Experts slam Chris Bowen’s $100 billion net zero transition cost blunder

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has low-balled the cost of transitioning the country’s power grid to net zero by as much as $100 billion, experts have claimed.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen has low-balled the cost of transitioning the country’s power grid to net zero by as much as $100 billion, experts have claimed, amid revelations the energy regulator’s own modelling does not support his assumptions.

Last Sunday, Mr Bowen told the ABC’s Insiders that “the best guide to the cost” of the transition, published by the Australian Energy Market Operator, “looked at the total cost out to 2050 of the entire generation, storage and transmission and came up at $121 billion”.

However, AEMO documents, including a public webinar held by the agency on the latest version of the “Integrated System Plan”, reveals that the $121 billion figure “excludes consumer energy resources, distribution networks upgrades, and the explicit cost of carbon”.

This includes the cost of improving transmission networks as well as what the agency calls “consumer owned storage”, or home-based battery systems which Australians would purchase and use to return power to the grid during energy shortfalls.

Centre for Independent Studies energy economist Aidan Morrison said: “the additional cost for all of this, including small-scale aggregated batteries like Tesla Powerwalls, at today’s prices it would work out at $100 billion to buy that today.”

Energy Minister Chris Bowen (with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in the background) has been accused of low-balling the cost of the net zero transition. Picture: Damian Shaw

“The other thing that complicates this is that (the AEMO) hasn’t included most of the system we have and the cost of extra growth in that, which is also valued at around $100 billion and which might have to increase its capacity by 50 per cent or more to accommodate the electrification they expect to occur.”

Former ANSTO chief Adi Paterson, who ran Australia’s sole nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights from 2009 to 2020, said that there would be more costs involved because of the unstable nature of renewables.

ANSTO CEO Adi Paterson. Picture: AAP Image

“Grid expansion is expensive and integrating too much intermittent wind and solar — unclouded daylight — is very costly,” he said.

“The engineering reality is that we are producing low quality 50MHz electricity and AEMO does not even acknowledge we have a problem.”

“Nuclear is costly to build but global experience shows that consumers pay less and industry benefits.”

Other experts were similarly scathing.

Ben Beattie, a Queensland-base electrical engineer and publisher of the Energy Wrap newsletter, said that “just doing the numbers on Powerwalls, it would be tens of billions of dollars … and that’s before you look at the blowouts of Snowy 2.0 and everything else.

“If they are looking at $121 billion and they’ve got some transmission costs and some generator costs, many of which could be plus or minus 50 per cent, the real figure could be anything.”

Mr Bowen said: “We take our advice from experts like AEMO, not from the discredited Liberal Party.”

“AEMO says the annualised capital cost of all generation, storage, firming and transmission infrastructure has a present value of $121 billion.

“The most conservative estimates of the coalition’s most recent in their string of nonsensical energy policies over the past decade, is $387 billion just in capital costs alone for new build nuclear plants.”

However opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said, “Chris Bowen is peddling more lies to distract from the fact that he has no credibility on costs … the last time Chris Bowen came out with a number it was to promise a reduction in household electricity bills by $275, but Australians are now paying among the most expensive bills in the world.

“By deceitfully ignoring billions of dollars’ worth of network and integration costs, the minister is deliberately telling lies and is consigning Australians to energy poverty.”

Do you have a story for The Daily Telegraph? Email [e-mail]

Originally published as Experts slam Chris Bowen’s $100 billion net zero transition cost blunder