The Australian Government has released the Energy White Paper, aimed at providing certainty and confidence in energy policy.
The White Paper sets out a policy framework that aims to deliver competitively priced and reliable energy supply to households, business and international markets. The main themes are:
- Increasing competition to keep prices down:
- Implementing energy market reforms in collaboration with the States and Territories
- Rolling out cost-reflective tariffs to reduce cross-subsidies between consumers
- Encouraging further privatisation of state-owned electricity assets
- Conducting an assessment of competition in the national wholesale gas market
- Increasing energy productivity to promote growth
- Aiming to improve national energy productivity by up to 40 per cent by 2013
- Developing a National Energy Productivity Plan
- Investing in Australia’s energy future
- Streamlining the approval and regulation of energy resources projects
- Attracting foreign investment into Australia’s energy sector
- Improving workforce productivity and enhancing the quality of skills and training
- Increasing research into innovative technology that supports the energy and resources
sector
The Energy Efficiency Council has welcomed the Government’s decision to make Energy Productivity one of its top three energy priorities, highlighting key areas that should be addressed to unlock energy productivity:
- Take urgent action on tariff reform.
- Save over $1 billion of taxpayers’ dollars over two decades by improving the energy efficiency of government agencies.
- Retain and strengthen the Commercial Building Disclosure program, which helps prospective buyers and tenants find efficient buildings.
- Establish programs to help industry save energy.
- Carry out long-overdue reforms to Australia’s energy markets to reduce the supply-side bias that have resulted in excess generation capacity and gold-plating of the grid.