Darren Cheeseman (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with some pleasure that I rise today to speak on the Australian Renewable Energy Agency Bill 2011 and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2011. I wish to make the point that these are important pieces of legislation which will build on the clean energy package, which is designed to secure a new way of managing our economy to ensure that we have an economy that has less reliance on a carbon footprint than we have had in the past.

ARENA is an important institution. It will have a huge job in shaping Australia's energy development into the future, particularly around renewable energy, and this is very exciting. ARENA will be responsible for providing financial assistance for research, development, demonstration and commercialisation of renewable energy and related technologies and for developing skills in the renewable energy industry. It will also have responsibility for sharing non-confidential knowledge and information from projects that it has funded. It will promote collaboration on renewable energy technology innovation with state and territory governments and other institutions, including international governments and foreign institutions. Whilst that might sound relatively easy, if you think about it for a moment that is a huge, complex task that will require enormous skills to be administered and overseen by the board.

In Corangamite and across south-west Victoria, there are enormous opportunities for renewable energy. Indeed, a very large part of Victoria's energy security going forward will be provided by south-west Victoria, including my own seat. In fact, a very large part of our energy security will migrate from the eastern side of Victoria to the western side of Victoria in the decades to come. That will provide enormous opportunities for new jobs in south-west Victoria, including of course Corangamite. It will provide billions of dollars of investment to western Victoria, creating opportunities for companies.

Unfortunately, the new state government in Victoria, the Baillieu government, has put in place new laws which will make it far more difficult to deploy renewable energy, particularly through wind farms. My part of Victoria is deeply concerned by the legislative hurdles that the Baillieu government has put in place. They fly in the face of the need to have a clean energy future based on renewable energy technologies. I hope that in due course the Baillieu government recognises the errors of its ways and will reverse the decisions that it has made around planning in this important space. We in south-west Victoria want to work very closely with ARENA to ensure that south-west Victoria takes up every opportunity to generate renewable energy for Victoria's energy security.

I recall one of the contributions made by one of the coalition members from South Australia on renewable energy take-up, particularly via wind, in South Australia. I must commend the South Australian government for their efforts in that area. He indicated that one of the difficulties is that renewable energy is not a baseload energy, and that is indeed true, although I think that important work can be undertaken in linking up our energy grids in South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and Queensland. The reality is that the wind may not be blowing in South Australia but it might be in New South Wales. If it is not blowing in New South Wales, it may well be in Tasmania. By increasing the landmass and linking our energy assets like that across the nation, whilst the wind might not be blowing somewhere it will be somewhere else, and that will create opportunities to share the baseload.

In my part of Victoria, south-west Victoria, not only do we have enormous opportunities with wind energy but we also have massive opportunities which have not yet been exploited in geothermal energy. There is a massive geothermal resource which is located from, in effect, Geelong through to the South Australian border and through to the Great Divide, which runs through a very large part of south-western and western Victoria. Geothermal energy, whilst it has not been proven up in any great way in a Victorian sense or an Australian sense, it certainly has been in many other countries. I think there will be huge opportunities through ARENA to support geothermal technology and deployment of that technology across the grid in the years to come. I certainly look forward to seeing all of those opportunities taken up. Geothermal is a renewable energy technology and it is a clean technology, producing, in effect, zero emissions. Geothermal technology taps directly into the earth's heat, superheating water to generate steam to drive turbines or heat exchanges. There are huge opportunities in that regard.

There are also other opportunities on the coastline of south-west Victoria. There are new technologies that have not been proven, such as tidal or wave energy generation. Again, these provide huge opportunities. These form a basket of technologies that can be located very close to coastal towns and generate electricity very close to where it will be consumed. By doing that, you do not have all the transmission losses that take place. So I think there are very substantial opportunities in south-west Victoria.

I think this legislation has been well thought through by not only the multi-party climate committee but also, importantly, the minister, who has given a great deal of thought to getting this right. I look forward to working with the government and tapping into the skills that ARENA will have, and I look forward to working with industry to access the opportunities that will be available.

There is no doubt about it, we have to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. This has been a problem ever since industrialisation, and it is our generation that will be left with the responsibility of addressing it and putting in place intergenerational policy to deal with it. The ARENA arrangements are a key part of addressing our greenhouse gas emissions and putting us on a much more sustainable path as we move forward.

I commend these bills to the House and I look forward to working with the minister on the passage of this legislation to ensure that south-west Victoria takes up every opportunity that these bills present.

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