Australia Ahead: Smart Energy Council Acting CEO

Paul just laid out some of the hurdles that Australia needs to overcome if it even were to think about implementing nuclear power. But what's your take on the policy that's being proposed? And do you see it as something possibly that does distract from our net zero goals instead of being something that could aid them instead? Australia's transition right now is being shaped by renewable energy. That's something that's being led by households with one in three houses in Australia ready with solar panels on their roofs. So Australians are already enjoying the benefits of residential solar. And now there's a massive scaling up of commercial large scale solar and wind projects across the country where 40% renewables, we could be hitting 80% by the end of this decade. We could be at 100% by the time we even actually consider a nuclear power station coming online in Australia. So just in terms of the time frames and in terms of the, the, the, the connection, the support, the community support for renewables, we're we're seeing this just leagues ahead. The other thing is obviously the legal barriers, nuclear being illegal as well as being relatively slow to bring online. And then finally, of course, it is far more expensive than renewables. So it just seems like too far off, too expensive and a little bit too hard to actually bring online here. Why then do you think this nuclear proposal is even being suggested in the first instance? From from Peter Dutton? It it's a great question. It's one that many of us have been asking. Ultimately, it does mean that we have to keep our coal-fired generators online longer. 90% of our coal-fired power will retire in the next decade. We have a little bit of gas that we use for peaking as well as as a bit for for base load, but we won't really need that much more gas. Ultimately what nuclear power means is that we have to find ways to swim out these existing assets and ultimately that means that it'll be taxpayers propping it up. We saw in the largest state in Australia, NSW, a deal done with the roaring, the largest coal-fired power station known to keep that online for an additional 2 years and that that could cost up towards of about 1/2 a billion dollars to do that. So ultimately who benefits from investigating and trying to proceed with nuclear are the existing asset owners. And the Coalition's track record in the past has been one that's tried to sweat out these assets for as long as possible. And unfortunately that seems to be the case with this current proposal. Now, Richie, in some respects you could make an argument for it though, because the uranium is here in Australia, the country's geologically, politically stable. There's lots of suitable sites, there's even the potential to control the entire nuclear fuel cycle. But this all kind of need to happen 20 or 30 years ago. Considering the advances in renewables has has the window for going nuclear closed in Australia, it seems a little bit too late in the game to investigate it. Even the energy market operator can't look at what it would, what the energy mix could possibly be simply because nuclear is illegal. So just the the legal and regulatory barriers alone will take years to work through. And then from there you have to figure out how we would potentially ensure it, how we can ensure that we have water supply, we're a water stricken country and how you bring about social license. And on top of that, how you do this at on time and and to cost, which seems to have evaded most other Western countries that have gone down this path. We've had nuclear debates in the past in Australia. Obviously we've had uranium as as an export for a long time, but every time we've had that debate, we've landed on let's just continue to proceed with renewables. Feels like once again we're having that debate with an actual proposal on the table. But the debate's being done already and most companies are backing in renewables, most households are backing in renewables. And if we allow this to distract ourselves from the renewable roll out, we could end up with more costly energy bills which are being inflated by propping up coal and gas. So really what we want to see is we want to see renewables continue to come online, We want to see Australians enjoy cheaper power bills and we want to see Australia use that clean energy to power its industries for the future. Australia's major energy exporter, the third largest exporter of fossil fuels. We want to see Australia continue to be an energy player in the region and to supply with clean energy, and that comes from renewables. One advantage of nuclear is that it's always on. It doesn't matter if the sun isn't shining, although the wind isn't blowing. But has battery storage caught up enough to nullify that advantage of nuclear energy batteries? What we're seeing come online at quite a dramatic rate. Australia's really pushing the barrier on big batteries, on clean energy storage. The federal government has taken a major position in backing in Snowy, 2 Point OA, huge pumped hydro project not far from where I am here in Canberra. So we're seeing clean storage come online, not fast enough. What we want to see is we want to see residential batteries supported. Right now we could, we could be rolling out a million household batteries which would provide these virtual power plants the storage that we need to support intermittent renewables. The government could be doing that by using its existing frameworks. We've managed to really nail rooftop solar that was through our renewable energy target and scheme. We want to see something similar for batteries. Incentivize batteries for households by putting it into the same framework and roll out household batteries at speed and scale. That will directly support households as well as providing that clean energy storage that you quite rightly point out when you bring online. Richie, we've got some research at Bloomberg talking about national emissions in Australia, and they've fallen roughly 20% since 2005. But a lot of that reduction has come through land use, land use change, forestry accounting, but total emissions from other areas, according to our research, are largely flat. So are we doing enough to decarbonize at this point in time? The short answer is no. Australia has a lot more work to do to decarbonize. The electricity sector remains the highest polluting sector and it hasn't seen that transition happen at speed and scale. Renewables will certainly help, but the other thing is we've done very little on transport. Up until a few months ago, Australia didn't have a fuel efficiency standard, so there's a lot more work that we need to be doing in that space.