Antinuclear

Anti-renewable zealot for Review Panel on Renewable Energy Target

The Abbott government is insisting on another review of the supposed health impacts of wind farms, despite not releasing a report from its main medical body, and there is also talk that the government support for rooftop solar will also be removed.

Will Abbott appoint an IPA man to a renewables review?
GILES PARKINSON  Crikey. JAN 29, 2014 Talk in Canberra is the government is poised to appoint a leading anti-wind and anti-solar campaigner from the IPA to a new panel to review the renewable energy target. It spells disaster for the sector. The renewable energy industry in Australia might be tempted to pack their bags and find another country to conduct their business if the latest talk in Canberra is true: sources say that the Abbott government will name Alan Moran, an anti-renewable zealot from the Institute of Public Affairs, to a new panel that will review the Renewable Energy Target.

According to sources, Moran will be one of three or four business people appointed to an “independent” panel that will get secretarial support from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — rather than departments for the environment or industry, which includes responsibility for energy.

If true, that will ensure that the panel is closely monitored by Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s inner core, who include the climate change contrarion and anti-wind advocate Maurice Newman  — his chief business advisor — and others from the conservative hard-right who neither accept the science of climate change nor the attraction of renewable energy.

And if true, it will shape up as a disaster for the renewable energy industry in Australia, which has already ground to a halt because of policy uncertainty, and which could face not just the possibility of the RET being diluted, but removed altogether. The Abbott government is insisting on another review of the supposed health impacts of wind farms, despite not releasing a report from its main medical body, and there is also talk that the government support for rooftop solar will also be removed.

Moran has famously hard-nosed views about renewables, and wind and solar in particular. In a panel discussion at Clean Energy Week in 2012, even former senator Nick Minchin, the man who orchestrated Abbott’s rise to power and the scrapping of bipartisan climate policy,said Moran made him “look like a pinko”.

Moran, like others from the IPA, including former head and now WA Energy Minister Mike Nahan, believe wind and solar don’t work, don’t cause abatement, and need like-for-like fossil fuel backup and constant spinning reserve, a myth that is repeated ad nauseum by conservative commentators.

When asked, in 2012, of his vision of the future, Moran’s response was to look 50 years into the past. “We had communism then, we got the Greens now,” he grumbled.

He said the energy profile in the 1960s was not much different from today, and “I expect that will continue into the future”.

Moran, who is the head of the IPA’s deregulation unit, was one of the main speakers at a poorly attended anti-wind rally in Canberra, which described the RET as a fraud. He described wind and solar as costly and “low quality”, said their costs were amplified by the need for backup in terms of fast-start conventional businesses, and were “imposing a huge burden on consumers and businesses”.

Abbott has been adopting many of these lines in his recent talking points. As has Newman.

Last week, Moran wrote an opinion piece in The Australian Financial Review titled “Renewable energy sources are just a power failure”. ……

The details of the RET review had been due to be released before Christmas, but appear to have been derailed because it was unable to dissolve the Climate Change Authority — which conducted the last RET review and found in favour of the renewables industry — which has a statutory requirement to conduct the next review. …..

[In 2012] in what must have been a Freudian slip, he [Moran]acknowledged there was a “slim chance” that a global accord to fight climate change could be implemented — in which case, he said, “there would be 60-70% renewables”.http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/01/29/will-abbott-appoint-an-ipa-man-to-a-renewables-review/

January 30, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics