Archive for September, 2009

When considering the economic advantages of going solar, it is important to take rising electricity prices into consideration. In the 2009/10 financial year, Queenslanders will experience a price rise of almost 16 per cent in electricity; New South Wales electricity prices will go up 20 per cent, Western Australia 10 per cent and the Northern Territory 18 per cent. In South Australia, residential customers will experience an increase of 4.4 per cent.

If you have an electric hot water system, installing solar hot water will reduce your energy bills. However if you install a solar power system, not only will you reduce the amount of electricity you consume from the grid, in those states with a feed-in tariff you can sell electricity back into the grid.

Here’s something to ponder. How many solar panels would be needed to power the whole world? Somebody’s gone to the trouble to work in out: 336,375 square kilometres worth would just about have done it in 2008.

By 2030, the projection is that we’ll need enough panels to cover 406,805 square kilometres. You can see what that looks like here. We don’t know who worked this out or if it is actually correct, but it’s an interesting idea.

To try to put those figures in perspective, Sydney covers 1788 square kilometres, Ballarat’s built up area covers 75 square kilometres, and South East Queensland (including Sunshine Coast down to the Gold Coast and west to the Lockyer Valley) is 22,420 square kilometres.

So, in 2008 the whole planet would have needed 16 times the area of south east Queensland to be covered in panels.

Of course, the calculation is not that straightforward, because urban areas are made up of a lot more than roofs and not all roof space is suitable for solar panels.