Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to talk about a very exciting project that is happening in certain cities around this country: the Australian government’s Solar Cities project, which has now been running for several years and is proving to be a success. This innovative program is very much focused on the future. It is designed to test new sustainable models for electricity supply and use, and seven carefully selected cities across Australia are part of this project.

The project is changing the way Australians think about and use energy. By trialling sustainable energy solutions, Solar Cities is discovering ways of dealing with common barriers to the greater use of solar technology, energy efficiency and electricity demand management among businesses and households across Australia. Each project is trialling a range of initiatives, including installing smart meters, supporting the uptake of solar panels and solar hot water systems, conducting pricing trials and educating the local community about energy efficiency. The elements of each project are tailored to suit that local community and that local community’s specific conditions. The information gathered from this program will be analysed to see how different members of the community can most effectively reduce energy consumption and how governments, industries and the community can support wise energy use.

The website states:

… the program aims to:

• demonstrate the environmental and economic effects of combining cost reflective pricing with the widespread use of solar technology, energy efficiency and smart meters
• find out what barriers exist regarding energy efficiency, electricity demand management and the use of solar technology, among businesses and householders in different parts of Australia, and test ways to deal with these barriers.

The Solar Cities program is delivering real and measurable results. To date, over 8,200 smart meters and 1,400 kilowatts of household photovoltaics have been installed, and 6,300 household energy audits have been completed.

You might wonder why I am standing here talking to you about the Australian government’s Solar Cities project. It will not come as any surprise to you that of the seven solar cities in this country, which include Adelaide, Blacktown, Townsville, central Victoria, Moreland and Perth, there is of course in the very centre, in the dead-set centre, Alice Springs. Since the Alice Solar City was launched in March 2008, Centralians have taken to the program with enthusiasm. It is really popular. According to the Alice Solar City website, as at October this year: 2,068 households have registered; 1,835 home energy surveys have been completed; 115 businesses in Alice Springs have registered; $5.71 million worth of incentive vouchers have been issued; $3.67 million worth of funding for solar and energy efficiency measures have been carried out; 300 solar photovoltaic systems have been installed; 509 solar hot water systems have been installed; and 588 smart meters have been installed on homes. Pretty impressive for 2½ years! This is an incredible achievement for a city that had just two homes with solar panels prior to the program and now boasts more than 250 homes with solar panels.

The Alice Solar City website states that the project aims to make Alice Springs a model for the rest of Australia—and that does not come as any surprise to me, as we lead the way in a whole lot of areas—and they want the world to follow, and it is clearly doing that. By the end of the project, the estimated reduction in CO2 emissions is expected to be the equivalent of taking one-quarter of all Alice Springs’s vehicles off the road. The program aims to have five major iconic projects in and around Alice Springs that will help showcase sustainable living and the use of renewable energy.

I want to go to just two of these this evening. The first iconic project was the installation of a large flat plate solar system at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Alice Springs. They have installed more than 1,300 photovoltaic modules as part of a 304-kilowatt solar PV system which will reduce the hotel’s CO2 emissions by 420 tonnes per year, with an estimated 531,000 kilowatt hours being generated per annum. The installation will supply up to 80 per cent of the hotel’s electricity requirements and will reduce the total load on the Alice Springs power grid by 0.5 per cent.

Let me just put that in terms that you might see as you are driving through Alice and heading along the road towards the casino, around near the golf course. The Crowne Plaza in Alice Springs has its total roof covered with the flat plate solar system. When you check in and go to your room and turn on the TV, there is a grid, an analysis and a graph of how much electricity in the hotel at any one time is being generated by this solar system.

In the first year alone, the Crowne Plaza’s PV system generated over 580 megawatt hours. The Crowne even has a channel on its in-house system, as I said, that shows the live performance data of the panels, allowing its clients to see firsthand how the system works. The information is even available on the internet. The panels powered 50 per cent of the hotel’s electricity needs on the morning of Wednesday, 15 June. Crowne Plaza Alice Springs was just this year unanimously voted the Asia-Pacific’s most environmentally sustainable hotel at Hong Kong’s HICAP 2010 Asia-Pacific hotel investment conference.

Other iconic projects being proposed include a solar air-conditioning unit for the Araluen Arts Centre, which is expected to reduce electricity usage by 50 per cent and gas usage by about 70 per cent, and a large solar pool-heating system to be built at the aquatic centre. But there is a more iconic project in Alice Springs that I particularly want to highlight tonight. I attended the sod-turning ceremony in April this year for the Alice Springs Airport solar power station project. It is a partnership between the Australian government, Alice Springs Airport, Ingenero and Alice Solar City. It will cost $2.264 million, with the Australian government contributing $1.l million to this state-of-the-art project due to Alice Springs’s status as a solar city.

The company chosen to design and construct the power station, Ingenero, is an Australian leader in renewable energy that specialises in solar power and develops utility-scale solar power stations that use a variety of world-class technologies. The Alice Springs Airport solar power station will have a capacity of 235 kilowatts and generate 600 megawatt hours of clean, renewable energy each year. It is expected to reduce carbon emissions by around 470 tonnes per annum and meet approximately 28 per cent of the airport’s electricity needs. When you drive in or out of Alice Springs Airport now you see 28 arrays tracking the course of the sun throughout the day, concentrating the sun’s energy up to 650 times onto high-efficiency solar cells and creating electricity. It was officially opened on 4 November this year.

This is the future. It is exciting that Alice Springs is leading the way in this type of technology with a project that is a first for the Southern Hemisphere. What is even more exciting is that this type of technology is suitable for mass production. The company is one of the few CPV providers in the world with commercially ready technology. This is the most cost-effective, commercially ready, clean energy technology that will assist cities such as Alice Springs to be energy efficient and cleaner for our environment.

On 5 December it will be 1,000 days since Alice Springs became a solar city. The city has issued the community with a challenge—to have 1,000 roofs go solar in 1,000 days. If this is achieved, just over 10 per cent of Alice Springs’s home or business premises will be running on solar, making it a first in Australia for a town of its size. I congratulate Alice Springs and the Alice Springs solar city people involved in this endeavour. The Red Centre is showing the world how easy it is to be not only red but green at the same time.