Planet Ark World Environment News reports that the American state of Minnesota has ramped up the interstate rivalry over renewable energy targets. Minnesota has enacted a mandatory target of 25 per cent of its total energy requirements to be met by renewables by the year 2025. As of 2004, renewables supplied eight per cent of Minnesota’s energy.
Minnesota is one of 22 US states with a renewable energy target. All of them are in excess of Australia’s recent former target of 2 per cent, and current target of 9,500 gigawatt-hours by 2010 and 20,000 gigawatt-hours (about 4 per cent of the total) by 2020. Some, such as California’s target of 20 per cent by 2010, are an order of magnitude ahead of Australia’s current targets. The combined population of the 22 states is 163,627,290, or 55 per cent of the total US population.
The under-bubbling of initiatives on energy and greenhouse policy in the US includes prominent Republicans such as Californian governer Arnold Schwarzenegger and Presidential hopeful John McCain.
What options are Australia’s political parties putting forward in this election year? The Labor Party is proposing to “boost the mandatory renewable energies target (MRET)”, but have yet to suggest specific figures, although former Shadow Resources Minister Martin Ferguson has praised Victoria’s target of 10 per cent by 2015. The Australian Democrats call for “a renewable energy target increased to 20% by 2020″, whilst the Australian Greens, late in 2006, proposed a Bill in the Senate which, among other things, sought to “Increase the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target so renewable electricity contributes at least 15% to national demand by 2012 and 25% by 2020″.
In the light of the targets announced by some of the US states, the Greens’ and Democrats’ proposals seem eminently do-able. One problem, however, is that the current Federal government’s paltry target is undermining the development of Australia’s renewable energy capacity. The government’s own MRET Review Panel remarked in 2003 that
By 2007, sufficient capacity is expected to have been installed to meet the MRET target of 9500 GWh for 2010. As a consequence, investment is expected to fall away rapidly.
The americans have also extended daylight savings to help reduce energy use.
Worth a try here?
After all, we dare not fall out of step with our dear ally!
Even ignoring the nuclear option for a moment, what if coal/gas combined with geosequestration turns out to be cheaper?
Or what if, in the short term, we all listen to wbb and radically cut our energy use instead?
Simon Sharwood: quite possibly.
On the first point, the renewables targets I’ve cited and which have been proposed are all for time periods no later than 2025. As I read the literature on geosequestration it is not likely to be making a significant contribution before then – I note that Kevin Rudd’s announcement of the weekend envisages “clean coal” electricity entering the national grid no earlier than 2020. The science of greenhouse suggests we need to be doing something serious to constrain emissions in the interim.
Paul, there’s nothing stopping us from switching from coal to natural gas (reducing greenhouse intensity by roughly 50%, and is much easier to adapt to CCS) right now. Making that switch might allow bigger cuts in emissions to be made for the same price than renewables.
Robert, I don’t disagree with you about natural gas, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily a question of one or the other. In fact I suspect we may want to do both (gas and renewables) if we’re to make the necessary reductions in emissions.
Whichever relatively paltry Australian figures you follow in the renewables contribution, placed alongside whatever target dates for ‘clean coal’ technologies to become widely available – electricity consumers need to get used to the idea of living on a lot less. Long lead times for options such as nuclear, hydrogen and, if ever, fusion energy will be held out like a cure for AIDS. If the tipping points for climate change/global warming cause more alarm at earlier dates than are currently vogue, it isn’t beyond possibilities that we will be living almost entirely on renewables and power savings. This could mean ‘down-shifting’ to 25 – 40 percent of what we currently use. Rather like current Baghdad blackouts perhaps. It could be fun.