Throw out the NEG

It’s a strange row that we hoe on energy. Via the AFR:

Renewable energy generated nearly 19 per cent of national grid power in the year to June 30 and is on track to meet the Turnbull government’s emissions target without the National Energy Guarantee, a new report says.

New wind and solar generation being built or committed under the existing federal Renewable Energy Target and just one other policy – the Victorian Renewable Energy Target – would be sufficient to achieve the government’s 2030 target of a 26 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by 2023-24, the report published by The Australia Institute says.

Under those policies, the share of total grid generation taken by wind, solar, hydro and biomass would be about 29 per cent of total National Electricity Market generation. Adding rooftop solar would lift the renewables share to just above 35 per cent.

Renewables hit a record 18.8 per cent of NEM energy including rooftop solar in the year just completed, or 15.7 per cent without rooftop solar.

The surge of wind and solar energy into the grid would likely force EnergyAustralia’s 1480 megawatt Yallourn brown coal power station, the most carbon dioxide intensive plant in the NEM which is due to close by 2032, out of service by around the mid-2020s, the report’s author, energy expert Hugh Saddler, said.

I suspect what is also pushing this on at such a pace is the gas carbon tax thanks to the great gouge. What a shame we didn’t keep the money ourselves!

Anyways, the NEG has got to go. Just let the states run RETs and disruption do its thing. We don’t even have batteries yet. In five years they’ll be rolling out in households across the country and this battle will be over.

The chaos approach is actually much cheaper than the overly-complex, overly expensive, overly-political NEG which seeks only to slow this momentum, via Reneweconomy:

The disaster that is the Coalition government’s climate and energy policy has been underlined by a new report that suggests the proposed National Energy Guarantee will impose an effective carbon price of $35/tonne on industrial sectors.

The analysis from Reputex confirms many assessments that the weak emissions reduction target for the electricity sector that the Turnbull government is seeking to enshrine in NEG will most likely be met by 2020, a decade ahead of time.

With no policy to extract low-cost emissions cuts in electricity, the emphasis will fall on other sectors to meet Australia’s national emissions reductions target of 26-28 per cent.

For the first time, Reputex puts a price on this abatement in other industrial sectors, at $35/tonne – more than 50 per cent more than the fixed carbon price of the Rudd government, and probably four times more than it would have been if the carbon price had remained.

Little wonder that the likes of former prime minister Tony Abbott is using this as a pretext for calling for Australia to follow the Trump administration’s example and quit the Paris climate treaty.

Only a government of true idiocy would build three intrinsically obsolete coal-fired power stations in QLD to keep prices high when it can just get out of the way and let QRET rip prices lower.