New South Wales faces a “momentous task” to decarbonise its electricity sector and will need to accelerate the state’s transition to renewables, the new energy minister, Penny Sharpe, has said.
The electricity infrastructure roadmap, inherited from the previous Coalition government, aims to drive 12 gigawatts of new renewable generation and 2GW of long-duration storage into the grid by 2030. The plan’s first tender secured 1.4GW of new capacity at record low minimum prices, the government said earlier this week.
“We’re trying to undertake a momentous task in the shortest period of time that’s ever been asked for us to do it,” Sharpe told the Smart Energy Council conference in Sydney on Thursday.
Four of NSW’s five coal-fired power plants are scheduled to retire over the next 11 years in a state that sources 70% of its energy from non-renewable sources, she said.
“The infrastructure to replace the coal-fired power stations in the past would have taken around 30 years, I’m told, to build,” Sharpe said. “We’re trying to do it in 15.”
Last month’s closure of AGL Energy’s Liddell power station and Wednesday’s confirmation that Snowy Hydro’s 2.0 giant pumped hydro project has been delayed at least two years until possibly the end of 2029, have intensified calls for NSW to keep Origin Energy’s 2880MW Eraring power station beyond its scheduled closure date of August 2025.
“‘The key thing is we just can’t turn [Eraring] off if the replacement [capacity] is not there,” Sharpe said on the sidelines of the conference. “We can’t have a situation where households and businesses and industries don’t have access to energy.”
Sharpe and other officials have met executives from Origin and also the Canadian asset manager, Brookfield, that is in the process of trying to acquire Origin.
To quicken the roll-out of renewables, the government will have to remove or reduce impediments across the government, including planning, skills and training, and inform communities affected by new plants and transmission lines more openly.
“We need to find ways for them to feel as though the benefits will work for them,” Sharpe said. There will also be “the need adequate compensation for affected landholders”.
“Our ambition is high,” Sharpe said. “We want NSW to be the world leader.”
Other changes will include transition authorities to assist regions that will be losing fossil fuel-related employment, potentially complementing a national equivalent planned by the federal government.
The Labor government also plans to legislate the state’s emissions reductions targets, including the 2050 net zero goal.
An independent net zero commission, as promised in the election campaign, will also be set up “to keep the NSW government honest”, Sharpe said.
To help provide relief to cope with soaring power bills in the near term, the government will provide $485m, to be matched by Canberra, to 1.6 eligible households and more than 300,000 eligible small businesses in the coming year.
“I want every person, every household, every business, every community to be supported through what will sometimes be a bumpy transformation,” Sharpe said.
