Page 1114 - Week 03 - Thursday, 26 February 2009
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There are those that have criticised this scheme and other schemes that give a leg up to the renewable energy industries as a subsidy to otherwise expensive and inefficient technologies. Let us just be clear about the energy generation landscape here in Australia. Around 90 per cent of Australia’s electricity is generated from fossil fuels. While many of us may have thought that we were blessed with cheap power generation by burning coal, the sad truth is that coal is the largest single source of greenhouse emissions in this country. We have become reliant on an energy generation source that is irrevocably damaging our planet, changing weather patterns, increasing the severity of storms, increasing drought and water shortages, increasing the number of hot days—and there will be fewer cold nights—and increasing ocean temperatures, threatening to reshape the biodiversity and fish stocks in our seas in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.
Despite this, coal-fired power generation still has a place in our energy market in the near term; renewable energy cannot compete with that at this point in time. In its proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme, the federal government has completely failed to send a realistic signal to the market about what the price of carbon should be.
The CPRS will not drive investment into emerging renewable technologies. The wind industry does not anticipate much benefit from the CPRS; the solar industry anticipates even less. The CPRS certainly does not make these industries cost competitive with coal-fired power for a considerable amount of time, at a time when we need urgency. And while emissions trading schemes, of which the CPRS is a pale, watered-down example proposed by a federal government with no real commitment to do anything concrete, might have some impact in driving efficiency in heavily competing industries, emissions trading schemes in general do not drive the massive upscaling of clean energy generation capacity that will be required in the future, and this watered-down version of the CPRS will do even less, unfortunately.
When we have squeezed every last drop of efficiency out of our coal-fired power stations, and the next step is to switch them off—because ultimately that is what we are going to have to do: switch them off—what will happen if we do not have up and running other sources of generation of the scale required? I imagine that those coal-fired power stations will stay switched on for longer than they should, further heating up this planet and further emitting greenhouse emissions.
This speaks to the purpose of a feed-in tariff that drives medium to large-scale installations: we need to get that capacity operating as soon as possible; otherwise we will not easily be able to switch off the coal-fired power stations when the opportunity arises—and when the need arises, more importantly.
The federal government has been lukewarm in its support for feed-in tariffs. Some, including the federal resources minister, Martin Ferguson—that progressive thinker of the ALP left up on the hill—think that feed-in tariffs pick winners and that we should just let the market decide which is the most economically feasible energy generation source to bring online. This completely misses the point that we should choose the right energy source not just on the basis of price but also on its potential to deliver base load or peak energy, decentralised energy or, indeed, energy that is appropriate for the environment in which it is being generated.
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