Industry fears 40 per cent renewable energy target will push up power prices

Australia’s peak industry lobby group fears Victoria's decision to go it alone and pursue a 40 per cent renewable energy target within eight years will push up prices that are already hurting business.

The Turnbull government wants states to sign up
 to a national agreement on energy policy. 

The Andrews government tabled legislation on Wednesday that set a statewide renewable energy target of 25 per cent by 2020 and 40 per cent by 2025.

In doing so it snubbed calls by the Turnbull government for states to join it in a nationally consistent approach to energy policy, prompting an angry rebuke from federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg.

The Matthew Guy-led state Coalition has already pledged to abolish the Victorian renewable energy target if it takes government next year.

Read Adam Carey’s story in the Melbourne Age - “Industry fears 40 per cent renewable energy target will push up power prices.”

(Concerns that the climate change conversation would become politicized were first voiced probably a decade ago, or even earlier, and now that fear had most certainly been realised, with the Victorian Labor Government introducing renewable energy targets and the Coalition opposition vowing it would abolish that target if and washer they are elected - a safe future for Victorians, and of course in a broader sense, the people of the world, has been swept up into an ideological debate - Robert McLean)