Yesterday, the Rudd Government announced the early termination of the rebate of up to $8,000 for grid connected solar. All customers applications that were substantially complete and lodged in the mail by midnight on June 9 2009 would be accepted however for this scheme.

Beyond Building Energy had a team of over 50 people working until almost midnight on June 9th and consequently is pleased to advise that we have managed to process the vast majority of all outstanding applications for customers and placed these applications in the mail before the midnight deadline. We will now be updating our databases over coming days and will be in a position shortly to advise all customers on the status of their application. Please have patience whilst we update our database records and understand that from Monday June 15th we can answer individual customer queries in this regard.

In a worst case scenario, if a customer’s application has not made the above deadline the options are as follows:

• Full and immediate refund of any deposit paid

• Transfer of the deposit to Beyond Building Energy’s new product offerings for the new Solar Credits scheme (see below). These offerings will be announced within 1-2 weeks from today.

THERE IS SOME GOOD NEWS HOWEVER.............

Replacing the previous Government rebate of up to $8,000 for grid connected solar is a new Solar Credits scheme. The new Solar Credits scheme varies in the following main ways:

• Increased Eligibility as there is NO INCOME RESTRICTIONS applying to the Solar Credits scheme (unlike the previous $100,000 combined family income test). Additionally, the new scheme is open to both businesses AND residential customers. For example, Landlords will now be eligible for the new scheme.

• An increased (or ‘multiplied’) number of renewable energy certificates (RECS) that each solar system will generate. For solar systems up to 1.5kW the level of RECS will be multiplied by a factor of 5, compared to the previous scheme. This will result in a substantial reduction in the cost of a new Solar System and Beyond Building Energy will shortly announce new offers to all customers in this regard.

Click here for more information
http://www.climatechange.gov.au/renewabletarget/publications/pubs/solar_credits-fs.pdf

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