Prominent Liberal party backbencher and chairman of the Coalition’s backbench energy committee Craig Kelly says the Coalition needs to scrap the current SRES subsidies for households and businesses to install renewable energy technologies such as solar.
Mr Kelly told The Guardian the Coalition needed to wind up the Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES), with the Morrison government in the middle of formulating its new energy policy.
The government’s new energy policy will factor in key recommendations from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) examination of the energy market, which recommended the abolition of the scheme by 2021.
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It’s not yet clear whether the government will take on board the ACCC’s advice to scrap the program, but Bill Shorten has promised Labor would maintain subsidies for households and businesses to install renewable technologies until 2030.
In August the Federal Government directed the ACCC to monitor and report on prices, profits and margins in the supply of electricity in the National Electricity Market, with the first report due by March 31, 2019.
The Clean Energy Council has said the SRES should be retained because it has delivered jobs and investment and the impact of SRES on retail electricity prices “is small and will continue to decline”.
“The SRES has leveraged significant consumer investment of more than $10 billion in the last five years, which brings system-wide benefits that deliver value for all electricity users,” the Council says.
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