SOLAR CITIZENS
SPREADING SUNSHINE Solar Citizens harnesses the group’s thousands of supporters to take action to protect the rights of Australia’s three million solar homes and businesses, and pursue the largest opportunities for a fast and fair transition to clean, renewable energy. Here, National Director Heidi Lee Douglas looks at some of the wins achieved with the help of like-minded citizens.
RIGHT NOW AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITIES are facing a triple threat: a cost of living crisis, an energy crisis and the climate crisis. We see this as an important moment for state and federal governments to address all three challenges by immediately increasing investment in household electrification and electric transport. We’re excited to address these by campaigning nationally for government incentives for the rollout of household solar and storage, electric appliances to replace gas, and energy efficiency upgrades, including for rental and social housing properties. Alongside this work, we’re campaigning for critical Fuel Efficiency Standards reforms that will help Australian consumers by bringing more electric vehicles to our shores, and we were instrumental in locking in electric vehicle incentives in states like Victoria and Queensland. A campaign that we’ve run three times now is to stop the ‘sun tax’: a rule change that allows solar owners to be charged by network service providers for exporting electricity to the grid. The first two times we stopped the rule change, but last year unfortunately it was passed by the Australian Energy Market Commission. However, the strong community campaign we ran meant that important consumer protections were included in the rule change, and we will continue to monitor that network service providers are not unfairly penalising solar households.
Celebrating success
“We’re more powerful when more of us stand together.”
56 SUMMER 2022
Our most recent campaign success, however, has been locking in more clean energy ambition from the Queensland government. Back in 2015, Queensland solar citizens worked hard to put clean energy on the agenda and lock in the state government’s 50% Renewable Energy Target. Over the past few years we’ve been campaigning for them to increase that goal by demonstrating how renewable energy backed by storage can power regional economic activity and jobs, and generate bill savings for all.
This work paid off when the state government launched its Queensland Energy and Jobs Plan, which backs in a 70% Renewable Energy Target by 2032. Turning the clock back a few years, our clean energy-loving community fought to protect the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Renewable Energy Target and the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme from repeated attacks and won!
Strength in numbers We could not achieve such success without our supporter base. It is currently skewed towards older homeowners, but we’re very excited to expand our audience base to include more renters as we kickstart work in earnest campaigning for schemes to support solar on rentals and social housing. Perhaps not surprisingly, when there are attacks on clean energy – for example, when governments are considering new handouts to big coal and gas companies or when there are proposals on the table for solar owners to get unfairly slugged – we see an observable increase in new supporters. There’s also been a noticeable shift in the public narrative in recent years. In regional Queensland, where we do a fair amount of work, we’re now seeing key local stakeholders calling out for more local investment in renewable energy and green hydrogen projects where they previously were supportive of building new coal assets. Nationally, we’ve also seen a large and positive shift. In 2017 when power bills were high, renewable energy received a lot of the blame in the media. Happily, we’ve seen that story mostly turn around now. We regard these fundamental developments as evidence that our hard work is paying off, people are listening, learning and taking action, and the renewables industry is going from strength to strength. Long may it continue! www.solarcitizens.org.au
