Page 680 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 March 2014
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
It is not bad policy when the competing technologies are also being subsidised. Global fossil fuel subsidies run at about $400 billion a year. In Australia there are substantial subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and anybody who looks at anything to do with the history of energy infrastructure development in this country knows that all those coal-fired power stations that now operate were paid for out of government resources when they were first constructed. That was a massive subsidy to the fossil fuel industry, on a scale that frankly is not even, I do not think, anywhere near commensurate with that which is put in place through this scheme.
The large-scale feed-in tariff will lock in green energy purchases for 20 years at a time, as I have already reflected, and the first of these substantial tranches will be 200 megawatts of wind at a time when there is strong competition between wind energy generators to secure power purchase agreements. In doing so, whenever we sign up generators, we will lock in that price security, and the indications are that it is a price we can afford to pay.
The government has undertaken quite a considerable review of the large-scale auction process and, as a result, is confident the process can be replicated and used on a bigger scale. In general, the feedback from proponents about the auction process was positive. Some changes were requested. One of those was a clearer sense of weighting of the criteria for the assessment of proposals, and I think this is useful. Proponents need to know what the focus is for the assessment and what the criteria are so that when they are putting their bids together they can make sure that they are informed and coming up with the most competitive bid that they can.
I am also pleased that community engagement will have a 20 per cent weighting in the assessment of wind projects. It is clear that good consultation and engagement with the community is crucial, both for the benefit of the community but also for the benefit of the development of wind farms in this country.
Again, I note the comments from Ms Lawder. She made some rather offhand remarks about the ACT not being willing to tolerate these sorts of facilities inside our own borders and wanting to make it somebody else’s problem in somebody else’s backyard. That ignores the basic physical fact that we do not have the wind resource in the ACT, but we happen to live in a region that has tremendous wind resources. Just by quirk of history, those wind resources are outside the ACT’s border. I think that points to the value of this 20 per cent weighting for wind projects.
Unfortunately, we have seen some proponents not give due regard to communities that they have attempted to put their wind farms in. That does not mean wind technology is a bad technology; it means we need to put pressure on those proponents to improve their processes. I note that any wind farm that will successfully achieve a contract under this legislation will, of course, have had to go through the New South Wales planning process. It is not that we are just dumping it off on someone else, making it somebody else’s problem, without a care for that. Both through the New South Wales planning rules but also through this weighting in the auction process, I think that we can exert a positive influence.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video