Showing their mastery of business, the Victorian Government is helping the local Solar industry to death. To prop up the failing, uneconomic but “fashionable” industry the Andrews government decreed that they will throw an extra $2,225 at homes earning less than $180,000 that want to install solar. (This is on top of the Federal subsidies). Because free money is always popular, they decided to limit this to 3,333 rebates per month but now it’s a stop-start monthly bloodbath out there.
The applications for this months allocation went online on the first of August and were all gone in 106 minutes. Some people had waited all month but their internet connections were too slow, and according to them “the orange wheel of death” kept spinning, but no magic money appeared. Now they have to wait another month. Who’s going to install solar now, if you might get two thousand dollars off it by waiting a few weeks?
It’s all utterly predictable, but killing small solar installers. For some, not one of their customers scored a rebate. So they’re saying they have no work for the next month now, no more will come in, and no way to pay their staff.
Disaster by numbers: @SunWiz_ breaks down why Victoria’s Solar Homes is starting to turn into a nightmare for #solar installers and businesses https://t.co/T1hiht6sci @DanielAndrewsMP @LilyDAmbrosioMP #springst @SolarVictoriaAU
— Clean Energy Council (@cleannrgcouncil) August 2, 2019
As the placards on the protest signs read: Thanks Vic Solar for killing the industry and small business.
Warwick Johnson, Reneweconomy:
August has smashed last month’s record for the amount of time it took Victoria’s Solar Rebate slots to run out. Three days? How about two hours? Already at a crisis level, the rebate scheme has now entered nightmare territory, with solar installers across the state – already hurting – forced to sit out another month without sales.
What the government created, the government can destroy. There goes the Victorian solar market. If only those businesses were selling something that people wanted to buy without a subsidy?
The up/down artificial cranking of the market will shake out all the small businesses.
Waste, waste and destruction
The rebates paid off people who would have installed the panels anyhow:
The program took residential installation levels from 3,000/month up to 5,000/month for that eight-month period. So, on the up-side, it brought 16,000 new solar installations that wouldn’t have proceeded without the rebate.
But it also funded 16,000 that would have happened anyway. And such was the impact of the scheme, only 1,000 customers/month of the original 3,000/month were ineligible for the rebate.
That makes it problematic even to simply dump the program. In the space of 12 months, the government has conditioned two-thirds of the original market to expect a rebate, and those customers will take a long time to return to the market in the absence of a rebate. Hence the crater
Oops. Spot the bubble. This is the state rebate on top of the Federal version.
Solar Panels are still not worth installing without a subsidy
Watch the fans at Reneweconomy dance around the high cost of solar PV. Here is how to not say that solar is too expensive for homeowners to want to buy it voluntarily:
…past experience with premium feed-in tariff schemes in various states has shown that scrapping the scheme outright would throw the industry into the doldrums, as consumers will feel that they’ve missed out. While the case for purchasing a solar system in Victoria without the current rebate is much more favourable than it was 5-10 years ago, it may take the average Victorian some time to become aware of this fact.
Some time? It may take 20 years for the panels to start being economic. Or 100.
If solar panels saved people money on their extremely high electricity bills they’d figure it out. The real problem is the solar panels are junk tech, solving a crisis that doesn’t exist in the most expensive and stupid way possible.