How not to save the environment, Austalian style

[classical_hero]

Perhaps the most stupid thing that the current Labor government did was means testing the solar panel rebate, due to the fact that it was "overheating". I would have thought that having this market booming would be a good way to take pressure off the economy due to the fact that Australia should be leading the charge on Solar panel technology since we are one of the sunniest places in the world. It is laughable that this government can say that they are green just by ratifying the Kyoto protocol and yet it does the exact opposite when it comes to actions it does the exact opposite.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2266473.htm

MARK COLVIN: The Federal Government's green credentials have come under fire on World Environment Day.

The Government marked the day with announcements such as an energy rating for televisions and a slightly faster phase-out for conventional light globes.

The Opposition leader Brendan Nelson paid a visit to the company Kevin Rudd used to launch Labor's solar rebate election policy. The rebate which the Government has now cut by imposing a means test.

Dr Nelson promised to introduce a bill to reinstate the full rebate, and used Question Time in Parliament to hammer the Government on the environment.

From Canberra, Alexandra Kirk reports.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: Last year Labor chased the Coalition up hill and down dale on climate change and environment policy. Now it's the other way around.

The Opposition leader Brendan Nelson used World Environment Day to retrace the Prime Minister's steps, travelling the short distance to Queanbeyan where Kevin Rudd launched Labor's solar homes policy.

BRENDAN NELSON: And so Mr Rudd came out last year with his big smile and a 'Kevin 07' t-shirt and said 'this is the way of the future', yeah.

BUSINESSWOMAN: And gave that, be a nice hug.

(sound of laughter)

BUSINESSMAN: Which she's not happy about being reminded of that.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: The Mays say Labor's decision to means test the solar panel rebate has cost them 80 per cent of their business - more than half a million dollars worth and three out of their five staff will have to go.

BUSINESSMAN 2: We're basically shutting down the (inaudible) the set up of the business. I'll go back to general electrical contracting to make up the shortfall.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: In Parliament, the Opposition's call on the Environment Minister Peter Garrett to apologise to the family for destroying its business and reverse the Budget cut fell on deaf ears.

PETER GARRETT: When the demand for this solar panels program and the rebate was seen to be heavily overheating…
(Sound of Parliament disagreeing)

MR SPEAKER: Order, order.

PETER GARRETT: The responsible course of action was to ensure that the amounts of the generous rebate went to those who needed it most.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: The Minister's undertaken to monitor the effect of the new means test.

PETER GARRETT: But in fact if this program were not means tested, then it would simply grow at current rates, lead to a massive blow-out and a blow-out in the Budget.

Within 12 months the Government would be providing approximately more than 8,000 rebates a week, now that's a budget blow-out which is really significant.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: Instead, Mr Garrett argues, the Government's compressing a rebate program from five years into three to put the industry on a sustainable footing.

PETER GARRETT: As I recall. As I recall you were always supporting nuclear not solar.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: The Prime Minister marked World Environment Day, restating the Government's commitment to an environmentally friendly car industry. Mr Rudd says Australia needs a green car industry. But that message has now been undermined by a key source of economic advice to the Government.

The Productivity Commission, late today, released a report, warning assisted green car production is unlikely to lead to lower greenhouse emissions or innovation benefits to other sectors.

And it says each car industry job currently saved costs Australians around $300,000 a year in assistance.

Peter Garrett celebrated World Environment Day announcing three new measures.

PETER GARRETT: Each of them shows the commitment that the Rudd Labor Government has on issues of climate change and recognising the importance of energy efficiency.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: First, a television labelling scheme for consumers to identify the most energy efficient sets.

Also, a new guide on home energy saving measures and phasing out traditional incandescent light bulbs a little faster. Coinciding with the release of a new report that forecasts an increase in household energy usage of 56 per cent by 2020.

Greens senator Christine Milne says the announcements don't amount to real action on climate change.

CHRISTINE MILNE: All we've got is a lot of ducking and weaving and dancing from the Environment Minister as to whether transport emissions will be in the emissions trading scheme and instead he's announced a voluntary sticker program for TVs. The world deserves better, Australians deserve better.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: After weathering more than an hour of sustained questioning from the Opposition, the Prime Minister's patience wore a little thin, honing in on his continuation of the previous government's solar hot water rebate scheme.

KEVIN RUDD: That actually seemed to have a means test in it. How much was it? Was it $100,000. I thought the Leader of the Opposition said today that the environment can't be means tested.

(Sound of Parliamentarian's laughing)

Have I missed something? The Member for Wentworth when he was the Minister of the Environment means tested these solar hot water rebate scheme. Oh stone the crows! Oh, selective memory again but this is just a matter of detail for those opposite.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: Brendan Nelson's undeterred vowing to try to reinstate the full solar panel rebate by introducing a Bill into Parliament in just over a fortnight's time.

BRENDAN NELSON: We will be moving this bill which will remove the means test on this. We think it's important that as many households as possible in this country consider and have affordable access to putting solar panels on their homes.

MARK COLVIN: Brendan Nelson ending Alexandra Kirk's report.

In fact the situation is so bad in Australia that people are moving overseas with such technology to get it off the ground.
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2274415.htm

MARK COLVIN: He was the prophet without honour in his own country but since Professor David Mills joined the brain drain, he's got Australian governments queuing up to check out his solar technology.

Professor Mills left Australia last year to take his scientific expertise to the United States.

Now he has the backing of one of America's leading venture capitalists. He's built the biggest solar manufacturing plant of its kind in the world and he's proposing solar-thermal as the energy solution for the US national grid.

This weekend, the Queensland and Victorian Premiers and the NSW Environment Minister are on their way to Las Vegas to check out the solar design that's booming in the US.

And the scientist behind the technology says that with the right framework, Australia could sign up too and produce 90 per cent of its electricity from the sun.

Environment reporter Sarah Clarke explains.

SARAH CLARKE: David Mills has long believed in the power of the sun. The former Sydney University professor has spent 30 years working on solar energy.

These days, he lives in the Napa Valley in California where he's set up a company developing technology using mirrors that track the sun, concentrating the solar power, creating enormous amounts of electricity.

It's on trial here in Australia but only on a small scale. Whereas in the United States, David Mills is now building one of the biggest factories in the world to produce these solar panels.

It's got the interest of some Australians including the Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, the Victorian Premier John Brumby and the New South Wales Environment Minister, Verity Firth - who will this weekend jet into Las Vegas to get a sneak preview of what he's got.

DAVID MILLS: The two Premiers from Victoria and Queensland are coming up to speak with us and other solar companies in Las Vegas where we have our factory and I think they'll probably be blown away by this.

We're actually building the factories that deliver very large plants right now I would argue in fact that we can implement solar more quickly than our other very, very complicated technologies like super critical core(phonetic) or carbon sequestration.

SARAH CLARKE: Solar technology has taken off in America. And demand for David Mills' Australian design solar panels is booming. He's even proposing solar-thermal as the energy solution for the US National grid.

One of the big advantages of these plants is that they can be built with the capacity to store heat that can power a plant and be drawn on during times when the sun isn't shining.

With that in mind, he's confident this technology could deliver in Australia, generating up to 90 per cent of electricity.

DAVID MILLS: Oh absolutely, if you only have 15 hours of storage with this technology, that's enough to provide, if you supply to the south-west of the United States, supply all of the United States electricity needs essentially. Certainly when I scaled the plant output to the maximum required by the grid in the United States, we ended up with 93% of the power being supplied in that calculation.

So the correlation between the output of the solar as long as you have storage, and what the grid wants is very, very close. Much closer than say, with the base load that people talk about. We hope to actually emulate what's happening here in Australia as soon as possible.

SARAH CLARKE: In the United States, massive solar-thermal projects in the order of $1 billion are being announced every few weeks according to David Mills.

The key is the cost. This technology is competitive with coal and gas on price; it can operate at 10 cents per kilowatt hour for plants between 100 and 200 megawatts.

For bigger plants the cost can be reduced to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. That means it's even cheaper than existing natural gas plants which operate at 12 cents.

Erwin Jackson from the Climate Institute says the Federal Government needs to tune into solar solutions if Australia is to significantly cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

ERWIN JACKSON: The really keen challenge for a government is that you know it's fine to have these technologies in the lab, but what we need to do is get them out of the lab and into wide-spread use.

And that's not going to happen unless the Government puts in place the policy frameworks that are required for these innovators and investors to actually get behind these new technologies.

MARK COLVIN: Erwin Jackson from the Climate Institute ending that report from environment reporter, Sarah Clarke.

 

[Arwon]

Indeed. Means testing the solar panel rebate is so mindbogglingly stupid I can't imagine how it ever got in there.

The brain drain of environmental talent has been going on for years. Howard politicised the CSIRO to the point where it became an unreliable joke on ecological matters, and the solar industry is so backwards that China's richest man got his education at UNSW but went back to China because the government there has more interest in renewable energy than ours does.

We should be a world leader in solar power like Spain is, but instead we can't even keep the talent we produce. There's only two universities with photovoltaic engineering schools in NSW, out of 20 or 30 universities. The UNSW one is world class, but pretty small and is useless if everyone ends up going overseas.

It's bipartisan fossil-fuel industry driven stupidity, so don't make this a Rudd thing because the Libs were just as bad or worse. You can look at any state or federal government in the last 15 years and see the same pattern of neglect or outright hostility.

"Clean coal". I mean really?

Vote Green.

 

[classical_hero]

It is a shame, but at least at the end of the Howard government they were starting to do some good things on the environment, but it was too late for many cases. It seems to be an Australian trait of late to be like this,, but it was not always the case where Australian ingenuity was rewarded, but unfortunately we see less of that now.

BTW, I will never vote Green due to their other policies.

EDIT. Since you are well equated with the Spain model of Solar panel industry, just give some more details about it and.
Also anyone who has a solar panel can give details of why they have one and what benefits they have received since having it installed.

 

[Lillefix]

I studied the cost of solar cells last year(for a single household), and compared it to how much you saved. And well, you can save a lot if you live in a sunny place with expensive electricity. But in a place like Norway it's(not surprisingly) useless as a supplement to the electricity at home. Although they are often used in cabins far from electricity lines.

If i remember correctly you have to pay more than $15000(american) every 20 year for a couple of kilowatts.

I heard the spaniards just make a plant that used mirrors to heat watertower and thus made energy. Sounds interesting. Personally I'm not totally convinced GW, but I sincerely hope governments will spend more money on these kinds of things, like using tidal waters and offshore windmills, in stead of these dirty fossil fuel plants.

I like the wordplay in the title by the way. Even though it perhaps wasn't intentional.

 

[Arwon]

Yeah, that's solar thermal energy as opposed to photovoltaics.

 

[FriendlyFire]

I had a look into getting solar panels for our home but even with the rebatte it would take around 20-25 years to break even. (assuming that there are no repairs or problems with the life of the unit which is reaching it end life).

I think the technology needs to mature somewhat more especially in how long they last before it becomes viable