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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-11-17 Daily Xml
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Energy Efficiency Initiatives

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (14:57): My question is to the Minister for Energy and Mining. Can the minister update the house on the Marshall Liberal government's energy efficiency initiatives and the flow-on impacts to employment?

The Hon. D.C. VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart—Minister for Energy and Mining) (14:58): Thank you to the member for Flinders for this important question. He, like all of us, is working incredibly hard to get the cost of electricity down, make it more reliable and make it cleaner.

Yes, $60 million was allocated in the budget handed down one week ago today to upgrade and make more energy efficient government buildings across the state—a very significant program because $60 million will actually create 400 green jobs in this area. It is very important work, and that will also help with regard to environmental responsibility.

It will help with COVID economic recovery. Every single job is an essential job as far as we are concerned, so to create 400 jobs in this way will be a huge benefit. It will, of course, also save taxpayers' money, because it will reduce by about $7 million per year the amount of money the government spends on behalf of taxpayers towards its electricity bills. This is a very positive policy all around. I thank the Treasurer for his support in this area. We take this responsibility very seriously. This is about creating jobs, about reducing emissions, about saving money for the taxpayer and about continuing on with that three-pronged approach: cheaper electricity, more reliable electricity and cleaner electricity.

We are using our leverage when we spend taxpayers' money to the very best advantage of taxpayers that we can. This has been seen in the recent announcement of the 10-year government supply electricity contract, so all the electricity that the government purchases being tendered to South Australian company ZEN Energy. We've got a very good price on electricity on behalf of the taxpayer. We will save approximately $13 million per year in that, and that's ahead of the $7 million through this additional initiative.

We also use that leverage to contract the delivery of a 280-megawatt solar farm near Whyalla, so again creating more jobs in the construction and bringing more renewable energy into South Australia and, importantly, as well as that solar farm, a 100-megawatt battery near Port Augusta. You will have heard the Premier say for years—in fact, years in opposition, let alone in government—that we cannot just keep building renewable energy generation in South Australia; we need storage and other smart technology to go with it. The Premier was saying this for years in opposition, and we are delivering exactly that.

We don't need any more wind farms on their own because when it's windy we have a lot of electricity and it's very cheap. We need wind farms that can work in with other important assets, like grid-scale storage, so that we don't have the blackouts of the bad old days, so that we continue to see the reduction in prices that we see at the moment: a reduction of $158 over the last two years in the cost of electricity for the average South Australian household, in stark contrast to the $477 increase that we saw in the two years leading up to the last election.

We are fulfilling our responsibilities to the very best of our ability, making electricity cheaper and more reliable and cleaner. We are doing it in many ways, including this $60 million investment in improving all government buildings across the state.

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