Our Chair, Heather Smith, has been developing ways for our system to price surplus renewable energy in ways that it is more likely to be used rather than wasted.
“A couple of years ago I wrote an article about making renewables cheap. Maybe our energy minister, Chris Bowen was listening because this week he announced a Solar Sharer scheme offering three hours free solar to households.
The two key areas of pricing reform that I highlighted in my original article were:
– Cheap times when renewables are in surplus and our usage patterns need to change so we can soak them up before they are wasted, and;
– Expensive times when we deploy dispatchable generation and it is necessarily expensive because much of the rest of the year these generators spend their time unemployed.”
In this article you can download a tariff calculator and develop your own ideas about the future of energy pricing.
Image Credit: CORENA. Photo of Nannup Community Centre solar install supported by the wonderful corena revolving fund.
