Page 1620 - Week 05 - Thursday, 5 May 2016
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would like the Assembly to take into consideration new per person emissions targets to be created before the next review of the act. These will provide useful reporting and monitoring measures between principal and interim targets.
A key recommendation of the review is that the 100 per cent renewable energy target first announced as policy by the Chief Minister in September last year not only be legislated but also brought forward from 2025 to 2020. A RET is set through a disallowable instrument under the Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act. On Monday, 2 May this year the disallowable instrument setting the 100 per cent RET by 2020 was notified. The achievements of the RET to date are many. The 2014-15 financial year marked the start of electricity generated by the 20 megawatt Royalla solar farm constructed by Fotowatio Renewable Ventures. The solar farm was opened in September 2014 and this financial year produced 34 megawatt hours of clean electricity.
Twenty megawatts from two additional solar farms, Maoneng Australia, formerly known as Zhenfa, and OneSun plan to be generating in November this year. Two hundred megawatts of large-scale wind generating capacity was released for grants for feed-in tariff entitlement in February last year, with one of these auction winners, Coonooer Bridge Wind Farm, being officially opened on 15 April this year. In December 2015 the first of two winners from the wind 2 auction was announced; 100 megawatts for Hornsdale stage 2. The other is 100 megawatts for Sapphire Wind Farm 1 in northern New South Wales.
Also underway is an additional 109 megawatt next generation renewables auction, which commenced on 1 April this year. This is a direct result of the targets in the act, and its interconnectedness with the Electricity Feed-In (Large-scale Renewable Energy Generation) Act 2011.
While I have detailed some of the significant successes of the operations of the act, one aspect of the act is not in operation. Section 10 details the setting of per person energy efficiency targets. At the act’s conception the energy efficiency improvement scheme and supporting legislation had not commenced and this section was placed to be the primary maker for energy efficiency.
However, two years into the act’s operation, the Energy Efficiency (Cost Of Living) Improvement Act came into effect, setting energy efficiency goals. The subsequent EEIS programs have seen the rapid rollout of energy saving measures across the ACT. The development of the energy efficiency act supersedes the need for an energy efficiency target to be set within the climate change act, and as such I recommend that this section of the act be removed in the future.
Fulfilling the objective of monitoring and reporting, the territory has engaged the services of greenhouse gas accountants pitt&sherry to produce a methodology and greenhouse gas inventory report annually. The requirements for reporting within the act are currently aligned with the federal government’s reporting time lines of producing an inventory two years in arrears. However, for accurate annual reporting, the territory has now received an inventory for the most recent financial year through contractual arrangements with pitt&sherry and we plan to continue this agreement each year.
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