Australia’s Renewable Energy Potential

Australia has the highest average solar radiation per square inch in any continent in the world and the country can capitalise on this natural blessing to help power its cities, achieve carbon neutrality and create a more sustainable future for its citizens.

Aside from the perfect geographical location and ideal climate in some regions, Australia is also home to some of the best researchers in the solar technology field. Recently some scientists based at the highly regarded University of Melbourne and University of New South Wales have made ground breaking discoveries which will help make solar cells more efficient, smaller, and cheaper in the future.

The country’s huge desert land mass that separates thepopulated coastal regions makes perfect locations for large scale solar PV projects, hybrid CSPs and massive wind farms. However this scale is ironically the very same reason which is partly responsible for rising electricity costs in Australia. The huge land area requires massive transmission lines to travel a long way from electricity girds, and power loss during this transmission is inevitable. Also maintenance and repair costs are very prohibitive and must be passed onto every consumer.

But the good news for the future is that by carefully planning and strategically locating new renewable energy power plants this need for massive power lines, expensive upgrades and electricity loss during transmission can be minimised, therefore decreasing the cost of energy.

However the key factor in unlocking Australia’s renewable energy potentials, especially solar power, is by creating enough of these mid-large scale “virtual” power stations to allow us to decentralise our energy production. Australian homes offer enough roof space for solar panel installations big enough to either partially or completely eliminate the household electricity bill, but industrial requirements are much higher.

While supportive measures undertaken by the federal and state governments have done much to grow the industry through very successful solar bonuses and schemes in the last few years, recent policy has been to reduce all of these. The reason is that solar power has reduced greatly in cost in that time, to the point where it is close to achieving price parity with coal produced electricity sources even without any rebates.

The industry still requires nurturing, stability and support though if we are to make the next step to being a real “solar power”; Australia is lagging far behind well-established solar giants in Europe like Germany despite their much less favourable climate conditions.

We already have some of the best researchers, resources, conditions and technology in the world; now we are waiting on stable government policies to give confidence to the large investors able to help fund a continued stream of large projects.

 Our proposed price on carbon will take care of funding for ongoing research and development of emerging renewable energy technologies, and better facilitation of decentralised grid connection; all of which is very important to Australia for economic reasons as well as environmental!