Australia Could Get Upto 50% Of Its Power Needs From Renewable Energy If Government Listens To Reason

Is the Australian Government Abandoning its Climate and Environment Responsibility

The Australian government in its National Energy Guarantee (NEG) plan has given short shrift to renewable energy with a plan of installing only 8% to 36% of power generation projected to come from renewables by 2030. There are no incentives or subsidies for renewables under this scheme. The Government says renewables are becoming more competitive without subsidies, so the Renewable Energy Target is no longer necessary. It’s understood those subsidies for using renewables will be phased out after 2020.

This will allow the development of new fossil fuel power plants powered by gas and coal which is not the optimum result for the Australian citizens. Though solar and wind power costs have been falling dramatically worldwide with recent auctions in Mexico and Saudi Arabia seeing prices of just 1.8 cents/kWh, Australians are facing increasing electricity prices with energy bills shooting the roof. One of the biggest reasons is the oligopoly in the Australia power market where the Big Three Utilities charge outsized fees and pay handsome salaries to their top executives for doing simple mundane jobs. The electricity prices are set to keep increasing with large investments being made in grid expansion and other infrastructure upgrades which are mostly not needed.

Storage is set to become substantially cheaper and should play an important role in increasing the integration of large-scale renewable energy such as solar and wind energy into the grid. The meter storage coupled with rooftop solar systems is already making a big impact on the power systems. Sonnen has managed to win hundreds of converts by charging a flat fee for electricity and providing price security for a long time. It not only allow power trading between its customers but also earns additional revenue by providing reliability services to the power grid.

The Australian government is not supporting the nascent storage and slightly mature solar industry over the century-old fossil fuels industry. It is allowing the market to play an outsized role which will deliver a suboptimal result. It is putting the onus of reducing emissions and increasing reliance on private electricity market suppliers. They will obviously have to go to the cheapest source which is coal. This will be a bad result because the social, environmental and health costs of coal are not accounted for.  The Conservative Australian government is abandoning its climate and environment responsibility under the NEG plan.