Page 1784 - Week 06 - Thursday, 30 July 2020
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we get on with protecting it and making it better. We have done that while growing our city, making it a vibrant and inclusive place to live. We have done it while delivering and growing more jobs for our city as well.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong—Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Minister for Corrections and Justice Health, Minister for Justice, Consumer Affairs and Road Safety and Minister for Mental Health) (4.53), in reply: On 4 June this year I presented the Electricity Feed-in (Renewable Energy Premium) Amendment Bill 2020 to the Assembly. This bill makes amendments to the Electricity Feed-In (Renewable Energy Premium) Act 2008, which established the ACT’s small and medium-scale feed-in tariff scheme.
This scheme encouraged the uptake of renewable energy generators such as rooftop solar photovoltaic systems and was open for applications between March 2009 and July 2011. The increased uptake helped drive solar PV prices down and make renewable generation accessible to more households and businesses across the ACT. For the 2018 financial year there were 10,170 generators supported by the scheme which collectively generated 46,550 megawatt hours of clean electricity for the ACT.
Evoenergy, as the ACT electricity distributor, is required under the act to provide data to the ACT government for the purposes of an annual report on the scheme. Evoenergy also uses this data to calculate the amount that is passed through to ACT electricity consumers. In 2018-19 the average weekly cost to a representative ACT household was 85c. In 2019 the ACT government sought an audit of Evoenergy’s data to ensure the ongoing efficiency of reporting and that the data being provided to the government is accurate, reliable and timely.
The amendment bill I presented for debate today has been prepared, following the outcomes of the audit, in order to strengthen the legislative requirements for scheme data collection and record keeping. This is intended to support improvement in Evoenergy’s data collection and record-keeping systems and improvement in the information provided to the ACT government. This bill has been prepared to enable the scheme to retain the long-term confidence of ACT energy consumers.
I will briefly outline the amendments that relate to accuracy of scheme data. These comprise the majority of the bill and provide the ACT government with an ability to take stronger action, if required, to ensure the reliability of the information being reported.
The first key amendment is that the minister will be able to request additional information from reporting entities where this is reasonably required to ensure the accuracy of the information they have reported. This could include information about how the entity records data or information about internal systems that it has in place to ensure data accuracy. The intent of these amendments is to enable the ACT government to ensure that reporting entities have robust processes in place to manage scheme data.
The amendments create an offence provision, should the reporting entity fail to provide the requested information. This conveys the seriousness of an entity not
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