Nearly one week after the federal government announced plans to expand the rooftop solar rebate to farms and factories – and all sorts of businesses in-between – industry is still buzzing with the promise of “insane” new demand from a market whose giga-scale potential sits largely untapped.
But ahead of the October changes to the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES) that will extend a roughly 20 per cent discount to rooftop solar projects ranging from 100 kilowatts (kW) up to 1 megawatt (MW), a few warnings and caveats are starting to emerge, too.
The first is that the potentially huge market for commercial and industrial (C&I) rooftop solar will not take off like a rocket and add hundreds of megawatts of new capacity to the grid within months, like, say, the Cheaper Home Batteries scheme has done.
That’s because the larger a rooftop solar project gets, the longer it takes – and the more regulatory and network standards need to be met. It’s also because there aren’t as many companies around that specialise in C&I solar projects.
Smart Commercial Energy, one of Australia’s leading C&I companies based in New South Wales, says that solar projects up around the one megawatt mark can take around six months to complete, including in the early planning stages.
