Incentives and Services
Alice Solar City offers a number of incentives for Alice Springs residents who are committed to being energy champions.
They are all designed to reduce energy costs for home owners and reward people who use less energy.
Incentives or discounts are available for:
- installing PV solar systems
- installing solar hot water systems
- reducing your power use by 10% or more
- accessing cost reflective tariffs
- a range of household upgrades that improve energy efficiency such as installing motion sensors on external lights, painting your roof white and replacing halogen downlight systems with low-energy options, just to highlight a few.
To access these incentives, a Home Energy Survey will need to be completed. Based on the recommendations from the survey, incentive vouchers will be provided.
We maintain a set of residential customer terms that cover interactions through our residential incentive program.
Free Home Energy Surveys
Free home energy surveys are available through Alice Solar City.
A trained energy officer will come to your home and work with you to identify the most beneficial changes you can make. The officer will also let you know about any costs involved and the incentives that are available.
A home energy survey will give you a head start to becoming an energy champion!
Come in to the Smart Living Centre to register with the project and book your free home energy survey.
PV solar systems
Its best known form is solar cells. They are usually connected in groups, called arrays, to convert energy from the sun into bulk electricity. A PV system can supply some or all of a household’s power, depending on the size of the system and the household’s needs.
In remote areas PV systems rely on batteries to store the energy so it can be used later, but in urban settings systems are connected to deliver power directly to the power grid for anyone to use.
There are many reasons to have a PV system installed.
- You will be creating clean, renewable energy which is fed to the local power grid.
- You will save on your power costs as the PV system will meet some – or all – of your power needs.
- All of the power generated by your PV system will be purchased from you and fed into the local power grid and you will buy back only what you need. As solar power is generated during the day when the community’s power demands are typically at their highest your investment will reduce the need for expensive upgrades to our energy infrastructure.
- The included Smart Meter and in-house display will help you use energy wisely.
- Taking into account the elevated buy-back tariff being offered through Alice Solar City, they system could pay for itself in under 10 years.
- The value of your home may be increased.
Through Alice Solar City, incentives will be available for 225 rooftop PV systems to be installed on houses and connected to the local power grid.
With funding support from Alice Solar City, Power and Water Corporation will purchase all the PV generated power from residents at an increased buy-back tariff for the life of the program. This will give you great value from your system. Note that the elevated buy-back is capped at $5 per day, above which the price reverts to the peak tariff (see cost reflective tariffs)
When PV systems are installed, you will also receive:
- a Smart Meter and in-house display which will let you know how much power is being produced and what you are consuming
- access to cost reflective tariffs.
BP Solar is the Alice Solar City preferred PV supplier, with incentives available for residential customers on the Solar Energiser 1000, 1500 and 2000 systems. You can download their Solar Energiser Brochure for details on these systems.
Residential customers who wish to purchase a larger system (greater than 2kW peak rating) may be still be able to receive an incentive which will be capped at the incentive value of the Solar Energiser 2000.
Download our PV fact sheet for an overview of this incentive.
Smart Meter
A smart meter is a new generation power meter which reads your electricity consumption every 30 minutes, and can optionally display this information inside your home with an in-house Monitor unit. You can then track your energy use all day, every day, helping you make smarter decisions about when and how you use energy.
Through Alice Solar City, 400 smart meters will be installed on Alice Springs households. These households will also move onto Cost Reflective Tariffs. Visit the Smart Living Centre to find out more.
Solar hot water systems
Solar hot water systems on roofs are a common sight. About half the homes in Alice Springs homes have already made the switch to solar hot water systems.
Although it is more expensive to purchase and install a solar hot water system than an electric hot water system, they are more cost effective in the long term. Solar systems deliver significant savings, depending on how often the booster is used, compared to other hot water systems. These savings mean the system will pay for itself in a short number of years. After that, your hot water is virtually free.
Alice Solar City aims to provide incentives for 1000 rooftop solar hot water systems to be installed in Alice Springs homes.
For more information about solar hot water systems download the solar hot water factsheet
10:10/20:20 Incentive
If your current power bill shows you have used 10% - 20% less energy compared with the same period the previous year, you can receive a further 10% discount on the value of the current bill.
If you reduce your energy by 20% or more, you can receive a discount of 20%.
The discount will be calculated on the kWh amount and then appear as a credit on the following bill. Not only will your electricity bill be cheaper, you’ll actually get money back!
Click here for tips on how you can reduce your household energy use.
For more information about how you can claim this incentive download the factsheet.
Cost reflective tariffs
Cost Reflective Tariffs encourage people to use power in off-peak periods by adjusting the cost at certain times each day to reflect the costs of generating the electricity during those periods.
This helps reduce the overall peak load and is referred to as load shifting, a common practice in many other places in Australia. Cost reflective tariffs better represent the cost to generate and provide power to customers during peak and off-peak periods.
Alice Solar City aims to have 350 homes on Cost Reflective Tariffs as part of the residential incentive program. Up to 50 businesses will also be able to access a similar package through the Commercial Incentives program.
As part of the package, your current power meter will be replaced with a Smart Meter.
The residential tariff structure in Alice Springs will be:
| Peak 9am – 6pm | 23.11 cents / kWh Monday to Friday including public holidays |
| Off-peak 6pm - 9am | 13.01 cents / kWh All other times |
| Daily fixed charges | Standard charges as per a normal account |
Note: After 1 July 2008 there will be a CPI increase each year.
You can view our cost reflective tariffs fact sheet.
