The Critical Skills Investment Fund - supporting the wind industry?

The guidelines for the ‘Critical Skills Investment Fund’ were released a few weeks ago (comments on them closed last week unfortunately - so too late to prompt some more feedback) and this was something that the wind industry needed to follow a little more than I am aware was done. The fund is worth $200million and is aimed at the resources, construction, renewable energy and infrastructure sectors, and intends to help industry secure a skilled workforce and address the growing demand for trained workers. So it is a fair chance that some of this money should wind up supporting the training of wind technicians and others in the industry. However, I worry that the fund has been designed to support the resources industry far more than the renewable industry.

This is essentially because the draft guidelines for the Fund contain some things that make it difficult for my organisation (and I think others in the industry) to gain much value from the fund, most notably the requirement that the funds can only be spent on courses accredited under the Australian national training system. This means the fund would be worthless to us in two of our most expensive training areas, turbine training and project management. There are of course no accredited Australian turbine courses, as the national system has yet to catch up with this need (it is slow moving) and for project management, the national qualifications are seen as not being rigorous enough by industry generally, so therefor both our project managers and Suzlon globally would prefer us to do the courses aligned to the global Project Management Institute qualifications.

My other concern about the fund was the makeup of the board overseeing the fund – it seems loaded with mining and petroleum people with the chair of the board Dr Keith Spence, although a very sharp and engaging fellow, being a flag waver for carbon capture and storage who I have heard specifically say wind is not the answer to our clean energy needs, due his opinion that it cannot assist with baseload power. I think perhaps someone from the renewable industry (maybe from the Clean Energy Council) should be on the board of a fund like this that specifically mentions renewable energy as a target industry. I just hope they mean it when they say renewable energy is something the fund wishes to support, not just the extraction industries.