Page 323 - Week 01 - Thursday, 17 February 2011

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the job done—not policies which simply place an unreasonable burden on Canberra families for very little environmental benefit. We will support those types of policies. We will not support this legislation.

MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.10): The ACT Greens will be supporting this bill today because the bill does a number of important things. It seeks to expand the feed-in tariff scheme to apply to larger renewable energy generators up to 200 kilowatts. It seeks to put a scheme cap on the new definitions of micro and medium scale generation of 15 megawatts. That is an area where we have some concerns, and I will be coming back to that and tabling an amendment which I have already circulated. The bill also opens the eligibility of the scheme to more people, in particular to incorporated associations, cooperatives, and the owners and lessees of premises. It really opens this scheme up to a wider audience that can take advantage of this and invest their own money for the public good.

The Greens support the extension of this scheme, and we do so in the face of some strong criticism of this incentive model for renewable energy, much of which Mr Seselja has just gone over. But we believe it is important that we start the transition to renewable energy generation.

We fully acknowledge that the development of solar generators in the ACT will only be one part of how this jurisdiction meets its 40 per cent greenhouse target. It is only one pathway to transitioning our energy dependency from fossil fuel based sources to clean, green renewable energy, but it is an important step. Current federal policy on structural support for renewable energy is limited to the mandatory renewable energy target, which, by its very nature, drives the commercialisation of least-cost technologies. We are, of course, still waiting for a carbon price to be introduced and, while it may be with us in the next 12 months or so, it will have a similar effect of driving the uptake of least-cost technologies.

That is all good and well, but two problems come to mind. Firstly, the ACT will find it difficult to build generation capacity that is least cost, as we have limited suitable sites for wind developments. Secondly, at a broader level, it means that we are not bringing on line the range of technologies that we are going to need to develop a portfolio response to climate change. It is going to take a suite of actions that will enable us to eventually stop using coal-fired power from New South Wales. Energy efficiency measures in our homes and businesses, electrification of our transport system, our consumption of renewable energy produced interstate, building our own generation capacity and the development of a smart grid to manage it all make up the suite of measures that we are going to need, and this bill is just one part.

The next feed-in tariff expansion foreshadowed by the government for later in the year starts to build real capacity of renewable energy in the territory. I have said before that we need to stop treating renewable energy as if it is a worthy niche in the energy debate. We need to start taking it seriously and rolling out technologies that are with us here and now. These are technologies that are operating effectively overseas and, while the technology will continue to develop and improve over the next decades, we have no excuse not to get on with it.


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