Page 1589 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
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The government should pass legislation to allow the debt for solarisation to be easily attached to the house, without incurring a second mortgage, rather than the house owner. The act would provide that any solarisation debt would need to be disclosed each time a house is sold. This is similar to the obligation to disclose rates or electricity bills or the house energy rating. This legislation would make the risk of default almost minimal, allowing Actew to charge a low interest rate on the debt.
The government took a bold step in 2000 when it introduced the greenhouse strategy—it might have been 1998—but unfortunately the Chief Minister got confused and thought that Professor Blakers’ solarisation proposal involved a $350 million dollar up-front expenditure by the ACT government. It did not, and Dr Blakers never suggested that it should. This confusion stalled the whole strategy, and seven years down the track we have hardly moved forward and our greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
Andrew Blakers’ solarisation of 100,000 homes in Canberra over a decade would be worth around $80 million a year and would lead to the creation of about 800 new jobs in a sector where it is often hard for people to find employment. Electricity utilities will benefit from mass solarisation through a reduction in peak loads, because better insulation will reduce the space heating peak load in winter and the air conditioning peak load in summer while solar water heaters will have gas or off-peak electric boosting.
Initial solarisations could focus on the items with the most clear-cut financial benefit. This would increase the probability that the scheme is commercially successful. In approximate order, this would be ceiling insulation, draught proofing, house zoning and low-flow shower heads followed by solar water heaters and wall and floor insulation followed by photovoltaic systems and double glazing.
Solarisation will create a substantial number of new jobs in the local community. The scheme dovetails with the building energy rating scheme in several states, and early solarisation companies will be well placed to dominate the national solarisation market that is likely to develop very shortly. The government can still take the lead on this issue.
Obviously, the commonwealth bears the major responsibility for taking greenhouse abatement measures. I welcome the Chief Minister’s commitment to require, as a minimum, that all electricity retailers source 10 per cent of renewable energy by 2010 and 15 per cent by 2020. This scheme is in line with New South Wales. Like the proposed national emissions trading scheme due to start in 2010, it is a fine example of what the Greens have been advocating, which is that the state and territory Labor governments use their collective power to bypass the bottleneck that is the Howard government and implement climate change and other initiatives by passing uniform legislation and committing to uniform targets.
Of course, while welcoming these proposals, I cannot accept that it must take so long to work out the details and implement these schemes. Australian governments seemed to have no trouble in immediately dismantling basic human rights and legal principles
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