Business Owners: Adsbygoogle window.adsbygoogle and Rule Change

business owners: As we reported here, shocked and confused business owners who have had only a month to grapple with the massive implications of the rule change attended an emergency roundtable meeting in Brisbane on Thursday. adsbygoogle window.adsbygoogle .push ;The Clean Energy Council, which hosted the meeting, again called for a deferment of the rule change, which it said had been rushed through without proper consultation or proper justification, according to Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In comments to Renew Economy after the meeting, the CEC's director of energy generation, Anna Freeman, said local industry was in a state of shock and confusion about what would happen to their existing staff and projects, in a matter of days. The rule change, due to come into play on Monday, will require licensed electrical workers only to perform basic installation tasks on solar projects of 100kW and over, including lifting, mounting and fixing PV panels. But local governments are also up in arms, it would seem, with the Darling Downs and South West Queensland Council of Mayors calling on the state government to defer the changes and review the regulations not just in consultation with industry, but with councils of affected communities, too. Solar projects will form a major platform for future jobs growth in these regional and remote centres and this amendment will take away jobs and could jeopardise the viability of projects. The proposed changes would force the solar farm industry to, in many cases, bring in electricians from outside the area to undertake manual and mechanical tasks associated with erecting solar panels, said Paul Antonio, who is the Mayor of Toowoomba, and chair of the DDSWQC. With limited numbers of licenced electricians in rural communities, these changes have the potential to rob local workers of manual labour jobs, increase costs of construction as well as causing potential delays in project completion, he told local paper Queensland Country Life on Wednesday. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.