Via The Australian:
“Although the technology is evolving, batteries are not ready for widespread grid-scale application for extended periods and pumped hydro is not available in all areas,” Dow’s Australian president, Louis Vega, said in its submission to the Energy Security Board. “Similarly, there is insufficient demand response to offset rapid changes in supply. To recover the cost of large capital investments over short periods of operation, a high power price is required — which challenges the affordability goal of the NEG.”
Industry was joined by the labour movement’s industrial arm, which attacked Malcolm Turnbull’s signature energy policy, arguing it will increase prices and fail to reduce emissions by locking in soft targets for the first 10 years of the scheme. The ACTU warned the government’s policy would adversely affect power industry workers, without a plan to transition them into new jobs. The union body also argued that the policy would “increase prices” and entrench the “market power of large retailers” while struggling to enforce emissions and reliability requirements.
…The Business Council of Australia called for the government to reject the stipulation in the NEG design that big energy users would be responsible for ensuring the reliability of their power generation.
It did not “see the need to transfer the obligation onto large users”, and urged that retailers retain the responsibility to ensure dispatchable generation. The peak business body called for generators to be able to use Australian and international carbon offsets to enable “flexible compliance” with emissions cuts at least cost.
Industry is wrong. Grid level batteries will be economic in short order. That roll out is going to explode in the next few years:
The unions are right and so is the BCA but calling for carbon trading at this point is all a bit academic.
We’re better off with political chaos and state based targets than we are with the cost-adding, coal-loving, inflexible, Paris-killing NEG. Via The Guardian:
Oliver Yates, the former head of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, says state and territory governments should not sign on to the Turnbull government’s national energy guarantee until such time as it contains meaningful emissions reductions.
Yates, a respected industry player now active in the renewables sector, and a board member of the Smart Energy Council – a solar group critical of the Neg – told Guardian Australia the Turnbull government’s policy “doesn’t do anything other than create a stable emissions profile for existing coal-fired power stations.”
“It’s absolutely of no benefit to the national transition away from emissions,” Yates said. “The only thing it does is help people producing emissions to know they don’t have to reduce their emissions over the next 10 years.”
Let markets sort out dispatchable power.
