2020 IB Extended Essays

Body Due to the current world attitude on clean energy, the demand for clean energy has increased

dramatically. This attitude for clean energy is demonstrated by Figure 1.3, whereby even with a

decrease in the subsidy’s amount the demand still increases. This means changes to prices; the

product and the market have been made in order to suit the largest number of consumers in the

market. The government then ensured that a subsidy was introduced in order to influence everyday

consumers to ‘do their part’ and help the environment by buying solar panels.

As seen in the below diagram, Figure 1.2, Australia’s clean energy percentage has been steadily

increasing over the past 20 years. The left axis shows how many Giga watt hours are clean while the

right shows the percentage. This graph demonstrates that people are really starting to use clean

energy over coal and gas which in turn could be taken as the solar panel subsidy is working well.

However, on the flip side the Australian governments renewable energy target was 20% of all energy

produced in 2009 while figure 1.2 below shows that a spike in clean energy did occur due to this

subsidy, it was not enough to reach the goal of 20% (Government, 2016). This partially answers the

question of whether the subsidy did affect sales of solar panels in Australia. However, figure 1.2 is

compromised of all clean energy, not just household solar panels, meaning that the data shown in

the graph is inaccurate in terms of the research question. It offers a broad outline but does not focus

on the topic of the question which is household solar.

It is important to note that figure 1.2 stops recording the clean energy in 2018 and therefore does

not help to fully answer the research question as it does not include 2019.

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