State Greens leader Greg Barber says the lack of a plan is holding western Victoria back from reaching its potential as a renewable energy hub.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
‘You’ve got wind, sun, sustainable biomass, waves, geothermal,” Mr Barber said. “It’s an embarrassment of riches and we just need to come up with the technology to take hold of it.”
On Thursday Mr Barber visited two Dennington families who have built sustainable homes completely off-grid and reliant on solar power, using batteries to store excess energy.
Zoe Damman and her parents set the system up in 2015.
Mr Barber called on the state government to maintain “fair” solar feed-in tariffs for those contributing excess power to the grid to avoid more people choosing to switch off.
Solar feed-in tariffs provide renewable energy producers with payment for each unused kilowatt hour of power they feed back into the grid.
Mr Barber said from the beginning of next year solar feed-in tariffs for about 80,000 homes and businesses across the state were set to drop significantly, which could encourage people to stop contributing to the grid.
“The reason the government ought to pay a fair price is not to incentivise solar, but to actually keep people connected to the grid,” he said.
“At the moment you only get about six cents for what you feed back in and on that basis, more and more people are going to start disconnecting, including in built-up areas, not just in remote areas.”
Warrnambool City Council candidate Thomas Campbell, who represents The Greens, said solar represented a great opportunity for the region.
“If we can really make it worthwhile for people to start moving towards greater renewable energy sources it has numerous benefits and we should be capitalising on that as much as we possibly can,” he said.
Mr Barber also reacted to comments from federal politicians linking a power outage across South Australia during wild weather on Wednesday to the state’s reliance on renewable energy.
“The usual drongos who ought to know better have lined up to blame it all on wind power,” he said.