This is how toxic the East Coast gas cartel is:
Australian Energy Producers chief executive Samantha McCulloch told The Australian natural gas “should never have been left out of the Capacity Investment Scheme”, which will see the government underwrite 32 gigawatts of renewable energy and storage capacity by decade’s end.
She said the government had “no policies” to support gas investment, despite the Australian Energy Market Operator finding the national electricity market would need 12.8GW of new gas-powered generation to be built by 2050 in its recent Integrated System Plan.
…“All the evidence shows that renewable energy backed up by gas-powered generation will deliver the lowest-cost electricity to homes and businesses as we transition to net zero.”
Energy program director at the Grattan Institute Tony Wood told The Australian he thought it was a “great pity that the Capacity Investment Scheme – the 23GW of renewable capacity and 9GW of storage – explicitly excluded gas”.
What a steaming pile of bull from the very carteliers that wrecked the energy transition, stole Australian gas on behalf of China, war-profiteered on the back of Ukraine, and smashed Australia into an endless energy price shock.
The whole argument makes no sense. By underwriting profits, the CIS is a policy designed to mitigate technology price falls in renewables acting as deterrent to investment today. This doesn’t apply to gas.
Moreover, if the CIS creates the need for gas power, then gas peakers have a compelling business case already.
The only reason they are not being built, and won’t be unless the government pays for them, is because the gas cartel has wrecked the security of supply. The gas cartel ships it all to China and sits atop 85% of reserves.
The cartel has complete monopolistic control of local gas and deliberately chokes it every single day to keep prices high.
Would you build a gas-dependent power plant if that was your critical supply chain partner?
The gas lobby should be banned by the media on principle. It is a vicious economic parasite and scandalous liar.
Likewise, Tony Wood at the Grattan Institute, a former gas cartel executive, should be banned. His horrendous advice in 2013 to not apply domestic reservation to the Curtis Island monstrosity led directly to the formation of the export cartel.
The Grattan Institute itself is still sponsored by the gas cartel and should be banned from the debate.
The only policy that will unlock the development of the 26 commercial gas peakers that we need is one that guarantees local security of gas supply at reasonable prices.
This can be done either via domestic reservation of 15% of volumes currently exported. Or, even better, a gas export levy set at $6Gj which will give gas producers plenty of margin while collecting massive taxes and dislocating the local price from the international price.
There is no other answer if you are going to build commercial gas peakers.
If the government builds them instead, gas and power prices will still be astronomical unless it also expropriates the needed gas reserves from the cartel and puts them within a National Gas Company.
