Warwick Johnston of SunWiz has a report out...

Warwick Johnston of SunWiz has a report out

http://www.sunwiz.com.au/index.php/industry-services/market-forecast.html summarized in http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/11/australias-800-mw-pv-market-how-long-can-it-last

showing that the cost of photovolataic electricity is already the same as, or marginally less than, the cost of residential grid power in Queensland and WA if the RECs are included. PV will be cheaper than residential grid power over most of Australia by mid 2012 even without RECs. This is very similar to what has been said academically by Muriel Watt at the Solar Energy Society of Australia and by Andrew Blakers of ANU.

Now, Warwick claims that the Australian industry is not properly skilled up for delivering the larger commercial and utility scale projects. The more complex integration of Smart Meters with PV & Grid power with load control by distributed small battery storage (electric cars using part of their battery capacity to trade power) as noted in a blog on RenewableEnergyWorld.com would seem beyond the limited scale/commercial acumen/political testicularity of Australian society.

I would be very interested to hear the chair at the AGM show evidence that SOO is actually capable in developing the larger developments (50kW plus) with examples to date.

Otherwise, the Texans and the Han Empire will do it for us. A look at the developers of the Geraldton PV power plant is not encouraging for Australian sourced engineering and commercial skills. Mind you, the Barnett government cannot seem to decide whether or not to build a power line of adequate capacity to move the renewable power around.