The most disappointing thing was the poor quality of the protesters who crashed the announcement, and the even poorer quality of their protest song. I believe Dylan, Springsteen, and Billy Bragg were all equally appalled, and we all wonder why they bothered if they didn't have much to say, and weren't willing to spend more than 5 minutes writing the lyrics for their protest song (I don't believe they bothered with a tune).
I also felt that some of the criticism of the White paper was warranted. If we're serious about reducing our economy's level of carbon intensity, we shouldn't be exporting fossil fuels in massive and increasing quantities.
But among the widespread criticism of the white paper, it would've been easy to miss the praise from some clean energy quarters.
Andrew Blakers from ANU published an opinion piece on the website The Conversation on Saturday which offered a positive take on the White paper. An excerpt from his piece is published below.
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The emphasis on the need for power demand management, rather than simply meeting peak demand though capital expenditure, is also very welcome.
The energy landscape is changing rapidly. A fundamental change is the extraordinarily rapid decline in the cost of solar energy. Results from the 2012 Australian Energy Technology Assessment of various energy technologies is included. This was a radical departure from previous Government assessments in that it recognised that solar and wind are on track to be low cost, fully competitive energy generation technologies rather soon. The White Paper notes that “few could have predicted the dramatic reduction in solar PV costs that has occurred over the past few years”. The White Paper could perhaps have emphasised more strongly the large implications of this fact for electricity providers.
Rooftop solar generators now produce electricity for less than the retail tariff everywhere in Australia. This could fundamentally change the nature of the electricity business, leading to the establishment of millions of small generators to supplement wind farms and large conventional generators.
There is an urgent need to re-think the national electricity market and infrastructure to take account both of the need for demand management and to cope with widely distributed electricity generation. Changes to distribution infrastructure, tariff structures and the business models of utilities will all be required. Local and central storage will also need to be included as the penetration of solar and wind energy rises above the tens of percent range.
The urgency for amelioration of greenhouse gas emissions becomes ever clearer. The Renewable Energy Target means that up to one-quarter of Australia’s electricity will come from renewables by 2020. South Australia already generates one quarter of its electricity from the wind, and the ACT Government has a renewable energy target of 90% by 2020.
The Newman Government quickly made two significant changes which moved this state further away from the kind of future people like Andrew Blakers see for us all.
They moved with lightening speed to clear the way for Uranium mining to resume. And they slashed feed-in tariffs for solar, as well as setting a time line on removing feed in tariffs entirely.
I grew up in Queensland when the rest of the country considered us to be socially and economically backwards. And the LNP government seems to have their sights set on taking us back to 'the glorious past'.
The LNP's only current (but suspended) visionary member seems to be Clive Palmer (who would've guessed?) who is warning the government against their current trajectory. If the LNP are in no mood to listen to their biggest donor, what are the chance of them listening to academics, or being interested in research, or empirical evidence that we need to move forward not backwards?
What are your thoughts?