Australians are mad for rooftop solar to ward off wild rises in energy bills, but are installers getting a fair income for all their hard work? Australia’s first national installer rates survey takes a look at how much the front line workers of renewable energy are taking home.
Solar installers have seen good times and bad as government incentives and tenuous green energy policy settings pull workloads one way or the other. As rooftop solar has slowly continued its advance into the mainstream, however, the margins earned by installers have felt the squeeze.
It’s a busy pitch. But is it a good business? A national survey was needed to understand the market and to find performance benchmarks.
Cranfield Projects invited solar installers to participate in a Solar Installer Rates Survey in the interest of determining trends across Australia. The purpose was to acknowledge the increasing price competition in solar installations as well as to show the average trends in labour costs as install rates have been the subject of many debates between industry stakeholders for some time.
The data reported in this article are based on the respondents from the survey only and should not be reflected as the true national average. The reported average charges exclude GST.
Respondents were concentrated mainly to NSW (25%) and Victoria (30%), with less than a third from South Australia (13%) and Queensland (15%). The remainder came from Northern Territory (2%), Western Australia (9%), Tasmania (9%) and the ACT (2%).
The average installer has been Clean Energy Council accredited for seven years. More than 85% work on both commercial and residential systems; 13% of respondents install residential systems only and 2% work on commercial only.
Continue reading the full story at - http://www.ecogeneration.com.au/solar-installer-rates-survey/
