Energy policy: no room for partisan politics, 18 groups tell government
From The Guardian
A coalition of business, energy, investor, climate and welfare groups has issued a sharply worded wake-up call on the energy debate, declaring “finger pointing” and 10 years of partisan politics have destroyed investor confidence in Australia’s energy sector, “worsening reliability risks”.
The joint statement from 18 groups ranging from the Business Council of Australia to the Australian Council of Social Services follows months of zero sum political debate about energy policy, power prices and reliability, during which time the federal government has pre-empted a major review by the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, by ruling out carbon trading in the electricity sector.
The pushback against toxic partisanship comes as the Liberal party in three states – South Australia, Victoria and Queensland – has agreed to do away with state-based renewable energy targets, lining up instead behind the federal scheme.
The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, welcomed the move, declaring in a statement “unrealistic state-based targets” have led to “huge power bills for families and businesses and unreliable supply”.
“With a businesslike, common sense approach, we can keep the lights on, keep power bills affordable and reduce emissions. Dangerous Labor-Green ideology has no place in energy policy,” he said.
But the 18 groups are making it known they want an end to all the posturing and brawling between Canberra and the states, which has rolled on since late last year over state-based renewable energy targets.
The group has also delivered a rebuke to the Turnbull government for racing ahead of the Finkel process.
The new statement calls on politicians “from all sides of politics and all levels of government ... to come together to work through the necessary solutions to our energy market challenges” – noting the Council of Australian Governments “has already established a strong policy process for this, the Finkel review”.
“Politicians need to back it and work with it,” the joint statement says.
While the Turnbull government has blamed renewable energy for recent blackouts in South Australia as part of a political strategy to emphasise points of difference between itself and the ALP, the statement is blunt about what is causing the current problems in the grid.
It says more than a decade of “finger pointing” has destroyed investor confidence in the energy sector, making new investment “impossibly risky”.
“This has pushed prices higher while hindering transformational change of our energy system. The result is enduring dysfunction in the electricity sector,” the statement says.
The group issues a clear warning: “There is simply no room for partisan politics when the reliability, affordability and sustainability of Australia’s energy system is at stake.”
The arguments made in the new statement echo the findings of Finkel’s preliminary report.
The chief scientist warned last December that investment in the electricity sector had stalled because of “policy instability and uncertainty” – and he gave implicit endorsement to an emissions intensity trading scheme for the electricity industry to help manage the transition to lower-emissions energy sources.
Finkel’s advice on the intensity scheme lined up with a range of other expert advice to the federal government, but the Coalition ruled out adopting the intensity scheme after conservatives expressed opposition to any form of carbon pricing.
There is also a continuing internal push against the RET, and subsequent to the publication of Finkel’s preliminary report, Turnbull put a question mark over the federal renewable energy target, saying it was “never intended to be perpetual”.
The group of 18 avoids endorsing any particular policies, noting that fixing the current problems will require a “raft of reforms” and the next stage of the Finkel review should be “an opportunity to explore these possibilities”.
The statement comes as federal parliament resumes on Monday. The Turnbull government has been using the focal point of the parliamentary sitting to face off combatively with the South Australian government over energy policy, and to declare Labor is pursuing policies that will increase insecurity in the grid.
The South Australian government has indicated it will build another gas-fired power plant in the state to provide back-up power, as well as other as yet unspecified interventions to shore up security in the grid.
Energy experts acknowledge that low-emission technologies, such as wind and solar, are intermittent, which presents technical challenges in a national electricity grid, but they also say the recent problems in South Australia are being caused not by renewables, but by a combination of regulatory failure, and commercial decisions by gas generators.
The energy market operator Aemo told a Senate hearing last Friday the most recent blackout in South Australia was triggered because existing thermal generators in the state were not available to come on line when demand surged.
The government in recent times has also been talking up the prospects of “clean” coal technology as a method of providing secure baseload power. Last week, the treasurer, Scott Morrison, brought a lump of coal into question time to make a partisan point.
Australia’s resources minister, Matt Canavan, has flagged subsidising a “clean” coal baseload power plant from the government’s $5bn northern Australia infrastructure fund, hinting it could sit alongside the controversial Adani coal mine.
But asked on Sunday whether a new coal-fired power station would ever be built in this country, given the energy industry’s view that coal was a legacy technology with little or no prospect of commercial viability, the industry minister, Arthur Sinodinos, hedged.
“I can’t answer that definitively,” he said, adding that carbon capture and storage remained a work in progress.
He said that if the government laid out an energy policy framework, the market would decide which technologies would be brought forward to achieve the transition.
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