At the conclusion of the inaugural meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate in Sydney, industry leaders claimed wind farm projects worth $10-12 billion would move overseas.
"We're quitting Australia", Energreen Wind business director Alan Keller told the Weekend Australian.
The newspaper reported that Keller said his company was downsizing and the $10 million it had invested in preliminary work would be wasted, with wind farms worth $1.5 billion in NSW and Queensland unlikely to proceed.
The company will be expanding in India and China, where Keller says wind power projects were increasing 30-fold.
Keller said the wind industry had no future in Australia due to the Federal Government's refusal to increase its mandatory renewable energy target (MRET) from 2% – approximately 70MW – by 2020.
While renewable energy industry leaders were invited to the conference as observers only, representatives from the coal and other mineral-based industries were active participants.
Andrew Richards, president of the Australian Wind Farm Energy Association, said wind farms accounted for less than 0.5% of Australia's energy use and that his company, Pacific Hydro, was reviewing plans for wind farm projects in Victoria and South Australia amounting to $1 billion.
Federal energy minister Ian Macfarlane said MRET provided the incentive for the wind energy industry to build a solid foundation and that, as there had been substantial expansion in the industry since then, an increase in the MRET was unnecessary.
Meanwhile, the Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO) has axed solar electricity rebates to community organisations and schools, and will phase out incentives for residential and commercial solar installations by 2007.
The maximum rebates offered to homeowners, community groups and developers implementing solar initiatives were slashed from $A8000 to $4000 on January 1.
