Simon responds to Zed on the solar farm

Following from Zed Seselja’s attack on the development of a solar power plant in the ACT Simon Corbell has responded in the comments and had this to say:

#13 Simon_Corbell
11:31 am, 04 Mar 11

I was amused to see Zed Seselja’s claims repeated on RiotACT after I showed in the media on Tuesday how spurious they were.

What are the facts?

The facts are that:

Rather than dumping a solar farm the ACT Government has committed to 210MW of large scale solar generating capacity on top of the 30MW Micro and Medium scale capacity that will be built from the expanded Feed-in Tariff scheme – for an eventual total of 240MW. That would meet about 20% of the ACT’s electricity demand.

The ACT already has built the equivalent of a 7MW power station from the operation of the FiT scheme.

The Government has increased eligible generators from 30kW to 200kW capacity in the existing FiT scheme.

The Expression of Interest process allowed industry to give strong evidence to the government that rather than just a single large solar power facility for the ACT there was potential for much more renewable generation.

Through the EOI the industry told us that a well designed feed-in tariff process was the best way to deployment of solar power generating capacity in Canberra and not to build just one plant, but five, six or more large scale facilities.

The Government has also committed to legislate for a market based auction mechanism to support that potential for multiple large scale solar facilities in the ACT with an initial auction for 40MW capacity.

To quote an industry leader who was interviewed on WIN News on Tuesday:

“Looking at the best way to fund solar farms this is the sensible thing to do. Instead of getting juts one solar farm project the Government will deliver five or six solar farm projects which will be a better outcome for the Territory.”

My market based approach is the world’s best practice for achieving the greatest renewable energy deployment at the lowest cost is supported by industry – it should be supported by the Opposition Leader.