www.climatespectator.com.au
3 May 2012
Origin Energy made big news in the Australian renewables sector yesterday by signing onto the biggest renewable energy power purchase agreement ever contracted in this country-the 270MW Snowtown II wind farm in SA. It represented an almost perfect rebuttal to criticisms by others in the renewable energy sector that the company was playing games to undermine the Renewable Energy Target by holding off on entering into PPAs to create the impression the target could not be met.
But on the same day, Origin Energy CEO Grant King undid this favourable publicity by delivering a presentation where he suggested the level of the RET be reduced by more than a fifth-from 45,000 GWs to 35,000 GWs in 2020. In the chart reproduced below, King argued that because electricity demand growth has dropped dramatically, we need far less renewable energy than initially projected to achieve the 20% by 2020 renewables target.
The implications for the large-scale renewables sector from following King's line of argument would be devastating. The current target for large scale renewables (LRET) such as wind and biomass is 41,000GWh by 2020, which he suggests should be lowered to 27,000GWh. Based on current legislation, Green Energy Markets estimates that we need to connect 1000MW of large scale renewables to the grid in 2014 (equivalent to about 4 Snowtown II's) and then 1500MW for each subsequent year to 2020. This adds up to a total of 10,000 MWs.
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