Australian Federal government announces increase in renewables scheme
Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen says a more concerted effort is needed to reach the federal government's target for 82 percent renewable energy by 2030. The government will dramatically expand a taxpayer-funded scheme to subsidise and underwrite new renewable energy projects -- including batteries, pumped hydro, wind and solar.
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00:00 What it will support is renewable energy, both dispatchable, so that means renewable
00:05 energy attached to a battery or indeed pumped hydro, that means that the system can call
00:10 upon it, and/or variable renewable energy as well.
00:14 We need both to move our grid into an 82% renewable world.
00:20 The biggest threat to reliability, energy reliability in Australia today, is actually
00:25 an ageing coal-fired power station which has an unexpected outage that AEMO and the market
00:30 operators weren't expecting and one day it's just not working.
00:34 That happens quite a lot, it's happening today as we speak, and we need to ensure we're getting
00:39 on new energy to replace the ageing coal-fired power stations, and I don't want to wait until
00:44 after the coal-fired power stations are closed or suffer some sort of event where they have
00:49 to close early.
00:50 We need to work with communities better than has happened in the past.
00:54 We want to bring communities with us more meaningfully than has happened in the past
00:58 and ensure there's community benefit, and we all have to do that, all levels of government,
01:02 and we are working on that through a review at the moment.
01:05 But also I think the broader question about planning systems, yes, there are some planning
01:09 systems which are quite slow for renewable energy applications.
01:14 We want to work with the states through these renewable energy transformation agreements
01:18 to fix that where it's necessary.
01:20 It's not about making environmental approvals more lax or reducing conditions, it is about
01:27 trying to get to yes or no more quickly, which gives communities comfort and certainty, gives
01:33 the proponents comfort and certainty, because if it's going to be no, it's better to get
01:37 to no more quickly so that then they can move on to other projects.
01:40 Not every renewable project is in the right place, not every renewable project has environmental
01:47 conditions that have been thought through by the proponents.
01:50 Environmental approvals will always be important, but as we're seeing a big increase in renewable
01:55 applications and the systems, some of the systems are groaning as those renewable applications
02:01 go up, it's perfectly appropriate for all governments to work together to try and get
02:05 that happening faster.
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