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I recently speculated that the 2008 Australian budget would announce increased funding for green initiatives. Now that the budget has been tabled, the solar panel industry is reeling from the decision to reduce the upper limit of family income for eligibility for the rebate - it was $150,000 and now is $100,000. Even with rebates, solar panels have a long economic pay back period but without rebates few people will ever see a positive financial return.

My home state of Victoria had weeks earlier reduced its feed-in tariff for people generating solar electricity. The combined effects of these decisions has seen a large number of cancellations of orders.

Both these decisions point to the reality that governments are willing to promise to achieve carbon dioxide savings by, say, 2020 but are much less willing to do something with impacts in 2009. The signals being sent are not promising. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Energy Sources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.