Solar panel company in administration

A solar panel installation company in New South Wales, which gained headlines for helping “green” Cate Blanchett’s Sydney Theatre Company, has been placed in administration.

DCM Green, formerly known as DCM Solar, bills itself as one of the largest panel installers in Australia and has focused on retirement home and villages. The company claims to have installed panels on 6,500 retirement home units across New South Wales, and to have installed 10% of the panels installed under the Federal Government’s Solar Homes and Communities Program.

DCM was placed in the hands of administrators Alan Hayes and Brett Lord of PPB Advisory on March 10.

The administrators were unavailable for comment prior to publication and SmartCompany’s attempts to contact DCM were also unsuccessful.

It is unknown whether the business is still operating at this stage.

The business was originally established in April 2009 as a “special purpose unit trust” called DCM Solar. The new company, DCM Green, was registered in February 2010.

The solar industry in NSW was hit hard in October 2010 when the NSW Government suddenly slashed the feed-in tariff on solar panels (that is, the amount the Government would pay for power fed back into the grid from solar panels) from 60c per kilowatt hour to 20c.

The NSW Government’s costs of the scheme had blown out from $202 million over seven years to an estimated $1.5 billion.

NSW Premier Kristina Keneally said at the time that cutting the tariff was designed to prevent households with solar power from facing big hikes in electricity charges when the feed-in scheme ended in 2016.

While she denied the sudden tariff cut would lead to a downturn in the state’s solar sector, solar industry experts say demand has fallen in recent months as a result of the tariff changes.