Solar households now Queensland’s ‘largest power station’

Solar capacity across Queensland’s residential roofs is now greater than that of Queensland’s largest coal-fired power station, energy minister Mark Bailey has announced.

Rooftop solar in Queensland now bigger that the state's
largest coal-fired power station - Energy Minister, Mark Bailey.

Speaking at the Energy Users Association of Australia conference on Wednesday, Mr Bailey said as of the beginning of May there was 1.7 gigawatts of solar installed in Queensland across 438,000 residential roofs. In comparison, the largest fossil fuel plant is the Gladstone Power Station at 1.68GW.

“This means that our rooftops are the largest generation capacity in the state,” he said.

Queensland currently has the highest installed capacity of residential solar PV in Australia (31 per cent of total, with NSW next at 22 per cent), and one of the highest penetration rates in the world at about 30 per cent.

The goal is to increase the number of roofs with solar to one million by 2020, which would represent 3GW of installed capacity.

Mr Bailey said commercial, industrial and large-scale solar were also helping to make the grid cleaner.

Read Cameron Jewell’s story on The Fifth Estate - “Solar households now Queensland’s ‘largest power station’.”