The southern state of Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) are both heading in the opposite direct to Australia’s conservative Liberal-National federal government with strong support for renewable energy.
ACT and the national capital, Canberra, are to be powered entirely by renewable energy by 2025, while Victoria has announced major new wind farm projects.
The ACT government has already committed to a target of 90 per cent renewable energy within the next five years and has backed a series of large-scale wind and solar projects both locally and interstate.
Environment Minister Simon Corbell said shifting the target to 100 per cent would make Canberra a leader both nationally and abroad.
“It means more jobs and more investment in the ACT economy, it means a complete decarbonisation of our electricity supply sector which will see further reductions in our city’s greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
“Most importantly it will see growth in the low-carbon economy, which means jobs and investment in our city, in our universities and in our research sectors.
“This is about seizing economic opportunity and recognising the enormous global market in renewable energy and wanting to attract some of that investment and some of that jobs growth to our city.”
Minister Corbell said the ACT was already well on its way to achieving a 90 per cent renewable energy target by 2020.
“Through the large-scale solar and wind auctions we will achieve 60 per cent renewable energy target by the year 2017 and 80 per cent by the year 2018.”
Opposition Leader Jeremy Hanson said his party supported renewable energy but that it would drive up power bills.
“Well we’re very supportive of renewable energy but the problem is if you go to 100 per cent the cost of that is enormous, what we’re going to see is power bills going up through the roof across Canberra,” he said.
“So already we’ve seen rates tripling and what Andrew Barr is now going to do is make everybody’s power bill unaffordable.”
Mr Hanson said the Canberra Liberals were still formulating their policy on a renewable energy target.
“We took a 30 per cent carbon emission reduction target to the last election so that remains our policy at this stage. We’re obviously re-examining that in the lead up to the next election,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Victorian government has set itself against the federal government over renewable energy by fast-tracking plans to build 50 new wind turbines worth $200m.
The Victorian Labor Party state premier, Daniel Andrews, made the announcement at Keppel Prince Engineering, the same wind tower manufacturer in the state’s south-west where 100 staff were made redundant in 2014 because of uncertainty regarding the federal government’s renewable energy target.
Conservative Liberal-National Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently described wind farms as “visually awful” and launched a senate inquiry to investigate their impact.
In June, legislation passed through both houses of federal parliament to wind back the renewable energy target from 41,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) by 2020 to to 33,000GWh, with the uncertainty in the lead-up damaging investor confidence.
Mr Andrews said: “The renewable energy sector and the thousand of Victorians and Australians whose lives depend on it, were betrayed with very bad policy. They were forgotten and left behind.”
“That’s not good enough. We’ve got a very different set of priorities. Renewable energy is about jobs, it’s as simple as that.
“I understand that, my government understands it. We will make sure we see more and more Victorians employed in this industry.”
The government would source renewable energy certificates from new projects in Victoria, bringing forward the building of about 100 megawatts’ worth of new wind energy worth $200m, he said.
