30 November 2017, Renew Economy, Finkel’s frustration: Everyone else has a strategy, but not Australia. One senses that Chief scientist Alan Finkel is just a little frustrated. The center-piece of his land-mark Finkel Review, the clean energy target, has been left in the gutter by weak-kneed politicians, and his attempts to bring perspective to the issue of storage has been branded as “eco-evangelism” by the same forces that make policy makers tremble in their bed at night. Little surprise, then, that Finkel chose to focus his last energy speech of the year on the “Myths and Legends of the Australian electricity market”, delivered to the ANU on Wednesday afternoon. And in doing so, he delivers some major brick-bats to both the country’s policy makers (politicians) and its regulators. Finkel argues that Australia has managed a unique trifecta – high prices, high emissions, and high uncertainty – and fallen behind the rest of the world. And he has no doubt who is to blame. “Everyone else has a strategy,” says one of the key points of his presentation (see above). The next line is equally damming: “Regulatory system suffering 10 years of policy paralysis.” Energy insiders and observers know exactly what Finkel is referring to: the first is clear, the political impasse caused by the Far Right and its opposition to basic economics and science. The second offender would be interpreted as the Australian Energy Market Commission – the rule maker that has stood in the way of blindingly obvious reforms such as introducing environmental considerations into the National Electricity Objective, and which has resisted and delayed nearly every proposed change that would nudge Australia’s ageing, creaking energy infrastructure into the 21st Century. Read More here
Tag Archives: Fed Govt
18 October 2017, The Conversation, The government’s energy policy hinges on some tricky wordplay about coal’s role. The most important thing to understand about the federal government’s new National Energy Guarantee is that it is designed not to produce a sustainable and reliable electricity supply system for the future, but to meet purely political objectives for the current term of parliament. Those political objectives are: to provide a point of policy difference with the Labor Party; to meet the demands of the government’s backbench to provide support for coal-fired electricity; and to be seen to be acting to hold power prices down. Meeting these objectives solves Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s immediate political problems. But it comes at the cost of producing a policy that can only produce further confusion and delay. The government’s central problem is that, as well as being polluting, coal-fired power is not well suited to the problem of increasingly high peaks in power demand, combined with slow growth in total demand. Coal-fired power plants are expensive to start up and shut down, and are therefore best suited to meeting “baseload demand” – that is, the base level of electricity demand that never goes away. Until recently, this characteristic of coal was pushed by the government as the main reason we needed to maintain coal-fired power. The opposite of baseload power is “dispatchable” power, which can be turned on and off as needed. Classic sources of dispatchable power include hydroelectricity and gas, while recent technological advances mean that large-scale battery storageis now also a feasible option. Coal-fired plants can be adapted to be “load-following” which gives them some flexibility in their output. But this requires expensive investment and reduces the plants’ operating life. The process is particularly ill-suited to the so-called High Efficiency, Low Emissions (HELE) plants being pushed as a solution to the other half of the policy problem, reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Read More here
18 October 2017, The Conversation, Federal government unveils ‘National Energy Guarantee’ – experts react. The federal government has announced a new energy policy, after deciding against adopting the Clean Energy Target recommended by chief scientist Alan Finkel. The new plan, called the National Energy Guarantee, will require electricity retailers to make a certain amount of “dispatchable” power available at all times, and also to reduce the electricity sector’s greenhouse emissions by 26% relative to 2005 levels by 2030. The government says it will save the average household up to A$115 a year after 2020, while also ensuring reliability. Below, our experts react to the new policy.Read more: Infographic: the National Energy Guarantee at a glance. Read More here
18 October 2017, Renew Economy, States gobsmacked by lack of detail, research in Turnbull’s NEG. The chances of the Turnbull government getting the approval of the states for its National Energy Guarantee appear remote after a devastating response to the proposal following an emergency phone hook-up on Tuesday. Approval for the states – through the COAG process – is apparently critical for the Coalition to implement the plan, because it requires changes to the National Electricity Rules. But in a testy phone-hook up between Frydenberg and the state energy ministers, the federal Coalition admitted it had no details, no modelling – and all it had to show for what it describes as “breakthrough moment” was a press release and an eight-page letter from the Energy Security Board. State representatives said they were gobsmacked by the sheer front and incompetence. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said one. “We would be ripped apart if we tried something like that.” Queensland energy minister Mark Bailey was dismissive of the lack of detail. “The detail is threadbare and it would be irresponsible to set the nation’s energy policy based on a short letter which is all we’ve been given.” (Read Bruce Mountain’s account for an explanation as to how this policy farce may have come about). It is particularly ironic because the federal Coalition needs the state approval, yet Frydenberg told the state energy ministers that the states would be relied on to do the heavy lifting to meet the various targets. Read More here