msh rakstīja: Nippys (a local manufacturer of orange juice) recently had their MONTHLY power bill double to $110,000 despite having installed 1 million dollars worth of solar panels and using less electricity than before the price rise. It’s truely obscene and our halfwit politicians are still pushing the electric utopia despite the cost of electricity accelerating far quicker than liquid fuels. Petrol and diesel prices are actually at a 18 month low at the moment which is kind of nice. Today on the radio the state government tried blaming the obscene prices on the rest of the country being too far behind us on the push to renewables (because we have a national electricity market) and that is why our prices here are so expensive. Doesn’t make a lot of sense since we’re more expensive than the eastern states that rely on coal which is supposedly more expensive than renewables. At the same time we have a massive uptake of rooftop solar. I believe Australia is the world leader on household rooftop solar. In the halcyon days we’d be paid upwards of 50c per kWh for our feedin which made spending 10-15k on a solar system a pretty good investment because it wouldn’t take long to pay off, but now the feed-in has been reduced to almost nothing. I get paid 5c per kWh and charged 60c per kWh to buy it back at night and despite generating more than double what I use still have a bill of almost $1000 a quarter. Someone is making a lot of money out of rooftop solar and it’s not the homeowners. Could probably get a battery I guess, but then I don’t like the idea of it burning my house down much either.