Page 582 - Week 02 - Thursday, 16 February 2017
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approximately $100 million per year. By around the middle of the century these costs are predicted to more than double.
We have experienced extreme conditions over the past few weeks, with record temperatures and catastrophic bushfire conditions across most of New South Wales, with a number of fires threatening major centres. Thankfully, as we speak, most of these fires have been brought under control. We have also seen emergency plans activated in regard to our electricity supply, as heatwaves across New South Wales and the ACT resulted in record high electricity demand while also creating problems for energy generation. At this time New South Wales and the ACT were at risk of rolling blackouts as supply from traditional coal and gas-fired generators was barely enough to meet demand.
One of the reasons this blackout did not occur was the collective efforts from our community and industry to reduce electricity consumption. I take this opportunity to thank for their efforts those in the community that reduced their energy use. Electricity generation by well over 300,000 households and businesses with solar panels in the ACT-New South Wales region played a key role in avoiding a blackout. Early indications are that voluntary reductions in electricity demand equated to around 300 megawatts across the ACT and New South Wales, around the size of a small to medium sized coal-fired power station. Without this support, the demand on the grid would have been even higher.
In recent months renewables have been blamed for blackouts, as we saw in South Australia, or when the traditional grid is simply unable to cope with high demand, as we saw last weekend. It is important to note that renewable electricity was not the cause of these events and that the federal government is continuing to play politics with our electricity system. Increased diversity of generation sources, such as wind, solar or any other source, generally increases the resilience of the grid.
The ACT government’s battery rollout in 5,000 households and businesses will play a significant role in reducing demand on the ACT’s electricity system. Those households with rooftop solar, battery storage, and increasingly electric vehicles, will be far more resilient in the face of climate change. The ACT’s energy efficiency improvement scheme is also playing an important role for households and businesses in increasing energy efficiency and therefore reducing energy demand. Over 70,000 households in the ACT have already participated in this system.
Necessary action to limit global warming to less than two degrees Celsius was agreed at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015 and again supported in Marrakech in 2016. Australia ratified the Paris climate agreement in November 2016, joining 175 nations committed to keeping global average temperature increase to well below two degrees Celsius.
Through ongoing and overwhelming support from the Canberra community, the ACT is on track to achieve its ambitious carbon emissions reduction targets. By 2020 the ACT will have reduced its total emissions by 40 per cent from 1990 levels, and will be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy. As outlined in the parliamentary agreement signed between ACT Labor and the Greens, the ACT is
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