Page 99 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 15 February 2011
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I would like to outline today a number of programs that the government is pursuing. I would like to start with a program that is directly assisting hundreds and hundreds of low income households to improve their energy efficiency and reduce their power and water bills. In 2010 I announced that the government would begin a five-month trial of what it called the outreach program to improve the energy efficiency of low income households and reduce their carbon emissions. The government committed $1.3Â million to this program from the Environment, Climate Change, Energy and Water portfolio.
Five community welfare organisations were contracted to provide energy-efficient appliances to low income clients to replace inefficient appliances. We know that, particularly if you are in private rental, if you are renting in a private property, you often cannot do much about the energy efficiency of the fabric of the building. You cannot change the curtains, you cannot put in insulation and you cannot even upgrade the hot water system, because these are the responsibility of the landlord. And you may not always have a landlord who is willing or interested to undertake those measures. But what you can do is improve the energy efficiency of the appliances in your home. And we know that, after hot water, one of the big users of energy in the home is the fridge, then the oven and the other major energy-consuming appliances like the washing machine.
So the government provided private rental tenants who were on an average household income of $540 a week or less with funding to purchase new energy-efficient appliances. Five hundred and seventy-seven appliances were installed, the majority being refrigerators, freezers, washing machines and indeed some heaters.
In addition to this, the government also spent some of this money to assist Housing ACT to further improve its existing built stock. As a result, Housing ACT replaced over 280 existing inefficient appliances with new energy-efficient refrigerators, freezers and washing machines in properties rented by community welfare organisations and used for emergency and crisis accommodation.
Housing ACT was also funded, as part of this program, to carry out insulation and draught sealing in over 200 additional properties, over and above its existing program funded directly by the government. And it was also funded to install solar hot-water systems in over 100 properties—an acceleration of its existing retrofit and refurbishment program.
I have recently reviewed the evaluation of the trial of the outreach program. It has shown that this program has had very substantial benefits for those participating low income households in private rental and low income households in community and public housing.
Let me give the Assembly a bit of an illustration of what sort of outcomes we have been able to achieve. Firstly, we have achieved energy use reductions of just over one million kilowatt hours per year or the equivalent of the power bill of 130 ACT homes as a result of those measures. Greenhouse gas emissions reduced by 915 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, with total savings to all the households of about $131,600
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