John MacDonald: Should the taxpayer chip-in for your solar panels?

If you’ve got solar panels on the roof, you’ll be loving the blue skies. 

And a solar energy advocate is saying today that those of us who don’t should be getting financial support from the Government. 

Mike Casey says New Zealand is one of the few western countries that doesn’t provide subsidies for solar energy. He says, in Australia, people can get subsidies to convert to solar and - guess what - more of them have. Way more.  

I think this is brilliant thinking - but not necessarily a brilliant idea. Because, if we could do all that magic wand stuff - which we can’t - but if we could, I’d say yep - Government subsidies for anyone and everyone. 

But there’s no magic wand and so we can’t. So I reckon there should be Government support to get solar into all new builds. 

I was talking to someone who, as they put it, went down the solar panel rabbit hole - in that they looked into it. But they just came to the same conclusion that I think most of us have - and still do - and that’s that the numbers just don’t stack up.

You can spend the money getting the panels on the roof, but it’ll take you years before the savings in electricity costs justify the spend. 

But getting more and more people onto solar energy is a much more realistic way for the Government - and I’m not just talking about the current Government, but all Governments - it’s a much more realistic way of trying to get those power costs down. 

Because what other options are there? The Government of the day can thump the table and tell the power companies to stop ripping us off. 

But that’s rarely worked with the supermarkets. So as if thumping the table is going to work with the power companies. 

The other option up the Government’s sleeve is restructuring the electricity market. But when do you think we’re going to see that happen? 

I was reading a history of New Zealand’s electricity reforms back in the 80s and 90s and it took about four years for those reforms to happen. So any changes the Government wants to make to the current electricity market is going to take a fair amount of time, isn’t it? 

So, if it wants to, the Government can do that. But I think it needs to be looking for some quick-wins at the same time. And subsidised solar conversion would be a quick win. Because, like anything in life, if you focus on the things you can actually influence - then that’s when you start to make progress. 

And providing taxpayer support to get solar power happening more widely, then that would be something the Government could make happen as soon as it wanted to. 

There are about two million occupied homes in New Zealand and around 60,000 of them have solar panels.  

It took New Zealand more than seven years to get 30,000 houses with solar. The other 30,000 took three years. And so now we’ve got 60,000. Which is about 3 percent of houses connected to the national grid. 

Compare that to Australia, which heavily subsidised solar, simplified the installation process, and invested in workforce training for installers and the general figure is about 35 percent (compared to our 3 percent). 

In many neighbourhoods in Australia, though, 50 percent of houses have solar panels. In some, as many as 80 percent. Thanks to government subsidies. 

Which our Government could bring in today, if it wanted to.  

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