Page 2784 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 17 September 2014
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In March 2014 Minister Corbell announced a wind auction for 200 megawatts of new wind energy generating capacity. A request for proposals and other proposal documentation was released on 17 April. The deadline for proposals was 3 September 2014. Eighteen proposals have been received for the ACT’s first wind power auction, reflecting keen industry interest. Successful proposals under the wind auction will produce about 560,000 megawatt hours per annum. This is equivalent to around 24 per cent of current forecast electricity consumption in the territory in 2020—24 per cent. Two hundred megawatts of wind generation capacity is expected to cost an average ACT household up to $1.34 per week in 2020, declining after that time.
At the launch of the ACT’s wind auction, the then New South Wales Parliamentary Secretary for Renewable Energy, now the Minister for the Environment, Mr Rob Stokes, praised our minister’s wind auction initiative and the potential it created for investment in the local region. The auction is open to proposals for wind generators located anywhere in the national electricity market, which includes all jurisdictions except Western Australia and the Northern Territory. The benefit of this approach is that the territory stands to receive a broader range of quality proposals that will result in the best value for money outcome to ACT electricity consumers. Wind generation is the most cost-effective renewable energy technology, around half the price of solar.
In my electorate of Ginninderra, we have led the way in Canberra’s renewable energy generation, in the form of bioenergy from the west Belconnen landfill, for a number of years. A regional bioenergy facility could convert ACT and regional organic wastes, which do not have another market, into renewable electricity. Existing recycling practices would be continued and enhanced. The ACT government is exploring options to deliver an energy-from-waste facility in combination with one or more new materials recovery facilities to recover and recycle paper products, plastic and metals that currently end up in landfill.
In conclusion, let me say that the only dark cloud on our solar array is the federal Liberal Party. Joe Hockey is tilting at the Lake George windmills and wants to take the puff out of wind power. We know that before the federal election, the Liberal Party abandoned any concern about global warming. “Axe the tax,” Mr Abbott droned, as though it and the mining tax were the source of all our economic woes.
They removed Australia’s pricing on carbon pollution but now want to go further in dismantling action on climate change. We were told by Mr Abbott that there was bipartisanship on the national renewable energy target by 2020, before the election. Well, the Liberals are busily walking away from this election commitment as well. Again, as with so many of his promises in opposition compared to the reality in government, Mr Abbott’s renewable energy target commitment was over-promised and will be under-delivered.
However, renewable energy is the way of the future, and history will be kinder to the ACT government’s stance than the federal government’s.
MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (11.10): I move:
Omit all words after paragraph (1)(a), substitute:
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