Via Reneweconomy:
Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull knows a thing or two about energy policy and climate change. His commitment to a carbon price cost him his job in 2009, and he spent the next few years advocating and endorsing policies and targets he supposedly believed in, even BZE’s zero emissions target.
He also has is own (very big) solar array and battery storage installation at his own (very big) home, and apparently likes to admire – in real time, with a monitoring device – how much power is being produced from the PV panels, how much is being stored in the batteries, and how much it is saving him on electricity bills.
His embrace and enthusiasm for energy “smarts” extends to electric vehicles, and his gushing praise for the Tesla Model S (wouldn’t that make for a nice addition to the ministerial fleet, powered by the solar array on Parliament House.
Which makes it all the more surprising, and somewhat disturbing, that Turnbull has emerged as prosecutor in chief, along with energy minister Josh Frydenberg, of what even leading business commentator Alan Kohler has described as a giant “hoax” over the Australian people – the push for new coal over wind and solar.
In recent weeks, as the relentless summer heatwave (the hottest summer in Sydney for 157 years of modern record), the campaign against renewables has reached Trumpian levels of false claims, fake news, paranoia and misleading comments.
“Cheap coal”, as former coal lobby chief Ian Dunlop suggests, is about as big a misnomer as “clean coal”, ignoring not only the massive subsidy it gets from having a free pass on pollution, but also the costs of building new plant.
But the Coalition campaign in favour of coal, and against renewables, is relentless, even after study after study is produced highlighting how wind and solar, even with integration costs, are a significantly cheaper option than sticking with a coal-based centralised grid.
Last week, the ANU released an analysis highlighting just that, echoing another detailed study last year from the CSIRO and the network owners lobby that put the savings of a high renewable grid at $100 billion over business as usual.
The main fossil fuel generators admit that building new coal power plants is not just a dumb idea, it is uninvestible.
And the financing secured for the third stage of one Australia’s biggest wind projects illustrates why. Electricity from the 109MW Hornsdale 3 project will deliver electricity to its customer, the ACT government, at a fixed price of $73/MWh for the next 20 years.
To put that in context – that is cheaper than electricity almost anywhere on the Australian grid at the moment. It is one-third of the cost paid by Queenslanders for electricity in February, one-half the cost paid in NSW, and it’s cheaper than the predicted prices in any state over 2017/18.
Indeed, that fixed price translates into a “today” price of around $60/MWh if you factor in inflation.
And the ACT government that commissioned this? They’re laughing. They know that their cost of electricity is capped for 20 years, but better than that, they get a refund from any excess. So if wholesale prices go above $73/MWh, which is where they are now, then the excess comes back to the ACT and its consumers.
Yet the Coalition continues on, digging themselves deeper into discredited and unfinanceable “clean coal” technologies such as IGCC. The world’s flagship project is at Kemper in the US, where $7 billion has so far been invested and it still hasn’t produced anything.
In fact, just last week the CEO said it was too expensive to burn coal. So now, they are turning it into a gas plant, which they could have done from the outset at around one-tenth of the price.
But there’s no end of chancers who want to repeat such boondoggles, which is why Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal has its hands out to the CEFC for money to fund a similar project to power the huge Galilee basin coal projects, and why others are promoting “refined coal”, a technology so absurd that even its fossil fuel proponents dumped it in the 1970s.
But where does the government get its information from? Hard to know as this exchange between Labor Senator Jenny McAllister and Treasurer Secretary John Fraser at a Senate Estimates committee reveals:
McAllister: As part of your energy analysis, have you performed any analysis on the cost of new coal-fired power stations compared to alternatives?
Fraser: No we haven’t.
McAllister: Have you formed a view on why so many industry players dismiss new coal plants as a viable option for new generation in Australia?
Fraser: No I haven’t. We’re consulting as widely as we can. It’s a very important issue and like everybody, it has crept up on us.
Crept up on us?
Enough said. More here…
