'The Solar Lodge'

EMAIL THE PRIME MINISTER

When we heard that the Australian Government was spending $4.5 million of taxpayers’ money on renovating the Prime Minister’s official residence, it got the 1 Million Women team thinking... What if solar panels could be included at The Lodge, PM Tony Abbott’s place in Canberra, as part of the renovation? What would that cost? And how much money and carbon pollution would it save?

From there, with help from the Australian arm of big international solar manufacturing company Suntech Power, we’ve come up with an inspiring opportunity for the PM.

We’re calling it ‘The Solar Lodge’. We hope the PM will like it … and that he will learn to love solar.

Email the Prime Minister here and let him know you support 'The Solar Lodge', EMAIL THE PRIME MINISTER , Share this email with your networks and urge them to send an email too.

By our calculations, the net cost of this magnificent looking set of solar arrays – as shown in the simulation image above, which is overlaid on an actual picture of The Lodge – would be about $46,500, which is slightly over 1% of the total renovation cost of $4.5 million.

The really great news, however, is that 'The Solar Lodge' would pay for itself a couple of times over with electricity being generated worth $126,819 over the life of the system, and over the 25 years it would cut about 720 tonnes of CO2 pollution, or just under 29 tonnes a year.

It also would mean that the PM was locking in lifetime low electricity prices for himself and future Prime Ministers of on-average just 14 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), which is a lot less than most of us are paying for our home power bills.

Here are some other key facts and figures about the solar system that Suntech Power has modeled for The Lodge, which is located in the Canberra suburb of Deakin not far from Parliament House:

• 81 solar PV modules (panels)
• Gross cost of system $66,825
• Rebate via Renewable Energy Target $14,095 (419 x Small Technology Certificates @ $37 each)
• Net cost of system after rebates $46,655
• Solar output 78.8kWh/day
• Simple payback period 9.7 years

1 Million Women is writing to PM Abbott to ask him to go solar at The Lodge, and to provide him with the pre-feasibility assessment prepared by Suntech Power*. We are told the calculations are very conservative, and they include an allowance of about $11,000 for difficult installation on a slate roof.

*See Suntech Power pre-feasibility assessment report HERE

#See our 1 Million Women letter to the PM HERE

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