FEMALE: Are there any many initiatives for getting sustainable like renewable electricity supply for the trains?
PREMIER: Well the train network the electric train network sources it’s electricity from as you’d imagine the national electricity market. Some of the electricity that goes into that market and is put onto our trains is from renewable sources but our renewable energy supply across Australia is still very low compared to a number of European countries. So it’s not that you sort of have a dedicated supply for the trains what we do is grow the renewable sources as a percentage of our supply. And we’re starting to see that happen. We for example five years ago in Queensland we had 1000 households that had a solar panel on their roof. We now have 78000. It’s an incredible story in just five years. And what those households are doing is after if they generate more electricity than they’re using which a lot of them are that electricity goes back into the grid and it’s used all over the place it’s used in trains it might be using you know in these lights. But very large scale production of renewable energy is still I think embryonic in Australia. We have funded a new a solar thermal energy plant to add onto the coal fired power station at Kogan Creek so it will be a power station that will use both solar and coal fire to increase its supply. It will be the largest second largest solar thermal plant in the world but it will only I think it’s only going to supply 100 megawatts of power. An average power plant supplies about 700 750. So you know the second largest in the world is being built here in Queensland and it’s only at that level. So it gives you a sense I think of that things are happening and they’re quite exciting and we’re up there with what other countries are doing but I’m being honest with you and saying it’s got some way to go. But I take heart from the fact one of the reasons we’ve gone from 1000 to 78000 is the more people who have bought these panels not just here but in other parts of the world and Australia it’s brought the cost of them down so more people can afford them. And as we see more of that investment in large scale and the technology change I think we’ve got to have a very optimistic view about what will be possible and likely in the next five 10 and 20 years.
MODERATOR: I’d like to bring Kate Jones in on this as well but I’ll just I’ll use a question from Michael at Helidon if you don’t mind to get us into that because Michael says that they’re wanting to buy an electric car in the next year or so so that they can recharge from their solar system for a net environmental cost of zero. Is the government planning to offer rebates for registration and stamp duty on these vehicles to partially offset their obscene purchase price?
K.JONES: We’ve actually been working very closely with an international organisation called Better Place in regards to how we can actually see the introduction of electric vehicles into Queensland and into Australia. I think the Victorian Government and the Queensland Government are the ones that have been working very closely with them to do that. I think some of you may have even seen the electric vehicle the i-MiEV out the front there but if you haven’t please do there’s an opportunity to see an electric vehicle out the front which is 100% which can actually lead to zero emissions if it can be run on 100% renewable energy. And that is absolutely what I think is the future in vehicle use in Queensland and we as a government are committed to doing that. We’ve got an electric vehicle road map. But of course we can’t do that alone there’s significant infrastructure and you might even want to comment on this as well in regards to how you have like a smart grid working where you can actually have renewable energy stored in vehicles and that can actually feed back into the grid. I mean ultimately that’s what we’d like to see. We already have in Queensland right now with the pricing scheme of registration for example our registration is geared towards does provide less payment for low emissions vehicles as well as four cylinders versus eight cylinders and that’s something that the Premier did some years ago to actually make to make that choice for people more stark in regards to what are they consuming and what are they purchasing. We are hoping to have the road map an updated road map for electric vehicles released either at the end of this year or earlier next year. This is something that is growing internationally Japan is probably leading the way at this stage and we are watching that very closely and as I said feeding with the Federal Government about how we can create more opportunities to bring those vehicles here to Australia.
