SPEECH: Origin Energy, MD, Grant King

At a CEDA event in Sydney, Origin Energy, Managing Director, Grant King spoke about reliability of electricity supply, reducing carbon emissions and competitive energy prices. He also commented on the government's Renewable Energy Target scheme and carbon tax.

Speech excerpt

"In respect of the carbon scheme itself, the government estimated that it would reduce carbon in its first period of operation by about 15 million tonnes and that would therefore, represent an abatement cost because that has come at a cost of about $10 billion, an abatement cost of about $700 a tonne. But if you accept our view that there's little evidence of abatement being driven under this scheme then effectively, the cost of abatement is a very high number. So it does reflect that we are paying an extraordinarily high price for carbon abatement.

Not necessarily a higher price per tonne of carbon but a very high price for carbon abatement. And it does beg the question whether our policies are serving us appropriately in this regard. One of the other ways we test what's happening - and here is a picture over the 100 years that many of these policies have been introduced, 2002 to 2012. And these policies are primarily designed to change the fuel mix. At the end of the day we change the carbon intensity of the power we use by changing the fuel mix. And so we should look to see whether there is any evident change in that fuel mix over 10 years."

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