Readers will know that I don’t often agree with energy executives but this is spot on:
Alinta chief executive Jeff Dimery, head of the country’s fourth largest energy retailer, said he could not see a way of building enough renewable energy sources to compensate for the loss of coal, which still generates about two-thirds of Australia’s electricity.
“We’ve had one battery reach a final investment decision in the last quarter – one battery,” Mr Dimery said.
“Snowy 2.0 is delayed, VNI West is coming in 2031, three years after Yallourn comes out. The whole transition is not lining up. We are so far off track.
“This is not a complaint, it’s fact. We’re not looking to apportion blame. Really it’s the opposite. We have to come together on the solutions quickly.”
Industry executives said they expected wholesale prices to remain high over the next few years.
The problem is not replacing coal. We can do that. It is replacing gas to act as firming power.
This is a two-pronged problem. First, Albo’s gas reforms are not working to keep the price down.
Gas prices are still trading above his failed $12Gj price cap:
Thankfully, they have come down and so has the wholesale electricity price:
But prices are still triple what they should be. Albo’s refusal to enforce his own policies is inexplicable.
Second, there is nowhere near enough clean firming power build-out to replace gas. More:
Paul Broad, who ran Snowy Hydro until resigning shortly after Labor won office last year, said the challenge of the huge pumped hydro expansion under construction could not be overstated, adding that was just a tiny fraction of new green-energy supplies needed.
“We need a Snowy every year, but it’s extremely difficult,” Mr Broad said. “We are being lied to that this is achievable; the transition will take 80 years.”
…Transgrid is building $10bn of transmission projects to deliver renewable energy to households and said that, while they remained on track, challenges were mounting for bringing enough new power supply on board in time.
“It feels like we are on track with the building of renewables,” said Brett Redman, Transgrid’s chief executive and the former boss of AGL Energy. “The second part, however, the building of firming – be it batteries or gas – that is more of a challenge.”
The nub of this problem is simple and has been so for 15 years.
A gas export cartel derailed the plan for gas to act as the transitional fuel while clean power storage was built out.
In response, you either have to break that cartel or radically accelerate the build-out to push it out of the grid.
Albo is doing neither and every household and business east of WA is paying an enormous price.
