How to build a 1.4MW solar power station in one hour

Queensland Premier Newman Campbell must have one hell of a solar hangover today.

Following his announcement to cut the $0.44c Net FIT he provided the industry and solar consumers with a window of opportunity to sign up before the scheme was switched to $0.08c, and sign up they did.

Energex reported this morning that 75,000 applications were received in the 13 days between the 26th of June and the 9th of July.

Broadly speaking, this is equivalent to around 12 applications per minute and 150MW of new capacity (at an average system size of 2kW) .

Assuming standard 8 hour working days, Premier Campbell effectively added 1.4MW of generation capacity per hour, to the sunshine States energy generation capacity.

Show me any other generation source that could achieve that, and I’ll eat my solar powered hat.

Energex also noted however, that 31,000 (or 62MW) of those applications were received in in a single day.

That is an astonishing 1.07 applications per SECOND or 7.8MW per hour on the final day.

Of course, it has to processed and installed and there is up to 1 year to do that, but my guess is that to maximise economies of scale Queensland installers will gear up and veraciously install the majority of this new capacity within 6 months or so.

Put in a State context, he just avoided the need for roughly 3.9TWh of coal fired energy over the next 20 years. At a conservative energy cost of $0.20c kWh, Queensland electricity consumers just started down the road to savings of approximately $39Million dollars per year.

(Inadvertently) nice work, Premier Newman.

Nigel Morris is director of Solar Business Services. This article was originally published on the SbS website – solarbusiness.com.au. Reproduced with permission.