Just as fashion is worn for pride and vanity, desiring to impress others in one's extravagance, clearly the object of following RET is none but national pride and vanity. Government is happy to spend your hard-earned money on RET for the same reason it is happy to spend it on national sports teams - they want Australia to look good and rank well among those other artificial constructs called "nations", perhaps in order to cover up and justify their immoral existence.

Had one truly cared about "saving the world", one wouldn't care where on the planet the consumption of non-renewable energy is reduced, so long as it is. One would also care about reducing consumption of non-renewable energy by thrift rather than the introduction of additional renewable energy just in order to display a nice percentage as a badge.

What's not been realised is that so long as the reduction of non-renewable energy is taken as a government project, ordinary people no longer feel responsible for the planet ("why, the government is taking care of that") and won't bother to consider "do I really need to keep that light on, that air-conditioner; do I really need to make this trip in my car or fly to this holiday?"

The title "Australia's Renewable Energy Target is failing to achieve positive outcomes" is correct for very many reasons.

However, this is incorrect: "The problem with large-scale renewable projects is that they are extremely efficient."

This is completely wrong, see:

"Wind turbines’ CO2 savings and abatement cost" http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=17311

"New Study: ‘CO2 Emissions Savings from Wind Power in the National Electricity Market (NEM)’" http://catallaxyfiles.com/2015/05/06/guest-post-peter-lang-new-study-co2-emissions-savings-from-wind-power-in-the-national-electricity-market-nem/

"CO2 Emissions Savings from Wind Power in the National Electricity Market (NEM)" http://joewheatley.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/report.pdf

"... the RET Review summarised economic analyses of the abatement cost of the Large Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET) at $32-$70/t CO2. … If the economic analyses do not take effectiveness into account, and if effectiveness decreases to [60%] by 2020, the estimates of abatement cost would nearly double to [$53-$116]/t CO2 with effectiveness included.

To put these abatement costs in context, the ‘carbon’ tax was $24.15/t CO2 when it was rejected by the voters at the 2013 Federal election. The current price of EU ETS carbon credits and the international carbon credit futures are:

European Union Allowance (EUA) market price (10/3/2015) = €6.83/tCO2 (A$9.50)
Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) futures to 2020 (9/3/2015) = €0.40/tCO2 (A$0.56)
Therefore, the LRET in 2020 could be 2 to 5 times the carbon tax, which was rejected by the voters in 2013; 6 to14 times the current price of the EUA; and more than 100 times the price of CER futures out to 2020.

Clearly, the RET is a very high cost way to avoid greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The rational policy decision is to close the RET to future investments. Or, as an interim measure, wind the target back to a real 20% of electricity generation."

We may need a fact check here. The Macarthur Wind Farm at 420MW could generate about 1000 GWh/yr using 20 ongoing staff or 50 GWh/yr/person.

Hazelwood at 1500MW generates about 12,000 GWh/yr using 540 ongoing staff or 22 GWh/yr/person.

Not sure how the author came up with "Hazelwood power plant employs between 6 to 8 times more people compared to the same output from the Macarthur Wind Farm.

But yes, wind farms can employ less people per unit of electricity than one of the worst coal plants. The good people of Morwell might see this as unwanted job losses.

Having reviewed the figures above, it seems that the article's author may not understand the concept of capacity factor. The capacity factor of a coal plant is about 3 times that of a wind farm. So the "6 to 8 times more people" should probably be 2 to 3 times.

The RET certainly has not failed in its main aim: to rip off as much taxpayers' payers money as possible. As with the carbon tax, it has no other aim. It is a cynical operation to take money from the poor to give to the already rich. Nothing to with clean air or natural climate change.

I have to agree with both Peter Lang and Martin N, the author's figures on renewable energy are quite wrong. He hasn't taken into account the rate outputs of the projects or the respective capacity factors - not to mention intermittency - all of which completely blow his comparisons out of the water. To make matters worse for the author the basic costs of these projects have already been discussed on this site http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=17227
by me and, I believe by Peter Lang in other articles. There are other problems with his article but that colossal error is enough to ensure that the author will not be taken seriously.