TJ Ryan Foundation Board member, John Quiggin, writes in The Conversation (18.10.17) that, by rebranding coal as ‘dispatchable’, the government’s National Energy Guarantee looks set to preserve demand for coal-fired power by giving it a new role – one it’s not well equipped to fulfil.
‘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.
‘… Given that the policy is unlikely to survive beyond the next election, it’s unlikely that it will prompt anyone to build a new gas-fired power station, let alone a coal-fired plant. So the only real effect will be to discourage investment in renewables and create yet further policy uncertainty.
‘This undermines the basis for the (unreleased) modelling supposedly showing that household electricity costs will fall. These savings are supposed to arise from the investment certainty resulting from bipartisan agreement. But the political imperative for the government is to put forward a policy Labor can’t support, to provide leverage in an election campaign. If the government had wanted policy certainty it could have accepted Labor’s offer to support the Clean Energy Target.’
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Why hasn’t the NEG modelling been made public?
Bruce Mountain writes in The Conversation (31.7.18) that a policy that aims to reshape the electricity sector needs to be judged on its numbers – but the lack of public modelling from the Energy Security Board makes it impossible for analysts to do this.
‘Central to the public debate about the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) has been the numerical forecasts of its effects – in particular how much it will reduce power prices. In a democracy whose households pay some of the world’s highest electricity bills, it is obvious why this measure should shape the narrative on energy policy.
‘But Plato tells us that good decisions are based on knowledge, not numbers. What’s more, electricity markets are incredibly complex, and therefore not amenable to straightforward predictions.
‘The Energy Security Board has put numbers at the centre of its NEG proposal, but the basis of these numbers is not clear. With 22 colleagues in 10 other Australian Universities, we are calling for state and territory ministers to ensure that the ESB’s modelling is available for proper scrutiny. I explain here why I support this request.’
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