Page 1673 - Week 05 - Thursday, 5 May 2016
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But, more importantly, the cost of this transition is a modest one because we are helping to reduce the overall amount of electricity that Canberra households and businesses have to use. Not only are we doing that through measures like the ACTSmart sustainability scheme, which is helping and teaching Canberrans both in the business sector and in the household sector to reduce their electricity demand, but we have mandated electricity companies, required them, to provide energy efficiency services to households. We have required that of them through the energy efficiency improvement scheme.
That is a scheme that those opposite voted against. It is disappointing they did, because it delivers a net benefit to households. It delivers savings on a weekly basis of around $5 per household per week. That effectively reduces or cancels out the impact associated with the transition to 100 per cent renewables. If you are seeing that reduction, then the net impact on your bill is pretty much zero.
But that shows you how affordable this transition can be. It is not a huge impost. It is not a dramatic impost. It is a manageable impost. And when you consider further that 25 per cent of the households that are assisted through the energy efficiency improvement scheme must be low income households and that the electricity retailers have an obligation to find those households and deliver energy efficiency services to them, you can see that this government is very focused on a just transition as well, assisting the most those household who are the most vulnerable. So there cannot be any argument that we are not having due regard to these cost impacts.
But we must also have regard to the economic opportunities, and these are considerable. Through the reverse auction processes the government has administered to date, we have secured commitments from the renewable energy developers to invest in our city, and we have companies like Windlab, Neoen and CWP committing to establish operation centres here in Canberra, committing to establish wind or solar development functions here in Canberra, committing to invest in the ANU in new skills and research, to invest in the CIT over $30 million in microgrid and wind energy skills development courses and training.
We have identified, for example, that at the moment when you build a wind farm and you need to train a technician you have to send them to Europe. Why cannot they be trained here in Australia? We are addressing that right now. The CIT will be the first TAFE in Australia to offer an accredited training course in wind maintenance and other technical skills. That is directly a result of the investments we are securing from the wind energy developers. In total, we are looking at an investment of over $400 million worth of value into the ACT economy, simply from requiring strong, local economic development outcomes as part of the procurement for large-scale renewable energy generation.
The changes we are debating today will establish zero net emissions for our city by the year 2050 but they will also amend the Electricity Feed-In (Large-scale Renewable Energy Generation) Act to allow a further 91 megawatts to be procured through the current reverse auction that is underway. That will bring in total 200 megawatts to be procured in that auction, and now is the time to do it, because
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