I recently attended a forum on Climate and Economics in my local area with Francine Wiig, the Independent candidate for Fairfax, with some very interesting topics discussed, ranging from the LNP’s nuclear power ideas to the dangers of not meeting Net Zero by 2050 and, of course, the upcoming Federal Election.
Here are some snippets from the forum. The full transcript and audio are available below:
Tim Buckley – Director of Climate Change Energy Finance
Why does Australia need to target net zero by 2050 or sooner? And the answer is because we as a country are the third largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world. And so as our key trade partners deliver on their Paris Agreement commitments to reduce emissions to net zero, our exports of our number 2 export – LNG, our number 3 export coking coal, our number 4 export thermal coal – they are terminally challenged.
So, for Australia, just looking at it from a finance and economic perspective, our economy is going to be gutted by dramatically reduced exports and all of the industries that have been the background of our economy for decades — we need to develop alternative exports so that we can actually have a more sustainable economic profile.
It’s not so much what we do, it’s what our trade partners do that threatens our economy.
Insurers are absolutely clear about the risk of climate change. But they don’t have a duty of care to offer insurance to properties that are uninsurable. They literally renew – you renew your insurance every year – they will walk away from whole suburbs, whole areas, because we should never have built there in the first place. They’ve warned our government, the government’s ignored it. The state, the local and the federal government has ignored it. The insurers don’t wear that risk, they wear it for one year.
The banks actually, where it is your mortgage provider, but you ultimately all wear it. And so there are just going to be huge chunks of our property market – and we have a residential property market valued at the moment at $11 trillion – and there’s going to be huge percentage of that, which is uninsurable. You just have to look at your insurance premiums in the last three years. They’ve all gone up double digits every year. That’s going to continue until your insurer then turns around and says, “by the way, we will no longer insure your property.”
Professor Ian Lowe – Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society and former Head of the School of Science at Griffith University
Why does Australia need to target net zero by 2050 or sooner? The period when we made the most rapid progress was the Gillard minority government, where there was a Labor government that had to depend on greens and independents. To get legislation, to have a carbon price. We moved rapidly to decarbonise. So, it is possible that we could get there by 2030, but your vote counts. Vote for a candidate who will pressure whoever’s in power to move rapidly. South Australia today, with about 95% of its electricity from solar energy, that is possible. All it requires is political will.
There are a whole heap of problems with the proposal to build 7 nuclear power stations by 2037. Firstly, it’s illegal. The Howard government legislated in 1998 – from memory Section 148 of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – prohibits the building and operating of nuclear power stations anywhere in Australia. And Queensland, NSW and Victoria also had state legislation prohibiting nuclear power.
Secondly, it’s impractical. The idea that you could build 7 nuclear power stations in 10 years – if Mr O’Brien seriously believes that, I want to know what he’s smoking and where I can get some. The Switkowski report to the Howard government said it would take at least 10 years, probably 15, to build 1 nuclear power station and all of the nuclear power stations built in the Western world this century have all taken about 15 years or longer. Thirdly, its uneconomic. Average world prices for different forms of energy last year, solar 3.7 cents a kWh, wind 4.1, nuclear 16. So it’s not just a bit more expensive, it’s a whole heap more expensive.
The CSIRO Gencost report says it’s uneconomic and they take at face value the industries claims of what it would cost to build nuclear power stations. But every one built in Western Europe or North America this century, has been over budget by at least a factor of 2, and in some cases by a factor of 4. It’s not economic, it’s not legal, it’s not practical. And even if it were done, the total output would be about 5 gigawatts.
Twenty-five gigawatts of coal is going to be retired by 2035. It wouldn’t even achieve replacing all of the small fraction of the coal that’s going to be retired. So it remains true what somebody said in the 1970s, if nuclear is the answer it was a bloody silly question.
Professor Steve Turton – Adjunct Professor of Environmental Geography CQU
If I could just add to Ian’s comments, more in the climate space now, rather specifically in the energy modelling: If we were to go down the nuclear path and in this case, that’s not going to happen anyway, it will actually make it more difficult to reach Net zero because it will keep our coal-fired power stations operating longer than they need to. As it is, they’re quite antiquated. It will also mean the use of more gas. Now the latest thing from the coalition is they’re now re-visiting the gas-led recovery. Remember that? In climate science, we call that a mal-mitigation pathway because what you’ll end up doing is basically shooting our carbon targets completely out of the water, which means, if that’s what they’re planning on doing, they want to keep coal going longer than usual for these fantasy nuclear power stations.
Plus, they want to start basically extracting more gas, for our electricity. It will blow our budget, and also it probably means they intend to pull out of the Paris Agreement. They more-or-less would have to, to save face because they will blow the target out. Gas is methane, and inevitably it’s use results in what are called fugitive ignitions, from gas wells, from pipes. Methane leaks into the atmosphere and it’s a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, by an order of magnitude, so using more gas inevitably means accelerating climate change.
Tim Buckley – Director of Climate Change Energy Finance
There are a whole heap of problems with the proposal to build 7 nuclear power stations by 2037. The American market is the second largest electricity market in the world, and there is not a single nuclear power plant under construction in America. China is absolutely embracing nuclear. Without a doubt, and I spend half my time studying China, I’ve been doing that for 15 years. So let me just remind you, China is the biggest builder of nuclear in the world. They built last year 3.9 gigawatts of nuclear. They will probably build 5 to 10 gigawatts a year for the next decade or so.
But 3.9 gigawatts last year, they built 370 gigawatts of wind and solar. So when Ted O’Brien says there’s a nuclear renaissance, reminds him that 1% of China’s capacity adds last year was nuclear. It’s a rounding error in the biggest electricity market in the world. In the one country that really is embracing nuclear, renewables are literally being deployed at 100 times faster. Now, I’ll just finish by saying, that is capacity. So 370 gigawatts of capacity of renewables, 3.9 gigawatts. Now 3.9 gigawatts is 390% of what they did in the last five years.
The biggest disruption in the world’s energy market in 2025 is actually battery energy storage. So pumped hydro storage was definitely the clear solution for firming renewables, for seasonal storage and for long duration storage, but battery technology has moved phenomenally faster than anyone has predicted, and so Ian talked about the high penetration of renewables in South Australia. It’s world leading – variable renewable energy penetration is the highest in the world. Last year it averaged 74%. This morning at 7 o’clock, 30% of the electricity in South Australia came from batteries. It’s the highest penetration in the world. The previous highest number was in California and it was 20.4%, and that’s before a lot of the batteries have all been commissioned. Australia is building more batteries than you can poke a stick at, as is America, as is Europe, as is the UK ,as is China. So batteries can be built, utility scale, in one year. A nuclear power plant – 10 to 20 years, and so the solutions are there, and the cost of batteries has dropped by 50% in the last 18 months.
Click to download the full Climate Change Forum transcript here
For an alternative view, watch the following interview with energy researcher Aiden Morrison: