The solar industry has welcomed NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell’s back down on plans to slash the solar rebate, but says more needs to be done to save 8,000 jobs in the state.
Australian Solar Energy Society chief executive John Grimes says community protests and lobbying efforts to sway crossbench MPs in the upper house have worked.
“Our strategy was to make sure the government heard directly from the people about how damaging this would be to the solar industry, and we had a concerted campaign to keep crossbenchers informed,” he told AAP on Tuesday.
Mr O’Farrell has acknowledged the role Liberal backbenchers and community protests played in the policy change.
He also admitted that the government’s solar legislation was not backed by the Christian Democrats and the Shooters and Fishers, whose votes were needed in the upper house of parliament.
“They made clear that if it involved rewriting of contracts, retrospective changes to contracts it was not going to get through the upper house,” he told Macquarie Radio on Tuesday.
“On the basis of all that, we’ve accepted the reality, which is we can’t proceed with this.”
The solar rebate will now stay at 60 cents per kilowatt hour for existing subscribers who feed power into the grid, rather than being slashed to 40 cents.
The change would have saved taxpayers $471 million, Mr O’Farrell said.
Subscribers who signed on to the scheme between October 2010 and late April 2011 will continue to be paid 20 cents per kilowatt hour.
But since April 28, feed-in tariffs have not been available for new subscribers.
Mr Grimes said the government needed to urgently introduce a scheme for new buyers of solar panels to be subsidised for their direct solar power consumption, in a bid to give certainty to the 8000 people employed in the NSW solar industry.
“There’s a solar industry crisis in NSW today,” he said.
“There’s no feed-in tariff in place, 8,000 jobs are at risk … and if the government doesn’t take action these jobs are going to go.
“That would be a disaster for solar in NSW.”
Greens upper house MP John Kaye described the back down as a victory for 110,000 households.
“Without an ongoing tariff for rooftop solar, households will not buy new units and the industry will waste away,” he said in a statement.
Mr O’Farrell blamed the previous Labor government for allowing the solar scheme’s cost to spiral out of control.
Comment was being sought from opposition leader John Robertson.
