VIC solar boss recognises panels Wodonga, Yackandandah and Beechworth

Solar Victoria chief executive Stan Krpan was on the panel of a mini conference at The Cube in Wodonga today (Thursday) to advise businesses and residents how to transition to solar power.

Speaking afterwards to The Border Mail, Mr Krpan said 2108 households in Wodonga had transitioned to solar panels under the program.

"Wodonga is one of our top performers if you like for its size," he said.

For comparison, Mr Krpan said 1280 Wangaratta households and 2080 Mildura households had also installed solar panels, but the total number of panels could be larger including panels installed separately to the program.

On the other side of the Border, Albury Council this week resolved to be wholly powered by renewable energy by 2025.

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Mr Krpan said so far under the three-year-old program about 200,000 Victorians had used the program.

"In 2018 just under 14 per cent of free standing homes in Victoria had solar panels, it's now over 21 per cent and growing," he said.

"But if you look at the some smaller towns, Yackandandah here locally and Beechworth are great examples, you're sort of talking about one in two free standing homes, so significantly above the state average."

He said the statistic in growth suburbs of Melbourne was about 30 to 40 per cent.

Mr Krpan said solar intake had been growing year on year in Victoria, with big growth in 2020 and 2021.

"We've had for the first four or five months of this year, a bit of a lull in the market, back down to 2019 levels," he said.

"Ironically the last few weeks, we've had an increase of 50 per cent to our contact centre, so that's calls coming in... which is a bit of a lead indicator for the applications that will come in and as of last week the applications that are coming through are back up to record levels.

"What we think is 2020 and 2021 brought forward demand because people were at home, some of them were saving money, some of them spending more time at home and using more electricity looking at ways to save and as the economy started to open back up lockdowns, particularly in Melbourne, ended, people are looking for other destinations for their money.

"But obviously the last four weeks in particular people have really been focused on energy prices and that understandably has led to a real spike."

Mr Krpan said the threats to power supply over the Eastern seaboard this week showed the need for renewable energy.

"It also shows that that needs to be really carefully managed for that to be done in an orchestrated and smooth way, because we don't like disruptions in the energy sector, particularly if that means black outs or brown outs," he said.

"It means also that those people who are moving to solar are in a better position to withstand some of that, so they've got their local generation, they're saving money, in our case somewhere between $900 and $1000 per year.

"Most Victorian households spend around $2000 on energy, generally a combination of electricity and gas, so to halve that, that's huge!"

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