Aussies for a while have been ridiculous at winning things. For a country with a population of only 25ish million people and change, we are used to punching above our weight at anything competitive that we set our minds to. Whether it be beating the Poms in the ashes, winning Olympic and Commonwealth gold medals in the swimming pool, dominating the world stage for decades in sports like netball, rugby league, hockey, rowing, target shooting, surfing, boxing, lawn bowls, UFC, golf, basketball… The list goes on.
There’s even a bloke they call “Belmo” who came from the small country town of Orange in NSW who decided to teach the world how to toss a bowling ball with 2 hands (like a rugby pass) who has now won more major pro bowling tournaments than anyone else in history. Something that if anyone asked a Yank 10 years ago, they would have laughed so hard they would have spilled their super-sized McValue meal and their watered down Bud Lite all down their “relaxed fit” Levi jeans and their $4273 Tommy Hilfiger polo top where an identical knock-off can be found by any Aussie at any street stall in Phuket in Thailand for about 2 bucks once we learn how to do the math with the currency conversion.
Yep, on the world stage, no other nation across the globe has more success per individual than us guys and girls from down under. We like to “go big or go home” at just about everything we do.
So it should come as no surprise that when it comes to being the global leader in residential roof-top solar, no one produces more “Energy KWh per roof” in any other nation in the world than us Aussies. Even still, winning something as important as renewable green energy by this margin is enough for even the most conservative Aussie to want to take off their Akubra hat, take off our steel cap blundstone boots and do a “shoey” in salute to living in the greatest country in the world where about 97.36% of its flora and fauna can kill 9467 humans just by blinking at the right time when the wind is changing direction. Apparently we are also good at making up statistics that scare the living daylights out of anyone who is thinking of visiting us one day. I promise, the rest of the numbers in this article are as fair-dinkum as it comes.
For a few weekends in spring of 2023, South Australia was powered almost entirely by rooftop solar panels! That’s right, us sun-loving Aussies have been installing solar systems on their homes like crazy, and now we have more than enough juice to run their state. Even on grand final day from 1pm to 1.30pm, South Australia and Queensland combined were able to produce 99.7% of their states TOTAL energy demand purely from rooftop solar.
This is a huge deal, because no other place of similar size has ever done anything close to this before. South Australia alone has about 1.8 million people, which is roughly the same as the population of West Virginia in the US, or the entire European country of Latvia. But unlike those 2 places South Australia gets nearly half of its electricity from solar panels on people’s roofs every single day. That’s insane!
How did we pull this off? Well, it wasn’t part of some grand master plan. It was more like a happy accident, thanks to a bunch of different policies and incentives from different levels of government. Some of them were pretty generous and got scaled back over time, but one of them stuck around: a national rebate that makes solar panels cheaper and easier to get for everyone. The federal government Small-scale technology certificates scheme also known as the STC’s
That’s one of the reasons that has convinced over 550 households to install solar via our advisory service – YouSolar Australia this year already, which her helped every single one of them not only save money, but also helps the grid cope with the ups and downs during the de-commisioning process of the countries coal-powered plants.
Our customers in 2023 are just a sample of how Australians are leading the way in rooftop solar. We have more than 3.6 million homes with solar systems, which is about one in three households. No other country even comes close to being able to match that per capita. As Dr Dylan McConnell, an energy expert from the University of New South Wales, said: “We’re streets ahead.”
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So what does this mean for the future of energy? Well, it means that South Australia is showing us that it’s possible to run a modern society on clean, renewable power from the sun. Other states have also risen to the occasion, like NSW – who have broken last years solar adoption rate records on residential properties and Victoria, with their Solar for homes bonus rebate program offering massive incentives and interest free loans to encourage their residences to make the switch to solar have all joined the energy revolution to further widen the gap that the mighty green and gold has over the rest of the developed world.
It ultimately means that we need to figure out how to make the most of this abundant resource by developing better technologies to store and distribute this figuratively unlimited source of energy from the sun, and how to integrate it with other sources of energy. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, after all. There are still challenges and costs involved in making this transition the 100% complete solution to transition away from burning dirty coal and endlessly ruining our great land with Coal-Seam gas fracking.
But hey, let’s celebrate this milestone for what it is: a remarkable stepping stone achievement that proves that rooftop solar is not just a niche hobby for greenies, but a mainstream solution for our energy needs because in the end we can be as “green” as we like, we all agree in the end it’s the numbers that need to make the most sense.
