Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks so much to the member for Macnamara for his question. I know that he is a huge supporter of renewable energy. I'm delighted to inform the House that I have now ticked off the 60th renewable energy project backed by this government. These 60 projects mean that we have now, on this side, ticked off enough renewable energy to power seven million Australian homes. That is the equivalent of powering every home in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, and it means that we are ticking off renewable energy projects at the rate of about one every two weeks.

On Friday, I ticked off the huge 600-megawatt Birriwa Solar farm in New South Wales, which will see the construction of around a million solar panels as well as 6,000 megawatts of battery storage. That's enough for 229,000 New South Wales homes. It's also part of the Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone, which recently received approval for a transmission line. Also recently, the Sun Cable project—six gigawatts of renewable energy, including four gigawatts to be used in Darwin. That's the equivalent of powering three million homes. That is 6,000—

The Leader of the Opposition hasn't heard of batteries! It's so sad. He hasn't heard about wind power and that the wind blows at night. He hasn't worked out that hydroelectricity works at night. The energy transition is real. It's happening.

We're also providing $300 worth of energy bill relief. We're putting cheaper power into the grid right now for households, right now for businesses. The alternative from those opposite is the most expensive form of energy maybe in 20 years time with no details about costs. What we had from those opposite was nine years of delay and denial. We had 22 separate energy policies. They didn't land a single one of them. They were told, when they were in government, that 24 coal-fired power stations were closing. They had no plan to replace that generation capacity—no plan for energy, no plan for workers, no plan to bring power prices down now. They're talking about something that might happen in 20 years time. They have no plan to help Australian households now. Just ask them.

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