Matt Cunningham opinion: NT’s 2030 renewables target ‘a goal without a plan’

The NT government’s renewable energy target was announced without much thought, is being pieced together after the fact and it’s proving to be expensive, writes Matt Cunningham.

AUSTRALIA has set an ambitious target of 82 per cent renewable energy generation by 2030 — it’s a signature policy of the Albanese government.

But if the Northern Territory example is anything to go by, the federal government is unlikely to succeed in its attempt to achieve this goal.

The NT Labor government announced its target of 50 per cent renewables by 2030 when it came to power in 2016.

It had everything going for it — virtually no public opposition (the CLP had been reduced to just two members in 2016 and then supported the government’s target ahead of the 2020 election), abundant sunshine and its power generation and distribution all sitting in the hands of government-owned corporations.

It has had near total control over this policy, yet, as we discovered during budget estimates, it is failing miserably.

Seven years on from the government’s promise to deliver “cheaper, cleaner, more reliable” energy, the plan is falling hopelessly behind.

Just 15 per cent of our energy is coming from renewables and that number has hardly budged for more than two years.

Meanwhile, three large solar farms still sit idle more than three years after they were built. And despite years of compliance testing, Power and Water still cannot say when those assets are likely to start supplying energy to the grid.

Getting answers about what’s going wrong with the government’s renewable energy plan is difficult — a freedom of information request once came back with 116 of 118 pages (all except the front and back cover) of a report into the issue completely blacked out.

But Opposition renewables and energy spokesman Josh Burgoyne managed to elicit some information during the estimates committee hearings last month.

Under questioning from Burgoyne about the solar farms, Power and Water acting deputy chief executive Michael Besselink revealed some of these power generation assets had been brought online for extended periods as part of the testing and compliance regime. And the results were concerning.

“Going through that process we have found that they do not meet the requirements of the agreed standards in a number of different places,” he said.

Opposition MLA Josh Burgoyne made a valiant effort to get an estimate of when the issues might be fixed.

“The concern to us is that continued operation at that level or higher levels of output may well destabilise our networks because we have had a number of occasions where we had very low loads on the network (and) not much to be able to absorb it.”

Burgoyne asked the direct question: “Did these solar arrays destabilise the network during that testing period?”

Besselink responded: “When system events have occurred, the behaviour of the plant, on a number of occasions, did not meet the requirements that we have for the standards.”

Put simply, the committee was being told that if these solar assets are connected to the grid, the power would probably go out.

Renewable energy advocates have accused Power and Water of being too risk-averse with these assets and their connection to the electricity grid.

But anyone who was here in 2009 will know the pain of widespread blackouts is a risk no wise executive would be willing to take.

Burgoyne tried to get an estimate of when the issues might be fixed and the power might start flowing but the best Besselink could offer was: “They have not given us an estimate of time — that is all I can say.”

We also learned these idle assets are costing our government-owned corporations money, although no-one is able to say exactly how much.

The problem is that the government’s renewable energy target was announced without much thought. It was a goal without a plan. That plan is being pieced together after the fact and it’s proving to be expensive.

The only real way to achieve the goal would be to completely overhaul the Darwin-Katherine network, something well beyond the financial means of the NT Government.

Rather than plucking a number and a date from the sky, the government would have been better to increase renewables generation by as much as its network would allow without impacting security or increasing costs.

The federal government could learn a lot from looking at how things have gone wrong here.

Matt Cunningham is the Sky News Darwin Bureau Chief and North Australia correspondent.