Canberra's national leadership on renewable energy has piqued the interest of Nobel laureates, who have invited ACT Environment Minister Simon Corbell to speak at a gathering of Nobel prize winners in Hong Kong in October.
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Mr Corbell and the Gallagher government are swimming against the national tide on renewables, with University of New South Wales renewables expert Iain MacGill describing the government recently as "one of the few names in town" driving renewable energy forward in difficult circumstances.
The ACT government plans to source 90 per cent of the city's energy needs from renewable sources by 2020, and has embarked on an ambitious program of funding solar, wind and other projects, including a waste-to-energy scheme, to get it there.
The renewables projects will help the government reach another ambitious target – reducing carbon emissions across the city by 40 per cent (on 1990 levels) by 2020, and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060.
Mr Corbell will speak at the Fourth Nobel Laureates Symposium on global sustainability. Fourteen Nobel prize winners will be there, including Canberra astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, who won the prize for physics in 2011, and Australian Peter Doherty (medicine, 1996).
Mr Corbell said the ACT had the strongest and most comprehensive policy on renewable energy of any state in the country, which was clearly attracting interest internationally. With the difficulties national governments were having achieving action on climate change, the focus was on state and city governments to take the lead, he said.
The Abbott government is reviewing its commitment to a renewable energy target, and Mr Corbell warned any move to reduce it significantly would have an enormous impact, setting Australian behind other countries.
"It will create significant sovereign risk for investors, who will be reluctant to invest again in the Australian market if there's such a dramatic and retrograde change of policy," he said.
The city's first solar farm, at Royalla off the Monaro Highway, will begin feeding energy into the grid within days. Two more are in planning – with the Mugga Lane array off the Monaro Highway in the final stages of approval, and the Uriarra farm bogged down by opposition from local residents. Together, the three solar farms will generate 40 megawatts of electricity.
Mr Corbell plans an auction this year for wind companies to produce another 200MW of energy from wind farms around Canberra, which he said was enough to power 65,000 homes.
The projects are all guaranteed a price for the electricity they feed into the grid for 20 years.
Mr Corbell plans 550MW of energy in all from large-scale projects, which is more than the city now uses.
He said the focus was on "decarbonising" the city's electricity supply so it could meet the greenhouse gas reduction targets it had set.
He would participate in Hong Kong in a session on "vision for places", chaired by former Australian chief scientist Penny Sackett.
