Page 2208 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
megawatts from the medium category to the micro category. That is okay; the minister can, in fact, fix some of his problems, but he has not exactly made any moves to do that as such so far. If you review exactly what he said, the hint was always there. He said:
I am not suggesting that it will be, but it does have that capacity.
The final point that the minister made was that the government has:
… a close monitoring occurring of what is going on in the industry. We have the regular reporting to the ICRC on the level of take-up, the level of demand, and that has remained pretty constant since the scheme commenced. We see about a megawatt installed every quarter.
Well, that was not right either, as it turned out. In fact, I still do not know where that close monitoring was occurring, and I certainly do not know where it is publicly reported for the industry. But that said, it certainly did not stop the cap creeping up from behind the government and whacking it on the head with a great big stick. I do not know exactly what the government was monitoring, but it was not the micro solar industry in the ACT, it would appear. And that was that. The minister said:
So for all of those reasons we will not support Mr Rattenbury’s amendment.
I would like to talk about feed-in tariffs in a more general sense. They seek to spread the cost of renewable energy generation across the whole community while providing an incentive to those who make the private investment in renewable energy infrastructure. The intent is, in effect, to provide a small financial incentive to encourage investment in solar or other renewable infrastructure.
The Greens wholeheartedly believe that feed-in tariffs are a good policy to bring on the development of a whole range of renewable technologies and that they should be used more widely and be subject to less political hysteria. Indeed, one of the failings of feed-in tariff policy in Australia is perhaps that they have been too readily applied to household solar and not applied widely enough to industrial-scale projects.
As part of the marketing of solar panels domestically, there has probably been too much focus on how a household’s feed-in tariff can reduce your electricity bills and not enough focus on the fact that feed-in tariffs are a power purchase agreement with a built-in incentive to repay the up-front cost of investment by the person putting the panels in. Feed-in tariffs do not actually reduce your electricity bill; they repay the up-front capital investment made by private investors at a rate of return that makes the investment viable. Indeed, using less electricity is probably the best thing anyone can do to reduce their electricity bill.
So we are supportive of the government’s general direction on feed-in tariffs towards industrial-scale projects, but we do not believe that there is any excuse to kill off one sector as we move forward to building another. This should never have been an either/or situation. We want to see small-scale solar play its role while also seeing the big players starting to build industrial-scale plants.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video