Renewable energy flatlines without carbon price

New research shows Australia’s renewable energy share has been declining since 1960 and Mark Wakeham* from Environment Victoria says without a price on carbon, our economy will continue with ‘pollution as usual’.

Environment Victoria recently released new research that shows renewable energy has fallen over the past 50 years as a proportion of Australia’s total electricity generation.

The report - Australia’s Electricity Generation Mix 1960-2009 - shows that renewable energy provided 19% of the nation’s electricity in 1960 but just 7% by 2008. During the same period Australia’s overall energy use grew dramatically. The actual output of coal power increased by 1200%, while renewable energy grew by just 450%.

This analysis is the first of its kind and was completed for us by Green Energy markets. Sadly, it shows that we’ve made little progress in cleaning up our electricity supply over the past 50 years, with the growth of polluting coal generation far outpacing the growth of renewable energy. This is a shocking performance given the strength of Australia’s renewable energy resources.

Australia is in a great position when it comes to harnessing renewable energy resources and countries like China and India would love to have the resources we have. We’ve got an abundance of sun, wind, waves, crops, heat and plenty of space. And yet we’ve been blinded by the size of our coal resource until now and have neglected these renewable energy resources.

As a result we’re falling far behind countries like Spain, Germany, the UK, China and the US because we don’t have adequate policy settings for renewable energy in place.

This decline in the proportion of renewable energy usage has continued over the past decade despite the array of state and national climate change programs that have been implemented. The research highlights that, for all the talk, we’re not doing enough to support clean energy and, in fact, we’re going backwards.

This is important information to take note of at a time when some are trying to undermine a carbon price. The introduction of a carbon price will give us a big opportunity to bring about a long-overdue transformation of our electricity supply and reduce our reliance on polluting coal.

When you look further at the detailed analysis of electricity generation in National Electricity Market states over the past decade, the amount of electricity coming from coal grew by almost 10% and annual greenhouse emissions from coal-fired power increased by 14 million tonnes.

For all of the hand-wringing about climate change over the past decade we’ve seen massive growth in emissions from coal generation while renewable energy has flatlined.

A carbon price will provide a long-term signal that we are serious about cleaning up our energy supply. If structured correctly it could be used to replace our dirtiest power stations like Hazelwood and Yallourn in Victoria and fast-track renewable energy development. A carbon price will help put clean energy projects on a level footing financially with polluting projects.

With a carbon price in place, the lowest-cost renewable energy technologies like wind power and biomass will be the winners in the short term and hopefully energy efficiency will get a significant boost as well.

We believe some of the revenues from the carbon price should also be used to help get the more expensive but critical renewable energy technologies - like solar thermal with storage - to market.

The research clearly shows us that, without a price on carbon and unless existing coal-fired power stations are retired, it will be impossible to reduce our emissions and clean up our economy.

*Mark Wakeham is the Campaigns Director for Environment Victoria. Prior to that he worked as an energy campaigner for Greenpeace Australia Pacific where he helped build a movement of Australians wanting climate change action. He has worked in the solar industry, was coordinator of the Environment Centre of the Northern Territory for five years and lectured at the Northern Territory University.