Page 1113 - Week 03 - Thursday, 26 February 2009
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that will inevitably happen with global pressure to cost carbon and as oil prices rise. But energy efficiency measures alone are not going to prevent emissions from rising to a level that will cause dangerous climate change. We must now deploy a range of measures to reduce our energy consumption and think about the ways that we will move towards electricity sources not reliant on the burning of fossil fuels. The climate change emergency that we now face does not allow us to cherry-pick abatement measures. We need to implement a full suite of policy options that deliver abatement as quickly as possible.
Renewable energy technologies are working; it is time that we embraced them on a large scale and moved away from considering them as some worthy niche of the electricity generation sector. A feed-in tariff is a mechanism that delivers not only increased penetration of renewable energy sources into the marketplace but also the longer-term expansion of the renewable energy sector on a sustainable basis.
The renewable energy industry has had a hard time of it in Australia. There is no doubt that we could be further ahead in terms of installed capacity if the policies of governments across the board had been more consistent and better thought through.
Federally, there was a photovoltaic rebate that industry and environment groups alike lobbied to have continued every two or three years. I was one of those lobbyists. The uncertainty of what the outcome would be was shocking, and the fact that this had to be dealt with every couple of years did no favours to the industry whatsoever. Last year the photovoltaic scheme was changed again, with the application of a means test. And this year it undergoes another change as it is linked into the renewable energy target certificate scheme.
That brings me to the other major policy initiative for renewables. The Howard government introduced the mandatory renewable energy target but then failed to extend the scheme, even when it was clear that the industry had easily met the target ahead of time. It was a real travesty that the Howard government failed to recognise the absolute success of its own measure and the absolute desire and dynamism of the industry.
Last year when I was in Bali at the climate change negotiations I met one of the major Australian energy companies. They had intentions to substantially invest in Australia; they had already invested substantially. But because the federal government failed to expand the MRET scheme they were heading offshore. They were going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Chile—Chile of all places—because they could not get the space from government to make those investments in Australia. That is a travesty for all of Australia, because we are shipping jobs offshore that should have been put together here in Australia.
That scheme has now been revamped with a higher target and a whole new set of rules, which is very welcome. Nonetheless we continue to have uncertainty. Rebates for solar hot water have started and stopped; they have overheated the market and then placed small business under pressure when they have been withdrawn. This is not the sort of thing that will develop the sector in the long term. All in all, the one thing that we could say has been lacking in the renewables industry in Australia is certainty, and certainty is something that a feed-in tariff delivers.
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