ENERGY MINISTERS APPROVE SPIRALLING POWER BILLS AND EMISSIONS
Friday, 04 December 2009 16:38
The refusal to tackle Australia’s largest source of greenhouse emissions continues, with Martin Ferguson and the state and territory energy ministers failing to initiate serious reform of the heavily polluting energy market, at today’s Ministerial Council on Energy (MCE) meeting in Hobart, Total Environment Centre (TEC) said.
“Australians have been dealt a double-blow to their future this week with energy ministers locking in spiralling emissions and bills in the wake of the ETS collapse,” said Jane Castle, Senior Campaigner at TEC. “The head in the sand approach to Australia’s largest source of greenhouse emissions is simply negligent.”
Ministers today considered several major reviews conducted by the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) but took no action on transitioning Australia’s out-of-date, polluting system to a smart grid. The meeting’s communiqué has approved a business-as-usual approach to building more inefficient, carbon intensive infrastructure and accepts inefficient growth in energy demand as inevitable.
“It’s as if climate sceptics are running the energy market. Saving energy is four times more cost-effective than building new infrastructure but energy ministers are making consumers pay for more polluting power stations and power lines instead.”
“The token decision to improve the connection arrangements for renewable generation does nothing to address the fundamental flaws of an energy market that has a built-in bias against renewables. Ministers are merely tinkering at the edges of the Renewable Energy Target that will go ahead with or without them.”
“If the MCE is serious about addressing demand side participation in the energy market, it must reject the AEMC view that the current, negligible levels of participation are optimal, and direct it to revise its Demand-Side Participation Review to ensure it addresses the gross under-utilisation of energy savings.”
“We’re pleased that the MCE has taken up TEC’s recommendation to send the AEMC back to the drawing board to reassess the ridiculous proposal to exempt over $12 billion of network spending from efficiency scrutiny. However, the underlying problems of the energy market remain unaddressed.”
“Ministers are wringing their hands over price rises that have occurred due to their negligence. They must overcome their paralysis and take action to rein in irresponsible, inefficient network spending.”
“We are still desperately lacking an environmental or energy savings objective in the National Electricity Law, that would actually recognise environmental sustainability and a safe climate are in the ‘long-term interests of consumers’. Such an objective would finally allow regulators to give environmental issues like climate change due concern, after being neglected for so long.”
