Intro to Australia

Sunset over Watson's Bay

Today I started reviewing my notes on Australia. I arrived in Australia in early December and left in early February. It was a beautiful time to be in Australia, since it was the middle of summer! However, in terms of research it was less optimal because it coincided with the Christmas and summer (I know! Summer & Christmas!) holidays.

Australia is more like Europe in the way they approach leisure. They value their vacation time and generally have more of it than Americans. This means that the Christmas/summer holiday combination is especially long. Many people don't return to work until mid February. This made setting up meetings especially difficult since no one would answer my calls or emails.

The upside was that I was able to enjoy some vacation time myself, which included a bit of surfing! 

There were a few main topics I looked into while in Australia. I traveled to Australia because of the vast amount of residential solar PV installed there. They have around 2 GW total installed, which isn't much in terms of total installations, but represents about 1.2 million rooftops covering 10% of all homes in Australia. On a percentage basis, this is likely the highest rooftop penetration in the world!

I wanted to understand why this was the case. The main reasons I found were the high solar irradiance, forward-thinking, streamlined regulations, and high cost of electricity. I will delve deeper into the latter two reasons in later posts; however, just for my own reference I will include a link to an article that provides great insight into why electricity prices are so high in Australia.

Methods of managing grid stability with high penetrations of renewables was another topic I looked into while in Australia. There are a few isolated grids in the more remote parts of the outback that have particularly high penetrations of solar. In some cases this has lead the local utilities to ban future installations of solar. Due to the limited research I did on this topic in Australia, I may not develop too deeply into this topic.

Lastly, I looked at the effect of the political changes on the solar industry. Just before I arrived, Tony Abbott was elected the new prime minster of Australia. Sadly, Mr. Abbott and the new liberal government are very against climate change and were responsible for repealing the first climate tax that had been passed in the world. There was great uncertainty about what Mr. Abbott was going to do with regards to certain government funding agencies for renewable energy.

As I look through my meeting notes from Australia in future posts, I will delve deeper into each of these areas. 

Kite boarding - so jealous!