On 20 August 2009, the Australian Government approved the landmark Renewable Energy Target (RET) legislation to ensure 20 percent of Australia’s stationary energyThe ability to perform work, mainly kinetic, potential, thermal energy, but also in forms of gravitational, sound, elastic and electromagnetic energy. will come from renewable energy sourcesRenewable energy harnesses energy that is available to us infinitely, from sources like wind or lunar energy. by 2020. This was once of the Prime Minister’s election commitment and it is demonstrating continued leadership on climate changeClimate change is a lasting change in weather patterns over long periods of time. It can be a natural phenomena and and has occurred on Earth even before people inhabited it. Quite different is a current situation that is also referred to as climate change, anthropogenic climate change, or ... policy.

The RET legislation will be the foundation of clean energy policy in Australia for the next decade. This will require significant investment into clean energy and Australia will need to raise more than AU$20 billion to finance new clean energy projects over the next decade to help create 28,000 new clean jobs.

The clean energy industry will now devote the next decade to finding the best ways to accelerate development of emerging technologies and driving them as quickly as possible into this growing clean energy market. The goal of the industry is to make clean energy cheaper, more reliable and more accessible, with the vision of not just meeting this target by 2020, but to surpass it.Australia has laid a foundation for an effective policy platform around which a world class clean energy industry can be developed. The next challenge is the successful passage of the Australian Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.