The Coalition’s proposal to cap large-scale renewable energy and eventually build nuclear power plants would lead to “massive” electricity supply shortages risking blackouts, according to analysis released by the federal government.
The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, released the findings of an energy department analysis that suggested electricity supply could be at least 18% less than what will be needed in 2035 under a scenario that reflects the few details of the Coalition plan that have been released.
Those details include the country building fewer solar and wind farms, the cancellation of the “rewiring the nation” policy to build transmission lines, extending the life of ageing coal plants and building nuclear plants at seven sites.
Under a scenario in which about 90% of remaining coal generation closes by 2035 – consistent with what the Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo) projects – the gap between demand and supply could be 49%, according to the analysis.
Bowen said it showed Peter Dutton would “take to our finely tuned electricity system planning with a sledgehammer” and cause “massive supply shortages over the next decade”.
“The question that Mr Dutton has to answer is: where would the electricity come from if we stop building renewables now and nuclear takes so long?” Bowen said at a media conference. “He wanders around making outrageous accusations about blackouts under this government when in fact it’s his own scheme [that] is the biggest risk to reliability in Australia.”
The analysis, released via an opinion piece in The Australian, is timed to precede a speech by Dutton on Monday on whether nuclear power could work in Australia.
Dutton and the opposition treasury spokesman, Angus Taylor, rejected Bowen’s analysis in TV interviews on Friday, but declined to release details of their proposal. Speaking on Sky News Australia, Taylor said Bowen was “full of nonsense” and Labor’s policies would “always cost Australians more than our alternative policies”.
The Coalition has said if elected it would use public money to build nuclear plants at seven sites. It has suggested it would also cap investment in large-scale renewable energy and back more gas, a fossil fuel responsible for 21% of Australia’s climate pollution.
It has not released the expected cost of the plants, explained how the Coalition would lift legislated bans on nuclear power, or said why he believed the first two plants could be operating by 2035 or 2037 – a much faster timeframe than experts say would be possible.
Government agencies and independent analysts have found nuclear and more gas would be more expensive for households and businesses than Labor’s plan of running on variable renewable energy backed by “firming” from batteries, pumped hydro, more transmission lines and some gas.
Aemo last month suggested the country’s main power grid, covering the five eastern states, would remain reliable as it shifted from running on mostly coal to mostly renewables if planned investments in new generation were delivered “on time and in full”. Bowen said this would not be possible under the Coalition’s plan.
The market operator has forecast the east coast grid could need nearly double the existing capacity by 2035. Bowen said under the Coalition’s optimistic timeframe there would be no nuclear energy by then, and that even if nuclear generators were built at all seven sites they would be expected to supply only a fraction of national electricity by 2050.
He said the opposition’s solution to fill the gap while limiting construction of large-scale renewable energy was “forcing coal plant operators to keep assets open longer”.
“There hasn’t been a day in the past 12 months without an unplanned [coal] outage,” Bowen said. “Power stations don’t get more reliable as they get older.”
The Coalition’s nuclear push was critiqued in a separate analysis released on Friday by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a thinktank. It estimated power bills for average households could increase by $665 a year under the opposition proposal.
Responding to both analyses, Taylor said he did not know the details of the policy the government and thinktank had modelled “but it sure as hell isn’t ours”. He said gas would play an “enormously important role alongside renewables in the coming years” and that nuclear would be needed “to play a role” if there was to be enough electricity “at an affordable price”.
Asked how much the Coalition’s policy would cost, he said details would be released before the election.
Dylan McConnell, an energy systems researcher at the University of New South Wales, said there was not enough information to properly assess what the Coalition’s nuclear plans would mean for electricity grid reliability. “There are a lot of unanswered questions,” he said. “Its reasonable to ask what we do in the meantime before a nuclear plant may come online, and the extent to which nuclear can play a role in the future.”
