyota and Honda might be a little ahead of us there! If the local car manufacturers had any sense they’d put some R&D money into CNG.

Labors reasons for this are class warfare (the ¨middle income¨ comments) and that they dont want to spend money on panels (its ¨too successful¨), but they do on coal.

Wbb, I share your pessimism. These idiots are taking us into dangerous climate change. The people of Kiribati are there already.

We need to take (in)action on climate change out of the politicians hands and setup a taskforce to deal with what is fast becoming and emergency of greater severity that a World war. Rather than class warfare, we need a revolution.

I do as well, so not on a high horse here. But really, we kid ourselves most of the time. And it’s not a chew gum and walk problem. It’s that we can’t focus in a sustained way upon hugely complex, long-range problems. Our make-up is to get enough to eat today; and fight tomorrow’s battles tomorrow. Unfortunately.

Even I say this - deep down I know I’m thinking: hey, it’ll work out.

But on the topic of Garnaut’s pessism. Couldn’t agree more. If the science is right - we’re stuffed. It’s just not within our abilities to deal with it. Not when most of us still believe in The Fates.

No supposition about it, Mark.

What Peterc said.

Middle class welfare or not, this means testing has stopped the industry dead in its tracks, and many of the inner city businesses around the country are probably going under. Nationally, there were 400 people waiting to undertake the panel installers accreditation process. The budget announcements took care of that at least.

The rebate was effectively a hook for people planning to install 1kw systems who were then able to be sold larger systems.

By the way, there are some subsidies available in Germany, albeit lower that $6,000.

The regional power supply company, Badenova - jointly owned by a number of regional municipalities and a natural gas company - offers a solar investment subsidy of about 300 ERO for customers who want to install photovoltaic panels.

[link]