Reliability before fantasy

The Australian Institute for Progress welcomes the Queensland Government’s new Energy Roadmap 2025 as a realistic attempt to manage the energy transition.

Executive Director Graham Young said that it puts engineering and economics before fantasy.

“The previous government had hard deadlines for retiring existing power assets even though the rate of installation of wind and solar is not fast enough to replace the power generation that would be lost. This would inevitably have led to blackouts and business flight.

“The new plan is correct to focus on reliability, and this requires multiple redundancies in the system. Intermittent resources need to be backed-up by storage, as well as reliable generation like gas and coal.

“Any system that takes the intermittents out before building the rest of the network will cause havoc in the network and there will be a high personal and economic cost for Queenslanders to pay for this.”

Mr Young pointed to the new gas-fired power station in Central Queensland as vital.

“AEMO’s Integrated System Plan sees a long term future for gas, even after 2050, so this asset could be around for some time.

“Gas is essential, because unlike coal, it can be ramped-up quickly when the wind drops or sunshine vanishes.

“Spending $1.6 billion on our current coal assets will allow them to operate for as long as required. Without them we would be entirely reliant on gas, which would be very expensive.

“A thermal power station can be like the surveyor’s axe which had two handles and 3 heads – their real life can be much longer than their design life."

Mr Young said it made some sense to put QIC in charge of managing the provision of pumped hydro.

“At the moment Queensland has minimal long-term storage. Pumped hydro is the only technology that is feasible to store power over days and even months, but none of the mooted large-scale projects are even close to storing power.

“QIC is used to managing infrastructure acquisitions, and pumped hydro, which, on the basis of Snowy 2.0 we should expect to arrive later than anticipated, and at a much higher price, needs a firm commercial hand on it.”

Mr Young said that he was dismayed by criticism he was seeing of this decision from conservation, welfare and other groups who were now apparently instant experts in electricity generation and economics.

“The general complaint is that this plan will put power prices up. It is hard to see how this could be the case and is contradicted by the government’s modelling.

“What can’t be contradicted is that since 2007 when Australia signed the Kyoto protocol electricity prices have increased around 120% despite many of the same groups swearing that they would be lower because 'Renewables are the cheapest form of energy'.

“We even went into the 2022 federal election with Labor claiming household electricity prices would fall by $275 per annum on average over their first term of government when they in fact rose by $307.”

Mr Young said part of the reason for price increases was the need for intermittent power to be backed-up, overbuilt and over-networked; and the other part is that the implementation of the energy transition has been botched by closing coal-fired power stations prematurely.

For further information contact Graham Young on 0411 104 801 or graham.young@aip.asn.au