Page 348 - Week 01 - Thursday, 27 February 2014
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reduction target. That target equates to a very simple figure: two million tonnes of carbon less in the year 2020 compared to the baseline performance. At the moment we are tracking at about four million tonnes of carbon a year as a city. We need to get it down two million tonnes and we need to cut omissions by about two million tonnes. It is my job as the Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development to implement measures that achieve that target.
I was dismayed to read the comments of Ms Lawder in her opinion piece. I welcome the fact that we have a shadow minister who is willing to write opinion pieces and engage in some sort of public debate because we have not had one for some time from those on the other side of the chamber. I welcome Ms Lawder’s engagement, but I was dismayed by her lack of knowledge, as reflected in that opinion piece.
She said, first of all, that 90 per cent renewable was unachievable, yet she is just so poorly informed on that. What does 90 per cent renewable look like for the ACT? It looks like about 490 megawatts of renewable energy generation. That is what it looks like. Is that a lot? Well, it certainly is a lot of renewable energy. But is it a lot compared to what the private sector was already planning in our city and our region? No, it is not.
In our region, in the 17 local government areas that surround us in the Australian capital region, there was close to 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy generation already planned and, in many instances, already approved by the New South Wales department of planning for development but not yet constructed. That is an enormous amount of renewable energy which, in this case, is wind generation—the cheapest form of renewable energy generation currently available to us. So there you have it. Is it unachievable? Is it unattainable? No, it is not. The private sector are planning for it right now. We just have to seize that opportunity.
I was also disappointed to see in Ms Lawder’s article that she spoke about how we would have to cover the ACT in solar farms to achieve 100 per cent renewable. This showed a lack of understanding of principal elements of the government’s renewable energy program, which are on the public record and have been on the public record since 2012. It failed to recognise that, first of all, our policy around renewables is not just about solar; it is about wind and waste-to-energy technologies.
I have already mentioned the fact that our feed-in tariff legislation, which the government is seeking to amend in a bill introduced today, facilitates renewable energy generation not just in the ACT but in the broader region. We actually operate in an integrated national electricity market where we source our generation not just locally but from generators many kilometres away across our borders in other places.
If we do that already, as Mr Rattenbury said, for fossil fuel powered generation, we can do it for wind, because why would we not tap into wind and, indeed, solar that is located in places where there are good natural resources that give us the capacity to generate efficient and cost-effective renewable energy generation? Regrettably, the comments from Ms Lawder really did belie, it would appear, a real lack of understanding of established policy.
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