#18292
Sir Humphrey
Strataguru

    CCBaxter,

    By all means, you and others should be informed and understand what is being proposed but the tone of your email comes across to me a possibly a bit too cynical. Perhaps I am being unfair but I am rather sensitive to this having been on the other side of what it seems is being proposed. I would advise you to seriously consider the possibility that what is being proposed is actually reasonable. For those who are comfortable and familiar with the technology it can come as a hard lesson to find that there are some who are actively antagonistic to renewable power and skilled in spreading uncertainty and suspicion among the diverse owners in an owner corp. If you feel you are not getting sufficient information for an informed decision, I would strongly urge you to sit down and talk. Ask questions but listen seriously to the answers too. Perhaps the proponents are simply unaware how far back some people are in understanding.

    When we first put a PV proposal our EC debated for quite a while about how to present what was unequivocally a good idea. Some wanted every bit of detail presented; others advised simplifying to avoid causing confusion. Eventually we had heard every crackpot objection and rebutted them so owners certainly were not deprived of details by the end!

    We had a period of frankly appalling misinformation distributed by a small minority in opposition, not to mention ridiculous time and money wasting and ultimately unsuccessful applications to our ACT tribunal by this minority of owners. For some time they were a serious worry but once the PV system was up we didn’t hear a peep about it. 

    The following is my summary of the situation in the ACT:

    https://tinyurl.com/9yufydw

    Following is the brief item accompanying a graph from our newsletter of a few weeks ago:

    “We have just had our first electricity bill for a complete quarter since our solar electric equipment was installed late last year. The graph shows our consumption of electricity for lighting the public areas since 2007. In 2007 we consumed over 6MWh per quarter on average but the effect of installing more efficient globes can be seen by the fall in consumption through 2008 so that in recent years our consumption was halved to about 3MWh/quarter. Our consumption in the most recent quarter ending in Jan 2013 is negative. In other words we put more electricity into the grid than we took out and our last electricity bill was a credit to our bank account rather than a debit.”