Renewable Energy

Mr BELL (Mount Gambier) (15:29): I cannot let that speech go without a little rebuttal. I think what is annoying the Labor Party the most is the unity shown on this side—the fact that we are 100 per cent a Steven Marshall Liberal government in 2018. It is absolutely killing them. We do not have Peter Malinauskas coming down from the upper house to either challenge or step straight in with, of course, an up-and-coming minister here, but that is not what I am here to talk about.

I am here to talk about biomass. I want the state government to make sure that they remember biomass as a renewable energy source. In fact, biomass has been touted for a long time, but we need to make sure it is given full consideration going forward. A very prominent businessperson who was quoted as being 'light years ahead of his time', Adrian de Bruin, who unfortunately is no longer with us, was a very parochial South Australian and a passionate member of the Mount Gambier community. Back in 2008, he was championing the delivery of a biomass plant.

The reason he was doing this is that we have so much tonnage of waste just rotting in the forests or going to landfill because it is not being used. At a conservative estimate, one million tonnes of wood fibre is going to either landfill or just rotting, unused. This would power a 60 to 100-megawatt plant, and it would be best located, according to all the experts, alongside one of the timber mills, where the hot air could be used to dry either chips or wood product whilst producing electricity at the same time.

It feels a bit like back to the future because, back in the fifties, a state-owned mill there, Woods and Forests, used to have its own biomass plant that generated electricity and sold it into the grid. One of the opportunities for this state going forward is that we could see localised generation, whether it is up in Port Augusta with solar thermal or the wind turbines, or in the South-East with biomass, contributing to local supply and therefore protecting to some degree the stability of our grid so that we do not again have statewide blackouts as we did last year.

Unfortunately, the problem of power outages and blackouts is becoming all too common. I want to run through a letter I received from Jacqueline Rovensky. I wonder, if this were in a metropolitan seat, whether this would be tolerated. These are the outage dates, as confirmed by SA Power Networks. We will start in 2016 to give it some relevance.

On 2 January 2016, the power went off for 11.1 hours with the cause unknown; 5 January 2016, weather, 2.3 hours out; 25 February 2016, equipment failure, 1.4 hours out; 16 March 2016, equipment failure, 7.1 hours out; 9 June 2016, equipment failure, 4.7 hours out; 12 July 2016, 2.3 hours out; 27 July 2016, planned maintenance, three hours out; 16 August, 3.5 hours; 28 September, 14.5 hours; 26 October, 2.9 hours; 26 October, 1.3 hours; 4 December, 1.8 hours; 7 December, half an hour; 10 January this year, 1.2 hours out; 8 February, of course, load shedding, 0.5 hours out; and, 13 February, weather, 2.7 hours out.

I talk about this because this area is located in a rich dairy industry where we have many dairy farmers who need to tip their milk down the drain because power is what backs up their refrigeration. On particularly hot days, that milk spoils very quickly.