Renewables target an incentive to invest

Australian
Wednesday 6/5/2009 Page: 33

LAST week's decision to more than double the amount of electricity sourced from renewable energy "meant a generation of research and development had to be done in a decade", the Clean Energy Council says. The Council of Australian Governments' endorsement of the mandatory renewable energy target brought Australia to the brink of unleashing more than $20 billion of new clean energy investment, CEC chief executive Matthew Warren said.

Successfully deploying the 20% target of renewable energy by 2020 would tap the ingenuity of the energy industry, accelerate research and development and reveal the scale and potential of the industry, he said. Mr Warren said that despite the maturation of wind and other renewable energy technologies in Europe and the US, all Australian universities, not just Group of Eight research-intensive institutions, stood to play a vital role in helping meet the target.

Australia still hosted two world-class solar photovoltaic research centres at the University of New South Wales and the Australian National University, and there was a "colossal array" of scientific knowledge that renewable energy companies would need to innovate, be profitable and meet the 2020 target, he said.

"Australia and the US are the only two countries that have outstanding natural assets. We have bioenergy, world-class wind on the roaring 40s, great geology and sunshine, good hydro, very strong ocean currents; a Melbourne Cup field of renewable resources," he said. Universities would play an increasingly vital role in improving the efficiency and driving down the cost of technologies based on natural resources and training the various professionals to drive the change, he said.

In a call likely to be well received by Innovation Minister Kim Carr, who is backing greater research concentration under his hubs-and-spokes model, Mr Warren said the industry wanted a smaller number of schools with the right collection of minds. "We have to think about how we better co-ordinate those efforts so good ideas aren't lost and concentrate schools of leading thinkers so we don't waste scarce resources," he said.

lain MacGill, co-director of the UNSW Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets, told the HES that the new target would be influential in driving a renewed level of investment and in proven renewable technologies such as wind. biomass and solar.