00:00Most of the roof is covered.
00:04When Russell Mowbray decided to renovate his Tuggeranong home, solar panels were the
00:09top of his list.
00:10I absolutely love it.
00:11It's not like a conscious decision now that we have to go and turn the air conditioning
00:16off or we can't use the heating.
00:18We can live comfortably without it being an excessive cost.
00:22Mr Mowbray runs a home renovation company and every customer he sees asks him about
00:27solar.
00:28It's fine and most people are pretty comfortable putting solar on because that's a nice easy
00:33quick way to help them out with bills basically.
00:36That's the end game.
00:39A third of all ACT homes have solar panels installed and the price for an average system is currently
00:44the cheapest in the country.
00:46Over the last 10 years the upfront cost to install an average sized system in the ACT has nearly
00:52halved.
00:53By about 5-7 years the system will be fully paid off.
00:57It's been a big shift in a relatively small amount of time.
01:00When I started solar energy was a very small endeavour.
01:05Small panels in remote areas and on satellites and today it is a global juggernaut.
01:11The source and cost of our power is a big federal election issue.
01:15The federal opposition says nuclear should be a key component of Australia's mix despite
01:20research demonstrating it would be significantly more expensive for consumers.
01:24So you would be taking a lot of the cost of that onto the government balance sheet which means
01:30that either we're paying higher taxes, we're borrowing more money and pushing more debt
01:35onto future generations or we're accepting lower government services.
01:38Some researchers do support a nuclear power industry for Australia and say we have the know-how to do it.
01:45It does things that no other producer of electricity can do for example.
01:52It will produce electricity with very high security, very high availability irrespective
01:57of the weather conditions or whether it's day or night.
01:59But Canberrans are looking to cut their energy bills now.
02:03Most people just they're looking to where they can save money and typically the sun's number one.
02:09An increasingly popular way to save on power.
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