Friendly fire: CanDo's war against solar-owning conservative electorates

It occurred to me, over the weekend, to take a look at the electoral dynamics of Queensland’s plan to appropriate the output of household solar at a fixed (low) wholesale price, and force households to buy all their electricity at the retail rate.

It seems to be a very bad idea, electorally.

For my analysis, I decided to use the state of the Queensland parliament before this year’s electoral rout that saw the ALP decimated – because that would skew the results. After all, right now the ALP is a mere rump in the Queensland parliament.

As it now stands, nearly all of the PV installations are in conservative seats; the analysis wouldn’t tell us anything. So I reverted to the previous parliament, in which the ALP held 51 seats.

Here’s the numbers:

	Total kWh installed	Average per Electorate	Average by affiliation	Difference from average
Labor	2,247,355	107,515	50,791	-56,724
Conservative	7,175,745	107,515	199,326	91,811

The data for solar installations was sourced from Australia’s Clean Energy Regulator, which http://ret.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/REC-Registry/Data-reports reports PV installations by postcode.

In Grass-GIS, the open source GIS package, I associated the postcodes with electorates as a simple overlay. This yields a map in which the areas within each electorate can be matched to the postcode-based reporting of solar PV installations.

Note also that “conservative” electorates aren’t just the LNP electorates: they include seats that were held by conservative-leaning independents.

The key points are easy to see. The seats the LNP already held before the 2012 election:

• Had the largest solar output by electorate – more than triple the Labor seats; and
• On average, have more than triple the solar power per electorate.

The situation now – in which the ALP only retains seven seats in the state parliament – would be worse. 

The image below provides a visualisation of the analysis. Pink-red shows formerly ALP electorates according to the amount of solar installed in the area; blues illustrate the same in Conservative electorates.

 

The three electorates I picked out - Cook, Barron River and Whitsunday - were among the mass that changed hands in the 2012 state election, and are now held by the LNP. They're also the "most solar" electorates that the ALP used to hold. 

Punish those evil greenies using solar power!

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Here’s an interesting statistic which might inform what follows: Queensland has 200,000 solar PV installs in a state with 1.5 million homes – about 13%. In the 2010 federal election, the Greens received 12.7% of Queensland’s Senate vote…

The Queensland Government is quickly going from gimlet-eyed to wild-eyed, an imitation of cartoon villains lurking in dark basements and giving the kind of laughs you used to have to hire Vincent Price to get.

In fact, Jafar, or even Zigzag (Aladdin and The Princess and the Cobbler, respectively, both voiced by the late Vincent) seem to offer up models of the kind of plotting and scheming, the “drop a surprise on them”, that Cambell Newman is indulging in.

The latest relates to solar power, which I discovered at Climate Spectator and wrote up for The Register here.

The short version: there’s a proposal for the government to change the way the energy market operates. Queensland home-owners who have installed solar power would, under the proposal, be required to sell their power to the government at a regulated low rate, and be required to buy from the government at a regulated higher rate.

What they would not be allowed to do is treat the output of the panels on their roof as their own.

It’s unbelievably coercive. If I were a Queenslander (which I’m not), a solar power user (which I am), and connected to the grid (not) … well, I’d be considering unplugging from the grid entirely, buying a bunch of batteries, and seeing if I could get through the nights without an interface to such a kooky government.

The discussion document is here, but it’s pretty much too late for any submissions, since comments close Monday (it was in a locked cupboard in a basement, sign saying “beware of the leopard”, you know the drill).

You know: turning off lights if you’re not in the room. Getting energy-efficient products. Sleeping on a mattress instead of an electrically-heated water-bed. Stuff like that.

And why does this arise?

Remember that this isn’t just any conservative government: it’s setting a standard for foam-flecked rabid-mouthed ranting that Rush Limbaugh would have to admire.

Yet there is a genuine, rational economics alternative to coercion: structure tariffs so that they accurately reflect costs. Make the price of access to the network accurately reflect the cost, instead of cross-subsidising network access out of the usage fees.

That, however, would mean abandoning the ideological crusade: solar equals greenies and greenies are godless and evil.