Message from the Clean Energy Council 16 July 2009

In November 2007 the Rudd Government was elected having promised to deliver a 20 percent Renewable Energy Target (RET) by 2020. Remarkably it is now July 2009 and that promise remains unfulfilled. Measures to accelerate deployment and development of clean energy technologies and to stimulate aggressive energy efficiency measures should be deployed well ahead of an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) or other constraints on greenhouse emissions. The more mature and developed these physical changes, the easier and more affordable the move to a carbon constrained world will be.

Instead these leading reforms have become an afterthought to the government's more complex and challenging Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). The two pieces of legislation have even now been legally linked together. The popularity and tripartite support for Renewable Energy Targets appears to be knowingly held to ransom in order to garner political support for a CPRS. The late arrival of the RET bill and the added complexity and political compromises has triggered even further delay.

The clean energy industry has been ready to finance and deploy around $28 billion of new energy infrastructure for more than a year. The solar PV industry has been promised a smooth transition from the solar homes and communities rebates to the new Solar Credits scheme. This important emerging industry is now in suspense. The cost of this delay is considerable. Call centres are silent, equipment and the skilled workers who use them remain idle. Our industry remains in limbo until the political deadlock over the passage of the RET can pass.

In the coming weeks the CEC will be directing its members to aggressively increase the pressure on all politicians to point out the commercial harm being wrought by treating the deployment of the RET like a game of political Russian roulette. Both major parties need to realise the full consequences of getting in the way of a clean energy industry which wields significant popular support and urgently needs red letter law, not just the promise of it, to avoid collapse and launch Australia's clean energy revolution.

Matthew Warren
Chief Executive