The WA State Government has announced this morning it will immediately halt new applications to its popular solar panel subsidy scheme.
A day after he told
The West Australian the scheme was being "monitored" amid fears from the industry a Government imposed capacity cap of 150MW was close to being hit, Energy Minister Peter Collier today confirmed the cap had been breached and the solar feed in tariff scheme would be immediately axed.
Mr Collier said he would make further announcements about the scheme "in the near future" but he did not go into details.
The solar industry feared the cap could be breached within weeks, but in fact it has been exceeded even sooner.
It appears a rush of applications to the scheme in June ahead of a July 1 deadline for the tariff rate being cut from 40c to 20c is responsible for the early demise of the program.
The move comes after the scheme has already been slashed twice.
Originally the Government wanted to pay households a 60¢ gross tariff for every kilowatt hour their systems produced, regardless of their own power consumption.
The axing will not affect existing customers who applied to the scheme at the 40¢ or 20¢ rates.
When Mr Collier announced the latest tariff cut, he also said the program would be capped at 150MW of total capacity.
The solar industry believes that cap could be reached by September.
Yesterday, Mr Collier said the scheme had been "phenomenally successful" but "we can't keep writing out cheques to the energy industry".
Even without the rebates, households would pay off the cost of a solar system within 10 years through energy savings, he said.
Figures published by the Office of Energy reveal that at the end of May, total approved capacity was about 110MW. Installations are growing at a rate of more than 5000 systems a month.
Shadow energy minister Kate Doust said the Government, which campaigned at the last election on a 60¢ gross tariff, was "laughing in the face" of an election promise.
"It is truly perverse that a Government would wind up a scheme, purely on the grounds that it has been too successful," she said.
Sustainable Energy Association chief Ray Wills predicted the inequity would start to cause political problems for the Government.
"If a whole pile of people in a particular electorate are told that their neighbours are being paid for the solar panels on their roof, but they won't be, I think that will create problems," he said.
My Solar manager Nikki Carter said the ever-changing rules made it very difficult to plan and run the business.
"We don't want a handout, we just want a level playing field," she said.
Typical
