Last night the Treasurer gave a half-hour Budget speech.  I listened in because lately, there hasn’t been enough boredom in my life.  There is a lot I could say about this year’s budget —  but I won’t.  I’ll stick to discussing energy.  Mostly, the Government’s plan for providing cost-of-energy relief to low-income households and how they’re doing it wrong. [Read more…]

Image Credit: Finn Peacock and his AI helper

The solar industry’s getting serious about gender balance. The Smart Energy Council’s Gender Action Plan (GAP) sets the stage for an estrogen-fueled transformation and was unveiled in a webinar last week.

I mean, come on, a measly one-third of the solar workforce are women, and the Smart Energy Council says they’re mostly in admin, with a smaller number in sales and very few up on roofs installing systems. [Read more…]

Zero-interest loans of up to $15,000 are available to most Canberra households and can be used to purchase a range of energy-saving home improvements and electric vehicles. [Read more…]

If you’re an ACT pensioner interested in getting solar panels installed; provided you live in your own home, I have good news.  To help meet their target of zero net emissions by 2045, the ACT Government is offering a rebate of up to $2,500.

But this isn’t the only good news I have. [Read more…]

Randwick City Council Has Buckets Of Solar, Battery & Sustainability Rebates

There are a lot of local councils in Australia, but there’s none better than Sydney’s Randwick Council. Their incentives are so generous a household could receive rebates of up to… [Read more…]

Queensland is taking the lead in going backwards on solar power, with Energy Queensland mandating a new device, a few new acronyms, a new layer of complexity for installers and a new expense for owners of some new solar power systems. [Read more…]

In November 2022, South Australia experienced a ferocious storm that decoupled us from the rest of the electricity grid and felled many local power lines. Functioning as an island, we couldn’t export to the bigger national network, so without that safety valve, SA Power Networks (SAPN) was obliged to pull out all the stops to maintain stability. [Read more…]

Earlier this year in Western Australia, a rule went into effect that all new or altered electricity network connections must have a circuit breaker as the main switch.  In some cases, this circuit breaker will trip if you use more than a piddly 20 Amps in your home. [Read more…]

The federal election is only four weeks away, so I decided to make an in depth study of the environmental policies of all major political parties and rank them from best to worst:

• Greens
• Labor
• Coalition

That didn’t take long. [Read more…]

Last year the International Energy Agency (IEA) published a long report where — among other things — they predicted the rate of new nuclear construction would roughly double.  When I first read this, I considered it nearly impossible.  But now Russia has invaded Ukraine, I consider it flat out impossible. [Read more…]