Page 1375 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 3 May 2016
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climate change, both across Australian jurisdictions and among the leading regions worldwide. It also ensures that the government is protected against uncertainty towards reaching our 40 per cent emissions reduction target by the year 2020.
This bill contains amendments to the Electricity Feed-in (Large-scale Renewable Energy Generation) Act 2011, which I will refer to as the FiT act, and the Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act 2010, or the climate change act. Both will see the ACT achieve 100 per cent renewable energy by the year 2020 and will set a new principal target of carbon neutrality by 2050.
These two amendments are placed together due to the interconnectedness of the climate change act with the FiT act. The climate change act sets the targets for emission reductions that the government must achieve, while the FiT act sets out the technical parameters of how this can be achieved through our procurement of large-scale renewable energy.
To give the Assembly some context, I will briefly outline the process that has led to this bill being presented today. Firstly, in November last year we celebrated the fifth year of operation of the climate change act. This triggered the commencement of a review of the operations of the act, as required under section 26.
Simultaneously, global leaders from 195 nations met in Paris for the 21st United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—Conference of the Parties, otherwise known as COP21. This successful meeting saw an agreement on enhanced action on climate change by all nations present. This agreement is known as the Paris agreement, and was opened for signature on 22 April this year in New York. Importantly, this agreement states that the parties agree to aim to undertake rapid reduction, in accordance with the best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.
In assessing the operations of our own legislation, the review compared the content of the act with the current climate change policy context. It also compared the technological advances in renewable technology with the appropriateness of our targets. The bill that I am presenting today stems from the recommendations that have been made in that review.
Two key recommendations stood out for immediate action. The first is the need to legislate our 100 per cent renewable energy target, announced as policy by the Chief Minister in September last year but brought forward here in this bill from 2025 to the year 2020. The second is to improve our carbon neutrality target, or zero net emissions target, so that we are aligned with the outcomes of the Paris agreement.
Achieving 100 per cent by 2020 can easily be done under existing auction processes that are currently underway and with more cost certainty in 2020 than in 2025. A 2020 date takes advantage of favourable market conditions for the ACT, where we have so far achieved the lowest cost for renewable energy seen in Australia. A 2020 date for a 100 per cent renewable energy target also moves the ACT from equal second to first among global regions with renewable energy targets reporting under the international initiative of the carbon disclosure project.
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