Australia is going to have another climate election. Without a doubt, it is the stupidest so far.
The next federal election will be a referendum on nuclear power versus renewable energy, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says, promising the government will campaign on the issue every day until polling day.
In an exclusive interview that signals Labor plans to pull out all the stops and make Peter Dutton’s nuclear power policy a central election issue, Albanese said it had been 670 days since the opposition leader first flagged the proposal and there was “still no detail, costings, no location, no detail whatsoever”.
But the prime minister highlighted recent CSIRO research that found nuclear power is up to eight times more expensive than large-scale wind or solar power.
Nuclear power should not be compared with wind and solar power. It should be compared with gas or renewables plus clean power storage. Nuclear power is firming, not renewable power.
Reasonably priced gas wins on every front, but nuclear is better if you have a gas cartel:
I doubt Peter Dutton can win this argument, even though Albo is lying.
Dutton’s nuclear proposal is full of holes, from no operating prototypes of small modular reactors to NIMBYs running wild.
But, the truth is, neither party makes any sense because neither will do the obvious: reserve gas on the East Coast for domestic use.
Without gas as the transitional fuel, we are stuck with loss-making coal as firming power, as far as the eye can see.
That is why Victoria has secret subsidies to keep Yallourn open. It is also why NSW has extended Eraring. QLD will be next as renewable penetration grows and with the “duck curve” of free energy during the day, bankrupting coal plants before there is anything clean to replace them.
Hence, NSW power futures have gone bananas since the status quo Eraring deal means we are stuck with gas as the marginal price setter in the National Electricity Market. Victoria is better off because its subsidised coal is brown, which is cheap:
For Scott King, last week’s announcement by the New South Wales government to extend the giant Eraring power station for at least another two years was a mixed blessing.
“It’s certainly not the longevity that people were hoping for but it does give [us] breathing space,” says King, a plant operator who has worked 18 years at the nation’s biggest coal-fired power station. “Of course, people prefer that we’d never close.”
Scott can relax. Eraring will run deep into the 2030s as:
- Albo’s failure to contain the East Coast gas cartel guarantees no new gas-fired power stations, implicitly underwriting loss-making coal.
- Dutton’s nuclear proposal arrives in the mid-to-late 2030s, which will be obsolete as batteries roll out into households and other decentralised solutions take the initiative.
Gas-fired power is the only rational choice for clean firming power. But, in the absence of gas security of supply, publicly subsidized loss-making coal is the incumbent solution that all parties in Canberra endorse.
