Page 682 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 March 2014
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Listening to the shadow minister’s speech this afternoon, I would be forgiven for forgetting that about 10 minutes before her speech she said that the Liberal Party’s position was to support a 30 per cent reduction in the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. You would be forgiven for forgetting that, to achieve 30 per cent, you are going to have to do a lot of work on emissions reduction. To achieve 30 per cent, you are still going to need a very significant component of renewable energy generation. For the Liberal Party to come in here and, on the one hand, say they have got a 30 per cent emission reduction target, rather than the legislated 40 per cent one, and then say that renewable energy is expensive and wasteful, and not something that they support, simply does not stack up.
I welcome the fact that since Ms Lawder has been in this place the Liberal Party has chosen to reaffirm a position that it seemed to have abandoned a few years ago—that 30 per cent was a target they would support. It is still a very strong target. But it is a strong target because you need renewable energy as part of the mix. The Liberals need to think very closely about that.
We know what the community thinks about taking strong action as a city on reducing our city’s greenhouse gas emissions and playing our part as part of a global movement of cities and communities who are taking practical action to reduce the impact of carbon emissions on the global atmosphere. The government surveyed 1,200 residents last year. That survey found that 76 per cent thought it was important that the ACT government take action on climate change, that it have a progressive climate change policy. Eighty-one per cent wanted the ACT government to take a strong leadership role. Ninety-three per cent supported the government’s proposals to demonstrate, promote and deploy new energy technologies as part of that policy response. Ninety-three per cent of all the people surveyed in that randomised sample supported strong action to support the deployment of renewable energy. That is what this bill does.
Renewable energy does the heavy lifting to achieve these targets. Seventy-three per cent of the emission reduction needed to achieve the 40 per cent reduction target will need to be delivered through renewable energy generation. That is a very significant objective for us. When it was originally passed in 2011, this act allowed a maximum of 210 megawatts of large-scale renewable energy capacity that could be supported by a feed-in tariff. In 2012-13, the government implemented the first ever reverse auctions in Australia for large-scale renewable energy generation. And we have demonstrated that it is a very effective mechanism to achieve large-scale renewables at an affordable price for consumers.
With that experience behind us, therefore, this bill seeks to increase the maximum feed-in tariff capacity that can be supported under the act to 550 megawatts. Current modelling shows that around 490 megawatts of large-scale renewable energy is needed to reach the renewable energy target. The extra 60 megawatts provides a buffer in case there are changes in methodology, particularly if the commonwealth government scales back the large-scale renewable energy target scheme.
The government, as Mr Rattenbury has said, has conducted a review of the operation of the solar auction process. That review has confirmed that it is a highly proven and
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