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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 6 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1661 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

If people knew how much greenhouse gas emissions they produce by their electricity consumption, then perhaps they would demand that ActewAGL make more of an effort to buy its electricity from more greenhouse friendly sources, regardless of the GreenChoice scheme.

Green power schemes are quite a perverse way of promoting renewable energy. They effectively ask people who want to do the right thing for the environment to pay more for their electricity, when we should be penalising those people who do not do the right thing. We should have a carbon tax on all sources of energy so that renewable energy ends up as cheap as, or even cheaper than, dirty energy, or we should extend what the federal government has done with setting a mandatory percentage of renewable energy that all energy distributors have to buy, set as an extra 2 per cent by 2010, with the extra costs of this spread across all consumers.

But getting back to this motion, there are some practical complications to implementing the idea. Given the nature of electricity, it is not possible to attract particular electrons from their generation source to a particular consumer. There is a continuous flow of electricity around the grid. This has been a confusion with the green power schemes. Some people have assumed that if they join a green power scheme the electricity that feeds into their house will be from a renewable source, but this is not the case. It just means that they have purchased an amount of electricity from a renewable source somewhere in the grid and that this has displaced an equivalent amount of non-renewable energy.

The best that can be done is for aggregated information to be provided to consumers on the proportions of electricity bought by ActewAGL from different generation companies. If the type of generator is known, then the greenhouse gas emissions per unit of electricity can be fairly easily calculated. However, even here there may be complications because of the nature of the national electricity market.

I believe that it is possible for a generation company to buy their electricity from a third party to sell on to a distributor like ActewAGL rather than generate the electricity themselves. Some electricity is bought through long-term contracts, and some can be bought on the spot market from whoever is supplying electricity at that particular time. So tracking back to find all the sources of electricity bought by ActewAGL for the period for which a customer is being billed could be difficult. But this is not to say that we should not try to get this information.

Given that at least the Actew side of ActewAGL is still territory owned and has a statutory obligation to operate in accordance with the principles of ESD and that the ACT has its own greenhouse gas target and greenhouse strategy, it is reasonable for the government to ask ActewAGL to pursue this idea.

While not everyone in the community will take notice of carbon emission information on electricity bills, it is much better that this information be available rather than hidden. It should not be too hard for ActewAGL to add a few lines of text to their bill format. This is a good initiative, and I support it.

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