When it comes to the Abbott government’s determination to scrap or wind back the renewable energy target (RET), numbers don’t always count.



The prime minister, who after the election took control of a RET “review” and appointed businessman Dick Warburton – a self-professed climate sceptic – to head it, says the RET needs to change because it is pushing up power prices.



“We have to accept that in the changed circumstances of today, the renewable energy target is causing pretty significant price pressure in the system and we ought to be an affordable energy superpower … cheap energy ought to be one of our comparative advantages,” Tony Abbott said last year.

Inconveniently, the idea that the RET is significantly pushing up prices has now been challenged by several sets of modelling.

ACIL Allen modelling done for Abbott’s own review shows the current target will increase the average household bill by an average of $54 a year between now and 2020, but will reduce bills by a similar annual amount over the following decade compared with what they would be if the RET were repealed. That modelling used assumptions highly unfavourable to renewable energy, including that coal and gas prices would remain almost unchanged until 2040.

Separate modelling for the Clean Energy Council by Roam Consulting – with different assumptions about gas prices – found that bills would be $50 a year lower by 2020 if the RET were retained.

Another modelling exercise, commissioned by three business groups from Deloitte, found household bills would rise by at most about $50 a year.

None of those numbers – those saying the RET leaves householders better off, or the ones that say it will cost, at the very worst, less than $1 per week – swayed the prevailing opinion within the Coalition that the policy, which requires 41,000 gigawatt hours of power to be sourced from renewables by 2020, must change.

Supporters of the RET, including the environment minister, Greg Hunt, were arguing the 2020 target should be pared back to maybe 25,000 or 30,000 gigawatt hours, which would allow a few new investments to proceed, but not many. There would, perhaps, be another longer term target for 2025 or 2030. Others, believed to include the prime minister, wanted to see it shut down for any new investment, with incentives only for existing generators.

But then another set of numbers came into play, the same ones playing havoc with so many of the government’s plans in the Senate.

Any change would have to get through the upper house. When Clive Palmer stood beside Al Gore and said he would countenance no change to the RET until after the next election, because the government had gone to the last election promising not to change it, those Senate numbers became extremely difficult, unless Labor could be persuaded to strike a deal, which appears unlikely.

But as the government awaits the Warburton review, due in a few weeks, it has been dawning on everyone involved that the goal of stopping new investments in renewables could also be achieved by simply doing nothing.

As Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported last week, the abolition of the carbon tax and the total uncertainty over the future of the RET has completely stalled investment in renewables already.

No new projects have been financed since the end of 2012, and only a tiny amount has been spent in the first six months of this year.

That leaves the renewables industry – especially the solar providers – turning to a third set of numbers – the kind that politicians often find hard to ignore.



Opinion poll after opinion poll has found Australians support renewable energy, and are in fact prepared to pay even more than $1 a week to back it.

Polling for the Climate Institute released last month showed 72% of Australians wanted to keep or expand the RET. Even when respondents were told “opponents of the scheme say the RET is a subsidy that drives up electricity bills, while supporters say it has helped create jobs and has tripled Australia’s wind and solar energy since 2009”, 71% still thought it should remain at its current level, or be increased.

Those kind of numbers have inspired the Australian Solar Council to begin a marginal seats campaign, asking voters to demand that their sitting Coalition MP lobby for a clear statement from the government that the RET will not be changed in any way.

They are starting in the Coalition’s second most marginal seat of Petrie, in Brisbane, where party leaders are being invited to a community forum and sitting MP Luke Howarth is being asked to take a stand. He told Guardian Australia he was a big supporter of solar power and renewable energy. “There are obviously mixed feelings about it, but I think renewable energy is a good thing,” he said.

Next stop is the Victorian marginal of Corangamite, where the new Liberal MP Sarah Henderson was quick to issue a statement saying she wanted to “ensure that we have a strong, operative RET which continues to drive the uptake of renewable energy and returns certainty to this industry”.

But other backbenchers, such as Angus Taylor, who has been a longtime and fierce opponent of the RET, say the business-commissioned modelling shows “the RET is creating a huge and unnecessary cost burden for businesses and households”.

Opposition to the RET within the Coalition is driven by a potent mix of a deep hostility to wind turbines, as evidenced by treasurer Joe Hockey’s comment to the (anti-wind) Alan Jones that he found them “utterly offensive”, a barely disguised climate scepticism (as evidenced by agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce, Ian Macdonald and Craig Kelly all suggesting that the fact the carbon tax repeal occurred on a cold winter’s day proved it had been unnecessary), and a belief that indefinite fossil fuel use is not a threat to the planet, but rather is crucial to human advancement.

Abbott’s top business adviser, Maurice Newman, wants the RET scrapped altogether and has said that persisting with government subsidies for renewable energy represented a “crime against the people” because higher energy costs hit poorer households the hardest and there was no longer any logical reason for them.

Many Coalition MPs see the world that way. Ian Macdonald spoke during the carbon tax repeal debate wearing an “Australians for Coal” hi-vis jumpsuit. The new Queensland senator Matthew Canavan used his maiden speech to say: “I want to put on the record my admiration and support for our fossil fuel industry and the thousands of jobs it supports … Fossil fuels have made more contribution than almost any other product or invention towards humanity's long ascent from lives that were nasty, brutish and short to ones of comparative luxury and leisure. The only form of energy that I want to promote is cheap energy”. And Taylor told parliament “religious belief is based on faith not facts. The new climate religion, recruiting disciples every day, has little basis on fact and everything to do with blind faith.”

It is an improbable basis for a coherent renewable energy policy, especially when the renewable energy target was intended as a supplementary policy to the carbon tax – which the Coalition has abolished – and when the entire energy market is in turmoil because billions of dollars in investment were made on the basis of wildly incorrect forecasts about electricity demand.

A properly functioning policy process would rethink the way the electricity market operates and the best market incentives to reduce the emissions it produces. But we don’t have a properly functioning policy process, and the government isn’t even entirely clear it accepts the climate change problem the renewable energy target is designed to solve.

In the meantime, the industry is reaching for the only set of numbers that gives it some clout.