Visy group seeks funding grant for waste to energy plan, but will proceed anyway
Visy Group backs waste plan as funding flees http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/companies/visy-group-backs-waste-plan-as-funding-flees/story-fn91v9q3-1226724734376 DAMON KITNEY SEPTEMBER 23, 2013
THE Pratt family’s Visy Group will not rule out proceeding with a revolutionary $300 million project to turn household garbage into energy that would generate 3000 jobs across the economy, despite federal government moves to slash funding for clean energy projects.
The government last week scrapped the Climate Commission and has previously indicated it wants to wind up the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation created by Labor to fund renewable energy projects that would otherwise struggle to get commercial backing.
Visy is seeking $100m in government funding for the $200m waste-to-energy plant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, or ARENA, the independent statutory body established to provide financing assistance for projects that strengthen renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies.
The government has pledged to retain ARENA but has not ruled out cutting its funding. Visy chairman and chief executive Anthony Pratt said the project, which is designed to generate 75 megawatts of electricity that would be sold into the electricity grid or directly to third parties from a plant adjacent to Visy’s Tumut pulp and paper mill in southern NSW, was still on the company’s agenda irrespective of government funding. “It would happen earlier with grants from the government and later without. That is all,” Mr Pratt said.
Visy last year commissioned its first waste-to-energy plant in Australia at its Coolaroo manufacturing and recycling plant in Melbourne. “We will continue to do what we were going to do anyway, which is use more and more adulterated waste in our existing clean energy plants. We have four of them around the world,” Mr Pratt said.
“That is an ongoing process to update the technology of the plants so they can go from using fairly easy-to-use stuff like rejects from the mill to using hard-to-process stuff like wet garbage and food waste.
“That process will continue.
“We just focus on what we are doing. We think it is an exciting growth industry for Visy, for Australia and the world.”
The Coolaroo energy-from-waste plant is reducing Visy’s emissions by 70,000 tonnes a year and diverting 100,000 tonnes of waste that was going to landfill.
The Obama administration provided $US18.5m towards the $US60m capital cost of the US Conyers clean energy plant.
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