{"id":5569,"date":"2016-06-20T19:11:41","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T09:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/?p=5569"},"modified":"2024-07-03T11:23:12","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T01:53:12","slug":"how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/","title":{"rendered":"How Australia Ended Up With A Renewable Energy Target"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"John

The Creator of The Renewable Energy Target. Mr John Howard.<\/p><\/div>\n

Australia’s Renewable Energy Target, or RET<\/a>, was first introduced in 2001 by Liberal PM John Howard. It has been almost entirely responsible for getting Australia’s graceful collection of wind turbines erected and getting solar panels<\/a> on the roofs of 19% of our homes.<\/p>\n

However, despite all its success, not many of us know very much about the RET.<\/p>\n

This is understandable, as on the surface the topic is fairly dry. But once you get past that desiccated surface you soon discover what lies beneath is actually about as dry as crawling through the Simpson Desert without water for three days and then eating six plain SAO biscuits off a salt flat.<\/p>\n

But don’t worry, I’m going to save you from having to experience that yourself. I recently filled in the gaps my knowledge of the RET and I’m ready to present you with all the juicy tidbits of information I gleaned from that dry and dusty landscape.<\/p>\n

Feel free not to read on if you are already confident in your mastery of the topic. But before you do that, just be certain you can answer in the affirmative when I ask, do you get RET yet?<\/p>\n

Why We Have A Renewable Energy Target<\/h2>\n

Why do we have a RET? The answer to that question is, to reduce our carbon emissions to stop the icecaps from melting and prevent the planet in the future resembling a Kevin Costner flop. And having met the man personally, I can tell you that a floppy Kevin Costner is not a pretty sight.<\/p>\n

\"Kevin

That’s right, Kevin Costner. You stay in that prison and think about your sins.<\/p><\/div>\n

But just what has the RET done to prevent our planet from turning into a badly done Mad Max rip off? And why did we go with that approach back in 2001 rather than something else, such as a carbon price or a phase out of coal power? Well the answer to that is, there is a good economic reason to have a RET and there are some not quite as good political reasons that made it more acceptable than the alternatives.<\/p>\n

The economic reason for having a RET was to support the initial development of renewable generating capacity in the country and get it through the early stages where costs were high and private enterprise would be unlikely to support it without the legal requirement the RET provided<\/p>\n

And the not so good political reason is the coal industry has a lot of influence and almost certainly would have blocked anything it found more threatening to its interests. But the rumor anything more substantive than the RET would have been blocked because the majority of Australian politicians worship Gilgamax the God of Carbon is almost certainly untrue. Most astute political observers regard the worshippers of Gilgamax as only forming a plurality at best.<\/p>\n

What The RET Has Done For Us<\/h2>\n

Renewable energy has come a long way this century. Rooftop solar and wind power are the most cost effective forms of new generating capacity in Australia. But things were very different 15 years ago when the RET was first introduced. Solar panels cost 7 times per watt more than now. And wind turbines cost one seventh more more per watt than now.<\/p>\n

But to be fair to wind turbines, 15 years of inflation means they are considerably cheaper in real terms than they were, they produce more energy per watt of capacity than they used to, and have improved reliability and lifespans, so the cost of the electricity they produce has fallen considerably.<\/p>\n

Fifteen years ago PV installations were as rare as hen’s teeth. And the funny thing is, since all hens start off with one<\/a>, you’d think they’d be pretty common. But take a look around you right now and tell me if you can see any. Unless you are all cooped up, I very much doubt it.<\/p>\n

The only thing solar you saw on roofs back then were hot water systems. When it came to PV we probably had more houses with solar cells on their roofs from Skylab<\/a> crashing into Western Australia than from actual installations.<\/p>\n

But now wind turbines are cheaper to build and operate than new coal or gas power stations and rooftop solar is the cheapest source of electricity available to most Australians. As rooftop solar competes with the retail price of electricity and not the much lower wholesale price, it would still out compete coal and gas even if they could generate electricity for zero cents per kilowatt-hour.<\/p>\n

While the RET can’t take all the credit for the decline in cost and spread of renewable energy in Australia, it can take a massive amount of credit for wind power. Without the RET it almost would not exist in this country. And along with high feed-in tariffs, hardware cost declines, and the massive run up in retail electricity prices, it has been a major driving force behind the rapid uptake of rooftop solar.<\/p>\n

\"A

The average Australian family in 2100 has 1.2 children and 2.9 American accents.<\/p><\/div>\n

How did the RET lower costs?<\/h2>\n

As you have traveled down life’s highway, or perhaps blundered through the roadside ditch beside it, as I am prone to do, you may have noticed that doing things can be hard. And doing things for the first time can be very hard. Whether it is studying a new language, learning to ride a horse, or following my own calling of becoming one of Australia’s most skilled lovers, beginnings can be fraught with difficulty. Generally when learning something new there is an initial hump in the road that can take extra time and effort to get over, but once that is done the rest comes much easier. I know that as far as my own personal goal is concerned, I’ve never been able to get over my first hump.<\/p>\n

Imagine if I gave you a heap of blueprints and instructions, and a really large box of parts, and asked you and your friends to put together a wind turbine. Chances are you wouldn’t have a clue what you were doing. It would probably take you ages to put it together and maybe you’d end up dropping a nacelle on a couple of your mates. And even after you got it up you’d probably have to go back and fix everything you got wrong. But, imagine how good you and your surviving friends would be at building wind turbines after 12 erections, or 30, or 100. You’d be quite expert at it, since nothing beats hands on experience.<\/p>\n

Installing rooftop solar isn’t quite as complex, but the principle is the same. The more you do something, the better you get at it and the more ideas you have on how to improve what you’re already doing.<\/p>\n

The problem is, no one wants to pay for a wind turbine or rooftop solar system built by people with no experience. Would you want people who hadn’t done it before mucking around with electric cabling on your roof? But inexperience is pretty much unavoidable when a new industry is getting started. By making it a legal requirement for electricity retailers to source a portion of the electricity they sell from renewable sources, the RET got wind power and rooftop solar over this initial hump. It didn’t just get the ball rolling, it pushed the ball up the hill and has now got it to a point where it can roll down by itself, if need be. We know the drive to lower the cost of renewables has been successful because at current costs Australia will never build another coal power station and is not likely to build any significant amount of new gas capacity either. You may have heard the Coalition Government call for a new coal power station in North Queensland to power a coal mine to mine coal to power the new coal power station, but trust me, that’s not going ahead.<\/p>\n

And it is not just improving construction and installation skills that lower costs. There are a whole slew of factors that have all worked together to decrease them. Finance is an important one. Back at the start of the century banks were leery of lending money to renewable projects because they had no experience with them and didn’t know what level of risk they were taking on. But things have since been completely turned around and now banks don’t want to lend money for new coal power stations and coal mines, while financing for wind farms has become mundane and rooftop solar installation is regarded the same as any other business.<\/p>\n

In addition, the RET has resulted in economies of scale which include the sourcing of hardware. For example, it is considerably cheaper to import 1,000 solar panels at a time than 2. And it has also played a small part in the world wide decrease in the cost of renewable hardware. The more solar panels or wind turbine components that are made, the cheaper they get as manufacturers improve their production techniques and more is spent on researching ways to lower their cost or improve their quality, either get a jump on the competition or just make money from licensing the newly developed technology.<\/p>\n

Limits To RET Technology Development<\/h2>\n

While an RET technically could encourage the development of all sorts of renewable energy, in practice to tends to only focus on what is the cheapest. For the first 10 years of the RET, apart from some small biomass and hydroelectric generation, the main technology that was developed was wind power. While solar did receive some assistance it didn’t have a large effect on its development. It wasn’t until 2011 when the RET was divided into large-scale and small-scale technologies that rooftop solar, with the help of other incentives, was able to take off.<\/p>\n

And even after the RET was split in two, it still focused mainly on just one technology in each area, wind and rooftop solar, because they had the lowest cost in each category. For example, because wind power was and still is cheaper than large-scale solar, no large solar farms would have been built in Australia if they hadn’t received additional assistance besides the RET.<\/p>\n

It is possible to design a RET so it will give support to more than one main type of technology, as ours did after it was cut in two. Without the split we almost certainly would have missed out on rooftop solar becoming the most cost effective form of new renewable energy in Australia.<\/p>\n

\"Dennis

Abbott from Waterworld… Sorry, I mean Deacon from Waterworld, looking for a Renewable Energy Target to cut.<\/p><\/div>\n

Why A RET And Not A Carbon Price Or Other Method Of Cutting Emissions?<\/h2>\n

A RET is great for getting the development of renewable energy started and bringing down its cost. But, it doesn’t do much to stop existing fossil fuel plants from operating and spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Or at least it wasn’t supposed to when it was introduced in its initial form. And that’s the reason why the Coalition under John Howard introduced the RET in 2001 rather than a carbon price or a coal phase out. Because it was not seen as a threat to existing generators or the coal industry.<\/p>\n

Back when the RET was first introduced it was called the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target and only called for new renewable energy equal to 5% of electricity consumption at that time by 2020. Eight years later the RET was expanded out to 20% by the Rudd Government. But even the small 5% target was enough to get Australia’s wind industry under way and while it wasn’t nearly enough to get rooftop solar to take off, it did breath some life into it.<\/p>\n

But back in 2001 Australia’s electricity consumption had spent the past 40 years growing at an average rate of almost 6% and substantial increases were expected to continue. So fossil fuel interests at the didn’t consider a RET that would only come to a small portion of the new generating capacity they thought would be required each year was any kind of significant threat.<\/p>\n

And that is why we have a renewable energy target rather than some other scheme for reducing carbon emissions. Because fossil fuel interests didn’t think it would be anything other than a mild annoyance. But even a very low carbon price of only $10 a tonne would have been seen as a threat to the coal industry and would not be something likely to have been passed by the Howard Government. And as for regulations requiring a phase out of coal power, well that wasn’t going to happen. The first four letters of the Coalition’s name isn’t coal because they always do the bidding of the coal industry. That was just pure luck.<\/p>\n

Because of the expectation that growth in electricity demand would continue, the opposition to the Rudd Government expanding the RET to 20% in 2009 was not insurmountable. The coal industry and incumbent generators weren’t happy about it, but their existing investments were regarded as being safe because demand was still expected to increase by more than the amount of new renewable electricity that would be provided.<\/p>\n

However, by that point in time, growth in electricity demand<\/a> had slowed to a crawl. This was unexpected, but almost everyone involved in the electricity industry saw the slowdown as only a temporary aberration and believed growth in demand would soon pick up again. Or at least they had a vested interest in making people think that it would. So it is amusing that in 2010, one year after the RET was expanded, electricity demand actually fell and continued to fall for four years after that. As a result the RET did start to cost fossil fuel interests money.<\/p>\n

Clearly they weren’t going to stand for that and it led to fossil fuel interests supporting the Abbott government and the removal of our short lived carbon price and the reduction of the RET. But that sordid series of events is a whole other story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australia’s Renewable Energy Target, or RET, was first introduced in 2001 by Liberal PM John Howard. It has been almost entirely responsible for getting Australia’s graceful collection of wind turbines erected and getting solar panels on the roofs of 19% of our homes. However, despite all its success, not many of us know very much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[397,436],"class_list":["post-5569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-solar-policy","tag-politics","tag-ret","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Australia Ended Up With A Renewable Energy Target - SolarQuotes Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Discover what the Renewable Energy Target is and the political hullaballoo that created it.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Australia Ended Up With A Renewable Energy Target\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Discover what the Renewable Energy Target is and the political hullaballoo that created it.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"SolarQuotes Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/SolarQuotes\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-06-20T09:41:41+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-07-03T01:53:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/john-howard-ray-of-light.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ronald Brakels\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@BrakelsRonald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@solar_quotes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Ronald Brakels\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/d0ce1779b3f5cb67cb4f146732af2fc7\"},\"headline\":\"How Australia Ended Up With A Renewable Energy Target\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-06-20T09:41:41+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-07-03T01:53:12+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/\"},\"wordCount\":2415,\"commentCount\":30,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/john-howard-ray-of-light.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"politics\",\"RET\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Solar Policy\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-AU\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/how-australia-ended-up-with-a-renewable-energy-target\/\",\"name\":\"How Australia Ended Up With A Renewable Energy Target - 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