Stan Lowe is building a house in the Kialla area, but has been told by the company installing the panels that Powercor, the company that manages the network in Shepparton, has said the grid cannot take any more feed-in power from that area specifically.
“We recently investigated putting solar on the roof of our new house being built in Kialla,” Mr Lowe said.
“We were told that Powercor's infrastructure could not take any more feed-in power. We could still put solar panels on for our own use, but could not feed any excess power to the grid.
“With all the arguments about coal, gas, and even wind turbines, rooftop solar has to be the simplest form of sustainable energy.
“It should be of major concern that our power infrastructure has reached capacity for solar in-feed.”
Mr Lowe said the information emphasises that long-term planning for the transition to renewable energy has been lacking.
“It just shows that electricity has been an issue that’s been badly dealt with for many years,” he said.
“I was never doing it for the income; for me, I put the panels on the roof to save paying money, but to say you can’t accept it into the grid is a silly situation when they’re saying we need to get rid of coal, gas — and the wind turbines are too noisy.”
In a statement, Powercor said it was possible that some households could not feed their excess electricity into the grid, but overwhelmingly, most could.
“Powercor now approves well over 90 per cent of applications from customers seeking to export excess solar onto the network, up from 60 per cent in some areas back in February 2021,” the statement said.
“Within the 3630 postcode during 2022, 98 per cent of solar connections have been approved for some level of export, while almost 96 per cent of solar connections have been approved for export in the 3631 postcode this year.”
Powercor said it was continuing to improve those results.
“Powercor is conducting a major program of works to help more customers share their solar power than ever before,” the statement said.
“Extensive works have been conducted since early 2021 on all areas of the network, including Shepparton, to increase network capacity and allow more customers to export their excess solar power.”
The company said the change to being able to accept renewable energy supply across the entire network was progressing successfully.
“Powercor is home to some of Australia’s rooftop solar hot spots, with up to 40 per cent of homes in some areas hosting rooftop solar systems, and about 24 per cent of customers across the network,” the company said.
“Rooftop solar installations increased by more than 23,500 customers during 2021 alone, and all solar customers combined represent over 700MW of generating capacity — larger than any single gas-fired power station, coal-fired generation unit, wind farm or solar farm connected in Victoria today.”
