IN THE backlash against rising electricity prices, renewable energy has often been singled out as the convenient scapegoat, particularly by a conventional power industry keen to protect their economic position.
While the spotlight has been rightly applied to infrastructure "gold plating", the real issue is the corporate welfare doled out to profitable sectors.
Queensland is a prime example.
The coal and gas industries are rapidly expanding under archaic laws that give mining right of way over other land uses. Their development has not only faced far fewer restrictions but these industries have been greatly subsidised.
In his review of energy policy in Queensland, titled Clean Energy Pathways, Trevor Berrill has identified state subsidies to the coal and gas industry of at least $6.9 billion over the past years, including hundreds of millions of dollars for the development of the oxymoronic "clean coal".
Another $13 billion is to be spent on infrastructure to support the industry over the next 20 years.
By contrast, renewable energy and energy-efficiency industries have received about $900 million in the same period. The industry, however, still faces many barriers such as access to land for large-scale wind and solar thermal electricity projects.
Look deeper into the data and Queensland is just the tip of the fossil fuel subsidy iceberg.
In 2011, total fossil fuel subsidies by the Australian Government were calculated by the Grattan Wood Institute to be $12.2 billion. This compared with only $1.1 billion spent on climate policies, including support for renewable energy, in 2010-11.
In the previous three-year period, fossil fuel subsidies also outpaced funding for government climate change initiatives by $1 billion.
When federal and state subsidies are combined with the cost of pollution, every Queensland home is paying $3475 a year to use fossil fuels.
That is not a misprint. The figure includes State Government subsidies of $1.42 billion a year ($750 per home), federal government subsidies of $10 billion a year ($1250 per home) and the $6 billion pollution cost of burning coal and gas ($3150 per home).
Even if the pollution cost is reduced by a factor of four, the cost to support a profitable and polluting industry is more than $2000 a year per household.
Compare this with the cost of renewable energy support nationally at $100-200 a year per home and the Queensland solar feed-in tariff that adds $54 a home by 2014-15, according to state Energy and Water Supply Minister Mark McArdle.
The solar feed-in tariff, however, has helped create a highly successful solar photovoltaic industry in the 18 years since Solar One on the Sunshine Coast became the first rooftop solar PV system connected to a power grid.
Queensland now boasts 250,000 solar homes and there are nearly one million nationally - a 100 per cent annual growth rate that has created a real industry sector with thousands of clean energy jobs.
The renewable energy support, however, does not factor in a number of benefits that electricity distributors are now starting to realise.
In his analysis of electricity demand from 2008 and 2012, John Davidson calculates that the solar PV installed in Queensland is actually saving households without solar $56 a year.
This is consistent with comments made by Energex's Mike Swanston on ABC radio after the temperature hit the high 30s in Queensland recently. The 500 megawatts of rooftop solar was, he said, "making a big difference in reducing the peak demand across southeast Queensland".
Peak demand power is the most expensive power to generate. With the generation cost of roof-top solar now at grid parity with domestic retail prices, solar is cheaper than gas generation to offset peak demand.
Coal and gas have a competitive and unsubsidised place in the market, but let's stop the fossil fooling that masquerades as competition.
Our children will look back and wonder how such bipolar insanity could pass as intelligent policy.
By removing subsidies and making prices tell the environmental truth, we can move steadily to a clean energy economy while contributing to climate change efforts internationally.
Peter Fries is an environmental journalist and filmmaker. In 1994, he co-ordinated the Solar One Project, the first rooftop solar PV system connected to a state power grid.