Antinuclear

The Coalition’s coal-keeper plan

The widespread concern among energy experts is that the introduction of nuclear into the power system would result in renewables, including rooftop solar, being switched off for extended periods, lest the grid be overwhelmed with power, and to assure the financial viability of nuclear generators.

According to analysis by the peak body for the renewables industry, the Smart Energy Council, “up to five million rooftop solar systems will be switched off, and the average power price bill will more than double” as a result.

The Coalition’s nuclear proposal offers no outlook for lower household bills, and the political debate obscures the fact that the plan is undeliverable.

By Mike Seccombe, 21 Dec 24,  https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/environment/2024/12/21/the-coalitions-coal-keeper-plan

There are really only two possibilities. Either Peter Dutton and Angus Taylor do not understand the basics of the Coalition’s signature nuclear power policy or they are deliberately, repeatedly broadcasting a falsehood.

At December 13’s Brisbane press conference where the opposition leader and shadow treasurer released the long-awaited costings of the Coalition’s nuclear plan, contained in modelling by Frontier Economics, both men said it showed their policy would cut electricity bills by 44 per cent.

In fairness it should be noted the council has a big vested interest, but the fact remains that Price’s published modelling appears to ignore the impact of nuclear on renewables. As Hamilton noted, in Price’s modelling “these capacity factors [that is, the amount of time renewables are generating power] do not change with the introduction of nuclear producing 38 per cent of generation nearly 24/7.”

In response to the Hamilton critique, Price argued it was already the case that renewables were sometimes turned down or off because there is too much generation. He said this problem would increase as the share of renewables increased.

“This is because you have to build vast amounts of renewables to produce enough electricity to meet demand, and since you never know whether they will produce at the same time or at different times, inevitably you end up at times with too much electricity.”

He did not, however, address the cost issue. And he conceded that under his model, less renewables infrastructure would be built.

The broader point, however, is that this was not apparent in his published work.

Normal protocol in the modelling world is to provide detail of the data on which a model is built, says Professor Warwick McKibbin of the ANU Crawford Centre.

“You should be transparent. That’s just standard good practice. If you can’t see that data that underpins the work, then how do you know what’s been assumed? How do you assess the value of it?” he says.

It doesn’t take an internationally renowned economic modeller to tell us that – every primary-school maths teacher instructs their students to show their work. But when the Smart Energy Council contacted Price, seeking the data underpinning his assumptions, the reply was a single word: “No.”

Dutton did it again on Tuesday at a press conference in Adelaide, called to promote the candidacy of Nicolle Flint, a member of his hard-right faction, for the seat of Boothby at the coming election.

“The work of Frontier says that over time electricity prices will be 44 per cent cheaper under our policy than Labor’s,” he said.

On Wednesday, Taylor repeated the claim. The opposition plan, he said, “will bring down electricity bills by 44 per cent. There’s no doubt about that.”

It’s not true. In fact, the Frontier report specifically says, on page 18: “We do not, at this stage, present any results for the prices, as this will depend on how the cost of new capacity will be treated in the future.”

What the Frontier modelling actually concludes is something quite different: that the total cost of upgrading and running the national electricity market out to 2050 – when we are committed to reaching net zero greenhouse emissions – would be 44 per cent less under one scenario including nuclear power than under another not including nuclear.

That claim, too, is misleading, according to many economists and energy experts, because it compares “apples and oranges” – that is, two dissimilar scenarios labelled “step change” and “progressive”.

The first scenario, step change, is premised on Australia electrifying its economy in a big way between now and 2050, largely using renewable energy to power vehicles, homes, existing industries and energy-hungry new ones, such as data centres and AI services, in a robustly growing economy. The other is premised on a future in which that transition away from coal, gas and oil is slower and growth is significantly smaller.

“This is unequivocally about politics, not policy. The Coalition’s $331 billion nuclear fantasy is a coal- and gas-keeper energy transition plan for Australia, funded by taxpayers.”

According to the modelling produced pro bono for the Coalition by Danny Price, managing director of Frontier, the step change scenario without nuclear would cost $594 billion. The progressive scenario with nuclear would cost $331 billion, a difference of $263 billion, or 44 per cent.

But that does not equate to a similar reduction in prices for consumers. Not if the economy ends up being smaller, with less demand for electric power.

Simon Holmes à Court, businessman, energy analyst and director of pro-renewables body The Superpower Institute, summarises the opposition’s case as “we’re going to pay $263 billion less for electricity, but it’s for a lot less electricity”.

“And meantime, we have to pay an extra $500 billion for fossil fuels.”

His calculation factors in the long lead times involved in building nuclear capacity. The Price model would see 13 gigawatts of nuclear commissioned across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria by 2050. The first unit would not come online until 2036 – and even this is a highly optimistic forecast. According to the CSIRO, a more realistic timeline is 15 years, not 11, to get the first one up and running. Other experts suggest even longer.

The Price model would see only a small amount of nuclear power before 2039 and the whole 23 gigawatts not operational until 2049.

In the meantime, his report says, Australia would have to extend the life of its fleet of coal-fired power plants.

“Already,” says Nicki Hutley, economist, former banker and now a councillor to the Climate Council, “at any one time, about 25 per cent of coal is down because it is ageing and is either under planned or unplanned repairs. What does that do to power prices when you don’t have enough supply to meet demand?”

In his report, Price suggested the problems with coal-fired plants could be ameliorated by introducing much more gas into the grid, but the cost of that, he wrote, “has not been modelled”.

Nor would the extra costs incurred by a delayed transition to renewables only be financial. More fossil fuels would be burnt, so more planet-warming gases would be emitted.

According to Price’s own modelling, the emissions intensity – the amount of greenhouse gas produced per unit of power generated – remains vastly higher under his plan than the government’s, all the way out to 2046.

The fact that emissions under the Price–Dutton nuclear plan eventually come down to the same level as the government’s renewables-heavy plan is beside the point, says Dylan McConnell, an energy systems analyst at UNSW Sydney.

“The pathway there is more important than the destination, in some respects, because it’s the cumulative emissions that matter,” he says.

By his calculations, as well as those of Hutley and the Climate Council, Steven Hamilton of the George Washington University, and the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute at the Australian National University, the extra cumulative emissions under the Coalition policy would be enormous.

The Price–Coalition plan would produce about 2.5 times the emissions of the government’s preferred step change model – 1.65 billion tonnes, compared with 0.6 billion, according to Hamilton’s analysis, which was published in The Australian Financial Review this week.

And that is in the electricity sector alone, Hamilton wrote.

Add in the costs outside the generation sector, arising from things such as greater consumption of petrol and diesel resulting from the slower take-up of electric vehicles under the Coalition plan, and the cumulative emissions rise even more. To a total of more than 1.7 billion tonnes, according to Holmes à Court.

Those extra emissions “would blow our carbon budget”, says Hutley. “No wonder the opposition wants to abandon the 43 per cent emissions reduction target,” she says, “because you can’t possibly get anywhere near it under this policy.”

Scrapping that 2030 reduction target set by the current government would breach the Paris climate agreement and make Australia an international “pariah”, she says.

Hutley stresses that she has no objection to nuclear power, per se.

“It’s not ideology. It is purely and simply about the numbers. And I just can’t make them add up. You can’t just say we’re going to produce a grid with a whole lot less energy and that’ll cost us less.”

A large part of the problem in trying to make sense of the Price modelling, Hutley and others say, lies in the assumptions that underpin it. Some, like the capital cost per kilowatt of installed capacity, are generally seen as implausibly low.

Price factors in a cost of $10,000 a kilowatt, although the actual delivered costs of nuclear plants in comparable Western countries are about double that.

Others are simply mystifying, such as his assumed “capacity factors” for nuclear generation compared with wind and solar. Skipping the technical details, the essence of the issue is that nuclear runs more or less continuously, producing a constant amount of relatively expensive electricity. Renewables, by contrast, are intermittent, depending on the sun and wind, but produce cheap electricity.

The widespread concern among energy experts is that the introduction of nuclear into the power system would result in renewables, including rooftop solar, being switched off for extended periods, lest the grid be overwhelmed with power, and to assure the financial viability of nuclear generators.

According to analysis by the peak body for the renewables industry, the Smart Energy Council, “up to five million rooftop solar systems will be switched off, and the average power price bill will more than double” as a result.

An approach to the shadow minister for climate change and energy, Ted O’Brien, seeking the data got no response at all.

Experts interviewed by The Saturday Paper noted other worrying or peculiar aspects of the opposition’s policy, including the party of business’s vision of a nuclear industry wholly funded by government.

They say the reason is that the private sector would not risk investing.

But perhaps the biggest mystery, says Holmes à Court, is why Dutton and co chose to bring on this fight.

Opinion polling shows nuclear is not a popular option with the public, in contrast with wind and particularly solar. More pertinently, it is a policy that almost certainly can’t be implemented any time soon.

The Dutton Coalition would have to win both houses of federal parliament in order to overturn a ban on nuclear legislated under the Howard government in 1998 as part of a deal with the Greens. The odds of that happening are very long.

On top of that, Queensland, Victoria and NSW also have bans on nuclear power and show no inclination to reverse them, even though the Liberal National Party of Queensland now holds government.

“A little-known fact,” says Holmes à Court, “is that Queensland made it a requirement that there be a plebiscite to un-ban nuclear. That’s a lovely little poison pill that they left in the legislation.”

That being the case, why pursue it?

Because it is a means of exploiting voter concerns about the cost of living, even if it relies on the untrue promise of a 44 per cent reduction in electricity prices.

And because it avoids another round of the climate wars that have riven the conservative parties for decades. Those wars played a major part in the demise of several Coalition leaders, including Malcolm Turnbull, twice – the second time as a consequence of the plotting of Peter Dutton.

What the nuclear policy actually does is kick the energy-policy can down the road. It promises to get to net zero by 2050, but in the meantime to keep the electricity system running on fossil fuels for another decade or more.

Indeed, says Stephanie Bashir, of the energy consultancy Nexa Advisory, it is a mistake to consider it a serious policy at all.

“This is unequivocally about politics, not policy,” she says.

“The Coalition’s $331 billion nuclear fantasy is a coal- and gas-keeper energy transition plan for Australia, funded by taxpayers,” she says.

And that about sums it up.

December 31, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics