#18343
Sir Humphrey
Strataguru

    Hi PeterC, Not sure whether your most recent comments were for me or for ccbaxter. I was just trying to highlight some of the questions a decent EC would be answering in a thorough proposal…

    My comments were for anyone reading really and I was in part just making the more general point for anyone who might be interested that solar PV tends to scale linearly. That is, there are few economies of scale. In discussions people often tend to assume that  bigger must be better and cheaper. In the case of solar PV, unlike many other things in life, it doesn’t tend to work that way. (straying a bit off topic a bit here) There are certain diseconomies of scale with large scale solar farms that don’t apply for domestic scale installations that can tend to cancel out the usual benefits of scale. I could write a few pages on this!

    I agree that accommodating multiple inverters might be a problem, as might the state of the roof, access and so on. 

    …Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that for new installations in NSW there is no longer a “gross” feed in tariff or a “net” feed in tariff, just a feed in tariff. For which the going rate is $0.06 per KWh. Which means that anybody would be crazy to connect up their PV system in a “gross” fashion these days…

    As far as I know that is correct for NSW. What you describe is a net tariff. IE you are paid only for net export at that low rate. Let’s say you make 3MWh and your premises use 2MWh. Your net export is 1MWh and you get paid at a low rate for that. On the other hand, let’s say you use 3MWh but only make 2MWh. You would then have to pay your normal retail price for 1MWh. In both examples your bank account would be better off by [2MWh X your retail price] because you don’t have to pay for 2MWh of consumption. That would not be taxable for an individual or an owners corp.

    In the first example, there was a further 1MWh exported. The payment for that extra bit would much less than the retail price (the 6c/kWh above) and would be taxable in the case of an owners corp. 

    If you effectively get the retail price for most of your electricity production then the return on investment is generally quite respectable. This is perhaps a reason why the proposal discussed here focusses on the individual units and multiple systems. Each unit might consume more electricity than the common property. Each small system might produce only (say) half of the typical consumption of a unit. Consequently the financial return would be attractive to each individual owner under a net tariff but not to the OC via its single account for the common property.