“Victoria’s latest announcement of renewable targets represents an unwelcome return to competing state climate change policies that risk driving up the cost of emissions reduction and threaten the orderly transformation of the electricity sector,” Business Council Jennifer Westacott said.

“To limit global temperature rises to well below two degrees Celsius, Australia will need to eventually reduce its net greenhouse gas emissions to zero and renewable energy will be critical to this,” Ms Westacott said.  

“”However, the integration of large volumes of renewable energy needs to be done hand in hand with the managed transition away from more emissions-intensive generation. The impacts on communities, industry and customers all need to be well-articulated and understood.

“Competing approaches from state governments on renewables targets don’t bring us any closer to an investable, transformative, reliable and low cost energy system.

“Instead it brings back memories of the over 200 competing climate change policies the industry wrestled with last decade that simply increased the cost of energy and failed to significantly reduce emissions.

“Australia needs a suite of durable, national, climate change policies that are integrated with broader energy policy and are capable of delivering Australia’s 2030 emissions reduction target.

“These policies need to be implemented at lowest possible cost, while maintaining competitiveness and growing Australia’s future economy.”

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