Australia on Wednesday announced plans for the world’s biggest solar power plant under a Aus$500-million ($375-million) radical rethink on climate change.
The government said it would contribute Aus$75-million towards a Aus$420-million solar-power concentrator in the first of a series of projects aimed at reducing the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.
The move comes as the government, which like the United States has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, tries to contain the political impact of the worst drought in living memory.
Treasurer Peter Costello said the plant near Mildura in the southern state of Victoria would be the biggest project of its kind in the world.
“The project aims to build the biggest photovoltaic project in the world and this is by using mirrors which concentrate the sun’s rays on a power plant,” Costello told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“It has no emissions and the power that can come from this plant can go into the national grid.”
Costello said the plant would be built by Melbourne-based Solar Systems, a company that had already developed solar generation for remote communities.
“It’s one of the world leaders and it’s going to come into Victoria, in a very, very sunny spot in Victoria,” he said.
The project will start in 2008 and reach full capacity by 2013.
The government would also put Aus$50-million into a Aus$360-million pilot project to reduce, capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from a coal-fired power station in the same state, Costello said.
The projects will be jointly funded by the state government.
A spokesperson for environmental group Greenpeace, Danny Kennedy, welcomed the announcement and said the government was starting to bow to growing public pressure and concern about climate change.
Just last month, Prime Minister John Howard and other Cabinet ministers were dismissive of the message carried by former United States vice-president Al Gore when he visited Australia to promote his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth.
Howard said he did not take policy advice from films and would not meet Gore during his visit, while Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane dismissed the film as “just entertainment”.
But as soaring temperatures and bushfires marked the start of another hot summer on the driest inhabited continent on earth, critics stepped up their attacks on the government’s environmental policies, blaming global warming for exacerbating the drought.
Last week Howard announced that Aus$500-million would be spent on a series of clean energy projects, and on Wednesday Costello said he accepted the scientific evidence on global warming.
“I accept the scientific evidence, which is that global warming is taking place, that it is caused by carbon emissions, that restraining the increase in carbon emissions will counteract that process of global warming and that we should play our part.” – AFP