By ALENA HIGGINS
IT’S time to store energy and get off the grid.
That’s the message from the owners of Freedom Energy, who were championing the benefits of energy independence to farmers at Toowoomba’s Ag Fest last week.
Marketing manager Ed Crothall said some primary producers he had talked to were paying upwards of $4000 a quarter just to pump water around their property.
“For the past four years, the solar industry has been all about what you can sell back to the grid and all about putting as many panels on your roof and having as bigger an inverter as possible,” Mr Crothall said.
“We are here saying it’s time for the other half of the solution.
“There are two ways to do that, you can either get rid of the grid completely and have your own back-up inverter or treat the grid as your own back-up system.
“It’s about energy independence and not relying on the likes of Ergon, Origin and so on who just keep putting up power prices.”
With a 4.5 year return and 25-year solution, clean energy was well worth considering, technical solutions manager Andrew Nichols said.
“We understand the rural community, and in the rural community they all know the inevitabilities of life – death and taxes – but in recent years you can add to that drought and flood and rising energy prices,” Mr Nichols said.
“In recent years, the solar expansion was based on really generous feed-in tariff subsidies and that was never really going to sustain itself in the long term.
“Now it’s down to eight cents and we are seeing a proportionate number of people coming through to talk to us – we don’t have to come to them – who are looking at new solar but they think ‘why am I going to export all that sun-generated electricity at eight cents a unit when I am going to be paying 25 or 30 cents at night’? Why don’t I keep all that stuff I have generated through the day and keep it for myself’.”
