Finkel endorses ScoMo gas plan for climate change

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It never ceases to amaze. Dr Alan Finkel today:

“Make no mistake, this will be the biggest engineering challenge ever undertaken. The energy system is huge, and even with an internationally committed and focussed effort the transition will take many decades.”

“It will also require respectful planning and re-training to ensure affected individuals and communities, who have fuelled our energy progress for generations, are supported throughout the transition.”

“Ultimately, we will need to complement solar and wind with a range of technologies such as high levels of storage, long-distance transmission, and much better efficiency in the way we use energy.”

“But, while these technologies are being scaled up, we need an energy companion today that can react rapidly to changes in solar and wind output.”

“An energy companion that is itself relatively low in emissions, and that only operates when needed.”

“In the short-term, as the Prime Minister and Minister Angus Taylor have previously stated, natural gas will play that critical role.”

Given this was the plan hatched in the early 2000s it is hardly ScoMo’s or news.

This is precisely what Australia always intended, along with everbody else. Then along came the gas export cartel and trashed it by sending all the cheap gas offshore and making our own prohibitively expensive, opening the way for a corrupt Coalition to blame renewables for higher electricity prices when it was always gas!

The question now that ScoMo has made his climate change hail Mary pass on the back of bushfires is: how do we reduce the gas price?

A deeply corrupt ScoMo wants to keep it high by fracking gas in Narrabri for $8-9Gj. Yet the Australian Government’s own Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism would today deliver gas for $2.70Gj if it were triggered. It is cheaper than Narrabri for as far out as futures go.

What should we do then I wonder? Pull the trigger on the ADGSM and have domestically reserved gas for $2.70Gj, crashing electricity prices, or wait for years for expensive gas to arrive in NSW and barely move the needle on prices somewhere in the fog of time?

If you can’t answer that question then you either belong in cabinet or at Sunnyfield.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.