Over one million Australians now live in a solar household. Solar power has come of age and is now a real part of Australia's energy sector.
Clean Energy Council Director Kane Thornton said Australia had set a target of sourcing 20 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy such as solar, wind, bioenergy, wave and geothermal power by 2020.
"The good news is we are now well on the way to achieving the 20% renewable energy target," he said.
"The last year has been a drought breaker in more ways than one. As well as giving Australia's farmers a boost, extra rainfall in key hydro power catchments made a huge difference, providing just over two-thirds of our renewable energy over the last year.
"We are already starting to see a boost from the energy produced by wind farms, with wind energy supplying enough clean electricity to power the equivalent of around 900,000 homes. Wind power is the lowest-cost form of renewable energy that can be rolled out on a large scale and we expect it to play a major part in meeting Australia's 20 per cent renewable energy target by 2020.
"Overall, renewable energy produced enough power for more than four million homes and came at a very low cost to consumers." While household renewable energy technologies such as solar power had an extremely successful year, industrial scale clean energy such as wind farms increased more modestly. This was mostly due to uncertainty around the introduction of a price on carbon.
Mr Thornton said it had been a challenging couple of years for large scale clean energy developers, but the industry was optimistic about the year ahead.
"Now that we have a carbon price in place, we expect to see many clean energy companies investing in major projects in 2012 and beyond. This was the reform we needed to help unlock some major deals during the first half of next year.
"Clean energy is now a major industry employing thousands of people and this represents real opportunity for rural and regional areas in particular," he said. Key findings from the report include:
Renewable energy produced 9.6% of Australia's electricity in the 12 months from 1 October 2010 to 30 September 2011.
As of August 2011, 1031 MW of solar power was installed in Australia - representing more than 500,000 household systems. More than 230,000 of these were installed between January and August this year.
Investment figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance show that the Australian clean energy market was worth $5.2 billion in the 2010-11 financial year.
More than 8000 people are directly employed in the installation, construction and maintenance of clean energy assets, but this doesn't include thousands more who are employed in administration, project management, sales etc.
Origin: battleforgreenearth.blogspot.com
