Renewable Energy Index - January 2019
To assist the Australian community in understanding the role and contribution of renewable energy to meeting our energy needs while also providing an important source of employment and reducing pollution, Green Energy Markets produces the monthly Renewable Energy Index.
The index tracks the contribution of the renewable energy sector broken down by fuel type and state on a series of metrics that are intended to translate abstract concepts such as megawatts and tonnes of CO2 into concepts the community can understand and appreciate such as number of households powered, and number of cars’ pollution avoided
January 2019
Meeting our power needs while reducing pollution
- Renewable energy represented 20.9% of Australia’s main east and west coast grid’s power supplies over January.
- Wind and solar combined generated 2,951 GWh over the month, this came within a whisker of exceeding brown coal generation for the month which was 2,969GWh.
- Once we also include power produced by hydro and bioenergy, total renewables were the second largest source of power after black coal.
- Australia produced an amount of renewable energy in January equal to the power consumption of 10.8 million homes – this actually exceeds the total number of households in Australia.
- The amount of renewable energy used in January avoided an amount of carbon pollution equal to removing 11.6 million cars from the road which is about 84% of the entire car fleet.
Construction activity and job creation
- 89 large-scale renewable energy projects were under construction at the end of January which are estimated to create enough jobs to employ 19,590 people full-time for a year (“job-years” of employment);
Rooftop solar installation jobs and power production
- 20,465 small-scale rooftop solar systems were installed in January 2019;
- These systems will generate power equal to the needs of 45,926 homes;
- The systems installed in January will deliver around $278 million in power bill savings over the next 10 years for the households and businesses that installed them;
- Installing these solar systems supported 7,320 full-time jobs (across installation, design and sales).