La Fontaine goes into battle on behalf of sustainable energy

Herald Sun
August 18, 2007 12:00am

THE renewable energy sector has united behind a "Joan of Arc" it hopes will lead its charge through the corridors of parliament ahead of the federal election. Just as the French saint fought to reclaim territory from those who invaded her homeland, Dominique La Fontaine, the leader of the newly formed Clean Energy Council, aims to snatch ground for her members in the carbon-literate government policies that will shape Australia's power infrastructure.

Ms La Fontaine has headed the Australian Wind Energy Association for more than two years following previous stints in forestry jobs. "I haven't been a greenie but I have always had a strong appreciation of sustainability," she said. She will become chief executive of a new peak body that is essentially a merger between the 300-member Business Council for Sustainable Energy and her own Auswind group. "It will be a one-stop shop for policy and our members, which in the past were affiliated with two or more bodies, will now be able to see more efficient use of their lobbying funds through a single channel," she said.

Ms La Fontaine will not meet the same fiery fate as the French crusader burnt at the stake for heresy, even though some climate change sceptics have described wind turbines as totems to pagan gods. But there is a chance, she believes, that the efforts of businesses that now produce sustainable energy will go up in smoke unless politicians can be convinced that carbon needs to be priced now, not later. "Our membership covers a quarter of Australia's total electricity production, including gas, wind, hydro and bioenergy," Ms La Fontaine said.

In addition to representing energy titans such as Babcock and Brown, AGL, TRUEnergy, Origin Energy and BPSolar, the Clean Energy Council will also be the new voice of businesses operating in the geothermal, cogeneration, biomass, and solar technology fields.

"If Australia seriously wants to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions, we need to use electricity smarter," she said. "We need to reduce its use, but the electricity we do use needs to be cleaner. "Our sector can make that clean electricity and help Australia's economic growth at the same time. "Ours is the sector that has the products and services that can achieve this today, without having to wait for new technologies to be developed."

Ms La Fontaine says the Federal Government's claim that measures to reduce emissions will be expensive is making people fear change. "The government also likes to point out it thinks it unfair that Australia should have to move swiftly on climate change, when big polluting nations such as India and China are continuing to build coal-fired power stations at a fast rate. "But the fact is that China and India treat renewable energy more seriously than Australia does at the moment. "China sees renewable energy as vital to producing power for its modern economy and plans to have 30,000 megawatts of wind energy by 2020."

Currently, China's wind farm sector produces about 5000 megawatts of electricity, she said, while Australia only has enough wind turbines to generate less than 900 megawatts. She argues there are too many policymakers that consider wind and other renewable energies as "alternative and hippie" when there is evidence these mainstream technologies provide consistent power and underpin economic growth, not detract from it. Unless governments continue to require electricity retailers to source some of their power from the renewables sector, Ms La Fontaine warns that companies such as Roaring 40s and Pacific Hydro will move their operations overseas to markets that encourage renewables.

Already, the Australian economy and private investors have lost the opportunity to take advantage of cutting-edge solar technologies that are making bucketloads of money for investors in China, the US and Germany. Many of these technologies were discovered by Australian researchers but faced with a lack of investment interest from a business community that could not see profits in the technologies, their developers took their zero-emission innovations overseas.

The Clean Energy Council's main worry now is the political inertia over setting carbon emission targets and prices. It is a frustration shared with business interests in the coal-fired electricity sector who say that without a price signal soon, urgent upgrades to the power grid and the construction of further power plants to cope with forecast energy needs are being hamstrung. The uncertainty is hampering the inability to plan capital works and cost carbon onto balance sheets and consequently putting billions of dollars of infrastructure investment at risk, the major energy players have told the government.

Ms La Fontaine believes both political parties are "playing chess" on carbon policy. "Each wants to see what move the other one makes first before committing," she says. "Our concern is that the government seems to believe that just having an emissions trading regime will solve the carbon issue. It won't. "We believe that by 2020 at least 20 per cent of the nation's electricity needs must come from clean energy, otherwise emissions will keep going up. "Our message right now is don't expect emissions trading to fill that void, because it won't for quite some time."

Ms La Fontaine said the same could be said of the as yet unproven and so-called "clean" coal technologies and carbon sequestration. "I don't have a problem with cleaning up coal," she said. "But while we are busy beavering away in laboratories trying to clean up coal, let us not allow what is under our noses, the technologies that we already know work, slip from our fingers."

And unlike the as-yet-untested "clean" coal technologies, carbon sequestration and even nuclear energy, Ms La Fontaine said that renewables do not need government hand-outs for research and development or the underwriting of insurance by the taxpayer. In particular, she said the community needed to be aware that the report on geosequestration technology tabled in parliament on Monday recommended that the government should carry risks associated with burying carbon dioxide.

The report supports full financial liability and responsibility for site safety and monitoring should be transferred to government in perpetuity after an unspecified period. "The report demonstrates the complexity and potential risks of geosequestration, however, we don't need to wait until these things are resolved to act," Ms La Fontaine said. "Our industry has energy solutions that are ready right now to immediately, positively impact climate change."