Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to rise to comment on the need to take effective action on climate change. I am going to focus very much on the word 'effective' in my contribution. As said previously by Senator Macdonald and others, climate is itself continually changing. Climate has continually changed over millions of years, and I think perhaps it is an oxymoron to use the term 'climate change'. We can make a comment on effective action on climate.

But, as Mr Hunt, our Minister for the Environment, said the other day, not only did Australia meet and exceed our Kyoto targets when many other countries failed to do so but kept criticising Australia but we also go into this process some 28 million tonnes ahead of our target for 2020. And then we are told by others on the other side, 'Of course, that's just creative accounting,' and yet, funnily enough, it is the accounting method used by the United Nations. It is the accounting standards that Labor used when in government. But all of a sudden, when the coalition government led by Mr Turnbull is able to achieve these outcomes with Direct Action, what do we suddenly see? It is all 'creative accounting'.

When we speak of effectiveness, I want to reflect on some of the renewables and other sources that are absolutely phenomenal. I start with hydro, or hydroelectricity. As we know, Tasmania is very, very strong in the hydro space. There is the Snowy Mountains authority. And we have the capacity, I understand, in Far North Queensland for the Tully-Millstream proposal, which would be generating in excess of 1,000 gigawatt hours per annum once that project was up and running. We certainly need to be expending our resources in that area.

In my home state and city of Western Australia and Perth, there is the excellent work undertaken by the Carnegie Wave Energy company, which won an award only recently in The Australian's 2015 Innovation Challenge. And what have Carnegie done using funds partially provided by the successive Commonwealth Labor and coalition governments? We now see a significant proportion of HMAS Stirling's power and desalinated water on Garden Island, south of Perth, being generated by wave action from Carnegie. Secondly, the company has only just recently raised a significant sum of $7.5 million to deliver on renewable energy for the island of Mauritius. How fantastic is that space?

On solar application we have heard others speak already; there are 2.4 million solar hot water systems or solar PV units, and 15 per cent of Australian homes now have solar units on the roof. That is double that of Belgium, which is next, which in turn is double that of Germany, at 3.7. And they say by 2020 we could well have 1 million solar battery technology performances here in Australia. How fantastic would that be?

We often hear the comment of how the Americans are starting to meet their targets—and do you know how, Mr Acting Deputy President? It is because they have moved substantially from coal generated to gas generated electricity. We in Australia probably have the world's largest gas reserves, and by 2019 we will go past Qatar as the biggest exporter of LNG in the world—so how fantastic is that going to be? I would also like to mention briefly again the capacity identified by the CEFC in the recent report showing there is potential for more than 800 megawatts of new generation from bioenergy, which they say could avoid some 9 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually.

The point to be made is that Australia's excellence in this space is our capacity to innovate and our capacity to develop new technologies and then to extend them through other parts of the world, especially in those developing countries of the world that cannot afford to pay for this new technology. That is where Australia's contribution lies, and why it is not recognised is beyond me. A prime example is the work of Carnegie.

I want to talk in the few minutes left available to me about the term 'effective'. I want to speak for a few minutes on the ineffectiveness of industrial wind turbines and make the point that it is estimated to be about 18 years for an industrial wind turbine to repay the greenhouse gas cost of originally developing it and putting it in place. For those who are interested, and for those who are not, it is about 18 years of use, so by the time an industrial wind turbine is getting to the stage of being decommissioned you will tend to find it is getting somewhere near the original cost of its greenhouse gas.

But those in South Australia would know, and you are one of them, Mr Acting Deputy President Edwards—and Senator Ruston and Senator Wong are here in the chamber—that on November 1, the first day of this very month, at 10 pm, across South Australia there was a blackout. More than 100,000 homes were without power—why? For two reasons. First of all is the enormous reliance on wind power now in South Australia—and you would not believe it, but the wind did not blow. And at the same time the wind was not blowing there was an interconnector problem with bringing the power coming from Victoria's coal fired Latrobe Valley. So we had a circumstance then, for that period of time, that South Australia and those 110,000 homes were without power, as were the small businesses and other businesses around.

In the United Kingdom, only in the last month did the UK government have to pay those heavy users of electricity factories and others to actually decrease their power for a period of time, again simply because of the lack of wind power. Having moved to rely on that particular form of energy for that purpose they are predicting now that it is going to cost them some billions of pounds into the future to compensate high-electricity users so that they can keep the lights on in their residences.

As we know about wind power, it is unpredictable. First of all, you do not know whether the wind is going to blow this time tomorrow. Secondly, you have absolutely no idea how much generation you are going to get. It is unreliable: you do not know how long the wind is going to blow for, and of course without other forms of generation it is totally unsustainable. So what we are going to see in South Australia over time is a higher and higher loss of reliability and, as we know, as a state South Australia has the highest cost in this nation for electricity.

I am a Western Australian, and we are all asked, as we should be in a nation, to make sure we support every state. But which manufacturing operations are going to want to go to set themselves up in South Australia when the supply of power is unreliable and it is the most expensive in the nation? It is no wonder the Premier, Mr Weatherill, is so actively trying to have a look at nuclear. We know that it is the ultimate when it comes to being a source of energy which produces no carbon at all.

The point to be made in these final few minutes is that when you have a high proportion of renewables, particularly wind-turbine-generated power in a community, you pay three times. First of all, you pay for the power. Secondly, you pay for the subsidy of the industrial wind turbines to the tune of about half a million dollars per turbine per year. Then, increasingly, we are going to be paying some sort of subsidy to keep the baseload power generation going. I certainly support the notion of effective action.