It looks like South Australia may be the first mainland state to achieve 100% renewable status. Their Labour Government has placed a target of 33% renewable energy by 2020 but it is likely that they could reach 100% within a decade.

South Australia already contains more than half of Australia’s wind turbines – with more to come – as well as the highest penetration rate of rooftop solar power systems in the country (more than 20% of homes).

There is already the 270MW Snowtown 2 wind farm, the 275MW Hornsdale wind farm and the approved 600MW Ceres project in the Yorke Peninsular as well as another 13 projects totalling 1,000MW (according to the AEMO) that are all in the pipeline. This together with falling demand means that they will be well above target before 2020.

With technologies speeding along as they are and many overseas nations installing solar farms with storage, uptake of solar storage may also be on the cards for South Australia – and necessary for increased grid reliability. Ron Stobbe, the head of the state’s network operator, SA Power Networks, has said that regional communities at the edge of the electricity grid should consider solar power systems with storage as it may be better than what they are currently supplied by the grid.

“When it comes to reliability, these alternatives like renewables, going into storage, is actually more reliable than what we can even provide,” said Stobbe.

A great deal of Australia has good renewable energy targets in place, good potential and is already achieving good results. Tasmania has great hydro resources and are also close to achieving a 100% renewable status – the ACT has a target of 90% renewable energy by 2020 – many local councils are just as ambitious as well. So what is the problem? Once again, the answer is the Renewable Energy Target (RET).
At best it looks as if the RET is going to be lowered from 41 000GWh to 23 000GWhs which is almost half – that is a lot of wind power and other renewable energies that could have been constructed that will now be halted. If we keep the momentum and the potential going who knows what we could achieve – not to mention the future we would be providing for our children and their children.

It has been said that if we let old fossil fuel fired power stations retire at the end of their lives, we will eventually get to a 100% renewable Australia by default. Reducing or removing the RET is going to slow down our progression significantly.