good article thuban. it lets itself down when it states............. "In Australia, too, owners of solar panels now have to pay the government for the honor of
feeding electricity into the grid."..........this is complety wrong and has never been the case.
I agree with the article, where the big companies are allowed to take resources when they are in decline and scarce to the detriment of locals and environment. This has happened repeatedly here in Aus with water allocations for irrigation and coal and iron production has ridden rough-shot over environmental concerns and cultural artifacts..........just recently a big iron ore mine destroyed a 46,000 year old aboriginal cave containing archeological artifacts.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...-rio-tinto-australia-demolition-a9551356.html
Archeologist Dr Michael Slack, who led that dig, said it was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
An earlier 1 metre test dig, conducted in 2008, dated the site at about 20,000 years old, but the salvage expedition uncovered a “very significant site” with more than 7,000 artefacts collected, including grid stones that were 40,000 years old, thousands of bones from middens which showed changes in fauna as the climate changed, and sacred objects.
The flat floor of the cave allowed for a significant depth of soil and sand to build up, creating a layer almost two metres deep in parts. Most archeological digs in the Pilbara hit rock at 30cm.
Most significantly, the archeological records did not disappear during the last Ice Age. Most inland archeological sites in Australia show that people moved away during the Ice Age between 23,000 and 19,000 years ago, as the country dried up and water sources dried up. Archeological evidence from Juukan Gorge suggest it was occupied throughout.
By making a completely false claim about the Auusie gov't solar situation, he looses a lot of credibility because any skeptic can use his false reporting to justify the rest of the article is also false........To make a compelling argument there can be no room for falsehoods because those opposing will jump on a 1% to discredit the other 99%
The opposite happened with solar rebates over here. To encourage household solar panel use, households were encouraged to overproduce their households needs to feed excess back into the grid. Due to overproducing there own power needs, they didn't have to pay for their power use and were payed so much money for the power that they produced going back into the national grid some people were making up to and sometimes more than $5000.00 per year. when the scheme was introduced there was a guarantee that the initial people who took up the scheme would never have the feed in rate reduced. In following years as to many people were getting payed to produce power the power companies had to put up there rates to those that were unable to afford the solar panels. The gov't scheme payable rate, for excess power, did go down but gov't rebates for soar panel installation has, and still is, very attractive and now they are giving incentives to install battery solar systems so help solve base load power blackouts in peak times.
Feed in by back rates as of today.........
https://www.solarchoice.net.au/solar-rebates/solar-feed-in-rewards
initially as mentioned above these rates were as high as 40cents per kwh and as a guaranteed price some of those who took up the scheme initially still get that rate.
2015
https://www.australiansolarquotes.com.au/2015/03/03/rooftop-solar-pv/
2012
Big companies wanted the scheme dropped
https://www.australiansolarquotes.com.au/2012/10/15/big-industry-recycle-solar-subsidies/