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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-05-17 Daily Xml
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WIND FARMS

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (15:31): I rise today to speak about a very important issue and a few different aspects of it; that is, wind farms and their impact on the Port Augusta power stations. I support the development of wind farms, primarily for two reasons. Obviously, we should all be pursuing any opportunities to create cleaner, greener, more environmentally responsible electricity sources, but I also support them because of the very positive commercial and economic benefits that they have for regional communities. Communities in Stuart and other parts of the state have certainly benefited in recent years, and I hope that these benefits will continue.

It is also important to put on the record that, within communities around South Australia, there are differing and often conflicting views about wind farms. The Liberal opposition has put out policy that makes our position very clear, so I will not go through all of that, but, suffice to say, planning, in my opinion, is probably the single most important factor that would help allay concerns. Things are fairly haphazard at the moment. Developers waving chequebooks approach landowners and local and state governments for permission to develop wind farms, and if we were to turn that around and do some statewide zoning about where they may or may not be placed, then that would take care of a lot of the issues.

In terms of the statewide impacts, one of the things we must do is to make sure that we get our balance right across the state, keeping in mind that we need to fit into a national grid which, essentially, is a south-east Australian grid. We need to get the balance right on how much electricity will be generated from wind farms and how much from coal and gas. Every member of this house would agree that that is a very important balance to get right.

I put on record my opinion that, at the moment, that balance is a little out of whack. We have a national target for renewable energy of 20 per cent. We have a state target of 35 per cent. It is interesting to note that Denmark, which is one of the countries at the forefront of this issue worldwide, has settled on approximately 19 per cent of their electricity being generated from wind farms. I think that is probably a pretty good example. They have been leading the world in that area. Fortunately, that is not far, of course, from the 20 per cent national target, and I think our state target is too high.

We are starting to see some impacts from that balance getting out of whack, and this is where I come to talk about the two coal burning power stations at Port Augusta, and say again that no sensible South Australian, no sensible member of parliament, would want to do anything other than reduce pollution. We can all enter into the debate about how far do you go, and where the specific priorities are, but reducing pollution is a critical issue that we must all address.

The other thing that is important, of course, is that we all want electricity, and I fully support any renewable proposals that can be proven to be reliable, that can be proven to be affordable, and that support our regional economies in other ways. The two power stations operating currently, Playford and Northern at Port Augusta, employ approximately 500 people in the north of the state: approximately 250 at Port Augusta and approximately 250 at Leigh Creek, and protecting those jobs is incredibly important to me, and always at the forefront of my mind when considering these issues.

Because it cannot compete with wind farms on windy days, Alinta had to announce recently that it is not going to produce electricity in Port Augusta for the six months of the year when it is not profitable. It is going to essentially mothball Playford—which should happen anyway because it is a very polluting power station—but its Northern Power Station is going to be closed for six months of the year and they plan to only operate from October to March. They have guaranteed the workers, they have guaranteed the community, they have guaranteed me and others that, for a few years at least, that will not impact in any negative way on existing full-time employees, and I will do everything I possibly can to hold them to those guarantees.

I want to alert the government to the fact that I think that in the six months when Alinta at Port Augusta is not producing electricity, the government is going to run into strife with its obligation to the people of South Australia to provide electricity, and I forewarn the minister for energy that I think that it is very likely that in the six months of downtime, the government and the energy regulator may well have to go back to Alinta.

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