Begin Rant: The mysterious case of the missing Renewable Energy Atlas

I don’t often rant about renewable energy. Largely because there is no need to. The legislation is generally doing its thing, people are putting money in to it, research is happening, work is happening… it’s all progressing well.

However, I do think it is an important thing that has to be done. We have to continue to find sustainable ways of powering our world. We have to make it as easy possible and as affordable as possible for people to choose renewable energy source.

Now, if you’re just an average household there’s not much to it. You can put solar panels on your roof or not, you can ask your electricity provider for green energy or not, etc.

If you are a massive company then you’ve probably got people who work on ways to use less power and ways in which you can generate power to offset your power bills (if there is an executive in your company championing it).

If you are a commercial renewable energy company then that’s pretty much all you do, with teams of engineers to assess sites and a lot of effort and money that goes in to each green power farm etc.

But there’s a group for whom it is a challenge… SMEs. Smaller operations that can’t afford to have people working on it but who may be interested in what they can do. Or in the case of the specific example that sparked the series of events that has prompted this rant: a farm in South Australia. For this group they need help – the decisions are complex and they need as much information and support as they can get to make the right decisions for their operation and the environment at little or no cost.

So that’s a bit of a rambling prologue for me to tell you about the missing Renewable Energy Atlas.

Australia used to have a Renewable Energy Atlas. Wonderful things. It’s basically a website with mapping tools that can tell you what renewable energy resources are available at any given site. You can see with just a few clicks if it’s a good site for wind or solar or whatever. To get an idea, Sustainability Victoria still have their renewable energy interactive maps here. (Not as pretty as the Atlas but still gives you the data).

It was launched by Peter Garrett in October 2008. “A a fantastic and invaluable tool for industry, governments and the community” he called it. “The Renewable Energy Atlas will continue to be developed”, he said.

We went looking for it to see if a private wind installation could be a viable way of offsetting the enormous power consumption of the dairy and the irrigators and the grain dryer and stuff like that. Given the energy bills of the farm are around $60,000 per year, I’m sure you can understand why it’s a good thing for such an operation to be looking at renewable energy options. Every website we went to… state, federal, private… all referred us to this great tool to get the data we need to make those decisions.

It’s missing. This is where it used to be. 

It’s been missing since about the start of the year.

And despite what that DCCEE website says, WindLabs do not make the data available.

I won’t run you through the entire exchange with the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (or WindLabs or Renewables SA or the other entities we have contacted in searching for this data). But this line in my last email from the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Enquiries Team should suffice to give you a taste of what I’ve been dealing with:

“The Department of Climate Change has not produced an Atlas and currently has no plans to do so.”

Nope, I’m not making it up. She told me to go ask DEHWA who created the Atlas, which doesn’t exist anymore, but their replacement DSEWPC politely and kindly referred me back to DCCEE. When they restructured in to 2 departments the Atlas quite rightly went in to Energy Efficiency.

All old links to it link to the DCCEE site, but it’s not their problem.

This may seem like a small thing, but let me assure you it is huge. Without the data you are locking people out from investing in renewables. It is prohibitively expensive for a small entity, such as a farm, to fund the new initial evaluation of a site privately.

The lack of freely available data doesn’t have much of an impact on large commercial installations: while certainly it may add a little to their initial costs, tens of thousands for site evaluations in the scheme of project with a budget of hundreds of millions doesn’t matter a great deal, and they’d do it eventually anyway.

But it kills small installations. Just writes them off entirely before they can even get started.

There are lots of other good reasons to have such a resource; such as education, research, and to entice investment from green investment funds and the like not as familiar with Australia’s abundance of renewable possibilities.

Here’s another good reason: it is utterly hypocritical to say you’re supporting investment in renewables, implement a carbon tax because you say you are committed to acting on climate change, and at the same time take away the data that could actually empower the greatest level of change in our energy use mix.

The big companies changing behaviours because of the carbon tax would, IMO, be utterly dwarfed if the enormous number of smaller operations in this country were enabled and encouraged to switch to renewable options. It makes absolutely no logical sense that the Federal Government would make it harder for the vast majority of Australian businesses to get on board with renewable energy, particularly on-site renewable production that could not only decrease their running costs but reduce load on the largely brown coal-fired national grid.

I’m not suggesting an on-site renewable option will work for everyone. But without the Renewable Energy Atlas or similar free data tool they can’t even ask the question.

I’m still waiting for a better answer from DCCEE on what happened to the Atlas. So… to be continued.

End Rant.