Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be able to speak on the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy Bill 2009 and would like to put on the record that on 29 September 2005 I put out a press release in which I made the call for a renewable, sustainable energy authority to be set up to do what this legislation is in fact going to do. My call at that stage was based on a study tour that I had recently made in the United States, looking at biofuels and other sustainable energies. I could see what was happening there with the sustainable energy centre that had been set up and the work on sustainable and renewable energy sources that was being done at a policy level and a practical level.

I was interested in the contribution of the previous speaker, the member for Kingston, because I am very interested in geothermal energy. I undertook a more recent study tour in Europe to look at climate change and a range of renewable energy sources, visiting the Carbon Capture and Storage Association in London, as well as the processing of daily waste in Copenhagen, where garbage trucks go out, as they do in Australia, at about six o’clock in the morning and pick up the garbage, come back to a massive incinerator with massive ‘kettles’, use that waste to provide the energy to boil the kettles and out of that produce steam to provide energy for about half a million people and, during the wintertime, provide energy for hot water for central heating. So an enormous number of things are being done globally, some of which I will talk about today. Obviously, the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy will embrace such things as recycling as well.

The comment that I would make at the start, though, is that it is all very well to set these things up, and to look at the functions of the centre and the role of the minister and the board, but you really have to have a government that wants to do something about it. I can remember when I came here in 2001 and I was interested, as I still am, in biofuels. There was a debate going on at that time about setting mandatory renewable energy targets on a number of levels. The one that I was particularly interested in was in relation to biofuels—ethanol, biodiesels and others—and the then Howard government put in place the target for, from memory, 360,000 million litres of biofuels to be achieved by 2010. There are less biofuels produced now, certainly as at six months ago, than there were when the target was set—and it was at a very low level. The point I am making is that it is all very well to make these political utterances that we are moving down a certain pathway, ‘We intend to do this; this is the policy,’ but you really need the will of government to drive these things.

Even though the main debate in this place in the last 12 months has been about a market mechanism, an emissions trading scheme to be used to impact on heavy emitters, a lot of the solutions lie in other areas that do not necessarily need a market mechanism to drive the agenda. The Europeans are moving towards some sort of emissions trading arrangement as part of their response to greenhouse gas emissions, but it is not being seen as the only game in town. I would say to the government that, even though the policy and public utterances seem quite positive on the surface, there are some cracks appearing in the armour because of mixed messages. Some people would be well aware of the mixed messages that were sent in terms of solar energy, for instance. The rules seem to be constantly changing as to who can and cannot access some of the incentive packages, whether it should be income assessed et cetera—those sorts of issues. How serious are we about driving sustainable energy sources, solar and wind, and promoting geothermal, for instance? Look at our poor old South Australian geothermal producer, stuck out in the middle of nowhere: as a society we have given him $5 million through the taxpayer to assist him and he is bumbling around out there having difficulties with the drilling and other processes. If we are serious about geothermal there should be a massive focus on trying to drive those processes.

On my study tour I visited two geothermal plants. One is a massive geothermal plant at a little place called Laradello in Italy, at the northern end of Tuscany. They have been producing geothermal power for nearly 100 years at that site. There are two massive power stations there, all computer driven—not a person in the building—and obviously having a significant impact on the local power generation area and in terms of Italy’s total needs. In other parts of the world they are doing similar things. In Australia, we have left this fellow out in the middle of South Australia and we hope he comes in with the goods. We should be out there helping him. Some people debate whether geothermal is sustainable and renewable, but it is a natural source of energy that we could be using.

The other geothermal plant that I went to, in Germany, is the coldest geothermal plant in the world. They drilled down about 3.8 kilometres to hot rocks and found that the rocks were not as hot as they thought they would be. But, rather than give up, the Germans—and they have done this at a number of relatively small plants—are interested in the science, how it is going to evolve and just what they can do with low-heat hot rocks and hot hot rocks and the variations in temperatures between the rocks and the water that is there as well. This particular plant, at Neustadt-Glewe, is producing electricity from steam from water that has not boiled. It sounds as though I have been in a pub all night, making a suggestion like that. But they are producing electricity through a normal generating process driven by steam from hot rocks that have generated that steam at 98 degrees Celsius. At the plant I talked about in Italy, the heat of the steam coming out of the ground is over 200 degrees Celsius. The Minister for Resources and Energy may be interested in this. How do they achieve the creation of steam from water that has not boiled? They have developed various brine solutions that they add to that water to create the same impact as boiling water, hence able to drive the turbines that create the electricity. They had a whole range of technical details as well but, rather than give up, they accepted a challenge. So there we have the coldest geothermal plant in the world producing electricity from water that has not boiled. It is quite incredible.

There are others areas I think the centre should be looking at—as I said earlier, I congratulate the government for initiating this process—and one is solar energy. Over the years we have nearly hunted every solar scientist off this part of the world, yet we keep being told it is one of the hottest parts of the globe. Where is the research that we should have been doing? Why have we sent our top people overseas? And why have a lot of our wind people, both technical and scientific, gone to other nations? Failures in government policy, that is why. Nothing else. Failures in government policy: words, rhetoric, but no real action. I see in the creation of this centre a positive move forward where these people can be assisted. If we are serious about global warming and coming to grips with climate change, we cannot leave it all up to some sort of market mechanism. There are a whole range of reasons why that in itself will fail. We have got to embrace other solutions. We have got to embrace, as this bill does, a whole range of renewable energy sources if we are serious about driving the change.

The Minister for Resources and Energy, who is at the table, would be aware—I sincerely hope he would be aware—of activities that are happening as we speak in Lake Cargelligo. It is not in my electorate but nonetheless it is something that we should be paying attention to. Electricity there will be generated from solar sources—from mirrors scattered in a strategic pattern around the frame of a Comet windmill. I have not actually been there and seen it, but I am told the top of the windmill has a graphite block that is superheated, with water pipes going through it et cetera, and graphite, which is pure carbon, has the capacity to hold heat for extended periods of time. That plan, I am told, will provide electricity for 3,000 people. Some would say, ‘That’s not going to save the globe,’ and probably not, but it could save a lot of money by removing the need to upgrade the transmission lines out to a small place like Lake Cargelligo. It could be used in a number of other areas too, not only in terms of the generation of electricity—in that case as a backup when transmission fails, as it does from time to time—but in terms of the capacity to store heat in these graphite blocks. Some people might say that is a bit too much like science fiction at the moment, but let us come to grips with it and make it happen, rather than leaving it all to the bankers and the traders in a market mechanism.

As you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Thomson, in Copenhagen 20 per cent of electricity comes from wind. Obviously, those countries are plugged into a European grid where there are all sorts of entry points for nuclear energy, coal et cetera in relation to power generation. I see the minister is shaking his head down there, thinking, ‘Here goes this bloke on wind again.’ I do not like to verbal you, Minister Ferguson, but your body language was not terribly positive. I am not suggesting that wind is the total solution, but the way in which government policy has been going in recent years, your government included, would suggest that the only solution is coal. If you are serious about this centre, you should start to get serious about the advice that may come from people who are actually working on some of these renewable energy sources. We cannot just write them off saying, ‘They’ll only contribute two per cent, four per cent or six per cent; they will not solve the problem.’ Most great walls were built starting with one brick. They were not built in one hit.

If the government are serious about this, they should look at what their own bill addresses. It is pointless setting up these things if the ministers who are responsible for accepting the messages do not take any notice of the advice. That is what happened under the Howard regime. They kept getting advice on various things that could be done and should be done but did very little. Before you came in, Minister Ferguson, I mentioned that the Howard government in 2001 set up the mandatory renewable energy target for biofuels, to be reached by 2010, but by the time they left government we had fewer biofuels than when they set the target. I think there is a message in that: if we are serious about these things, we have really got to start to drive them at the policy level, not send some of the mixed messages that have been coming out of this place in the last 12 months.

The biofuels example is an interesting one. While I was on that tour in Europe, I met with some Scottish scientists who are working on the breakdown of the cell wall of barley and wheat stubble. In terms of their agricultural activities there, because of the short season, after the barley or wheat harvest they bale up the straw, essentially to get it off the ground so that they can get it prepared for the next crop. Some of that goes into litter for pigs and whatever else; its food value is quite limited. These Scottish scientists—and scientists in other parts of the world; I met with people in Copenhagen who are doing similar things in terms of biosolutions, and Canada and the US are working very hard on this as well—are trying to break down the strength of the cell wall in wheat stubble, in this case, as well as barley stubble, so that it can be used to make a viable third-generation biofuel, through a lignocellulosic process, for the future. In that sense, in a low-carbon world they are making a positive contribution in terms of biofuels and value-adding to agriculture. But this country is doing nothing on that. We are told we have got to value-add, we are told we have to move into more renewable sources of energy, but very little is happening.

I am not a climate change sceptic. I believe the nation should be doing something to come to grips with climate change, and playing a leading role in this area. I have issues with the Prime Minister’s current proposal, but I support his going to Copenhagen and playing some sort of leading role. While I was in Copenhagen on my tour, I met with some economists who worked for the IPCC a bit further away, in Paris, at the International Energy Agency. They were very sceptical about what was going to come out of the Copenhagen climate change conference. This was three or four months ago, but 10,000 beds were cancelled while I was there. So I do not think a lot will come out of the Copenhagen conference. That is also partly because we are trying to crack the nut with a market mechanism, and there is a lot of scepticism about using a market mechanism to do that.

There is another issue that comes into it, though. I was very pleased with the announcement last week that the government was going to exempt agriculture from the emissions trading scheme, because, Mr Deputy Speaker Thomson, as you would remember, I said in the parliament that I would not support a carbon pollution reduction scheme that included food. That is not just for domestic reasons. Obviously, the domestic issues are about the cost impost on our farming community and the measurability of some of the emissions et cetera. But the major reason I raised that argument was that, if you extend a global carbon emissions arrangement to the food sector, the potential impact on land use is enormous. In fact, the government’s CPRS incentivises the planting of trees for carbon purposes. Presumably that would be on land that was previously used for food purposes.

As a farmer, I think that one of the best things that could happen is that we create another competitor for land use. The first thing I would be doing is moving into third-generation biofuels, which tick the positive carbon boxes—renewable energy boxes—rather than the negative boxes that food ticks if you start to embrace food in a carbon economy. The starch in wheat is carbon—carbon footprints, nitrous oxide. In this country, we punch enormous amounts of nitrogen into the soil to achieve not just yield but, especially, a premium price because of the protein in the grain. Lignocellulosic biofuels do not tick any of those negative boxes. The issue of food in a carbon economy is much more than a case of localised farmers reacting to a particular cost impost. If you were to impose the CPRS on the world, the shift of land use into renewable fuels—or into carbon by way of vegetation et cetera—and the movement away from the food economy would create enormous political instability from those people who are not being fed. That is something we should all consider. (Time expired)

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