18th August 09

Emerging technologies need investors not a carve out

NATIONAL: Emerging clean energy technologies need direct investment to drive them forwards right now, not last minute changes to the Rudd Government's proposed renewable energy target (RET) that won’t help, according to Australia's peak clean energy industry body.

Proposed last minute changes to the RET to 'carve out' part of the target for emerging technologies risks further delay to the legislation designed to deliver 20 per cent of Australia's electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

'Carve outs in the proposed target for emerging technology sounds like a nice idea, but it doesn’t work,' said Clean Energy Council Chief Executive Matthew Warren.

'The biggest challenge for most emerging technologies is accessing capital to develop their technology. You won’t be able to take a carve out to a bank to raise finance if your technology is still unproven,' he said.

Mr Warren said these technologies need a suite of targeted measures such as tax reform, grants, R&D schemes and skills and training programs to find out what they can do as quickly as possible.

'These all need to be built on top of the RET, not as part of it or instead of it,' Mr Warren said.

'Inserting these misguided carve outs for any technology assumes we can predict the future: when they will be ready, at what price, and at what scale. If we knew that then they wouldn’t need a carve out,” he said.

'The problem for emerging technologies is uncertainty. We don’t know which technologies will hit snags and which ones will leap forwards.'

The CEC has more than 300 members representing all proven and emerging technologies and strongly supports the need to accelerate the development and deployment of new technologies like geothermal, wave and large scale solar.

As a direct result of the intervention of the CEC, the trajectory for the government's renewable energy target was modified to ensure greater investment certainty for emerging technologies that are expected to arrive to market in the second half of next decade.

Mr Warren said the carve outs being proposed by the Coalition will just slow the deployment of already proven renewable energy, make the scheme more expensive and will need to be constantly micro-managed by government bureaucrats for the next decade, without providing any help to the technologies it is trying to assist.

'Delayed passage of the RET is costing the renewable energy industry $2 million a week and holding back 28,000 new clean jobs and $28 billion of nation building investment. There are thousands of Australian households waiting to put solar panels on their roofs. We don't need any further delay or uncertainty. We need this bill passed now.'


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Attachment : CECMR180809 FINAL.pdf (application/pdf - 338.79kb)