Electricity Suppliers Concern with massive Uptake of Solar

SOLAR panels sitting on the roofs of houses and quietly feeding electricity back into the grid might seem like a good idea, but it is causing some concern for electrical suppliers.

In Queensland, the state's energy grid is not coping with the high uptake of rooftop solar systems.

Energy Minister Stephen Robertson has recently admitted that new applications for solar systems were being rejected in areas where high uptake threatened the safety and reliability of its 1950s-designed network.

There are currently more than 6000 households with Solar panels who were losing money while they waited months for Energex to install "smart metres" that measure the value of the surplus power.

Neil Lowry, Ergon Energy's executive general manager of asset management, said one of the main problems was that the system was not designed to accept electricity from its customers.

The electricity grid is much like a water pipe that delivers water to a house, but is not designed to take it away.

Mr Lowry said Ergon had teams in place to deal with the boom in solar electricity, and was watching the situation closely.

One of the problems was that putting the energy back into the grid required a higher voltage than transformers were designed to handle easily.

"If we get clusters of too many people putting electricity into one transformer the transformer is designed to shut off so that it is not damaged," he said.

"This causes an interruption in supply to everybody drawing power through that transformer."

Mr Lowry said solar electricity systems were very popular, with Ergon receiving about 2000 applications a month across regional Queensland from people wanting to connect to the grid and possibly earn money from it.

However, Ergon would have to manage the situation so there were not too many people connecting up and overwhelming the grid.