Wind or sun, coal or nuclear; we need a stronger grid and a better debate

The only thing as predictable as global warming causing more storms and more power outages is the political debate that follows.

Transmission lines wrecked by Tuesday’s wild weather.Credit: Jason South

After Tuesday’s storms and blackouts in Victoria came Wednesday’s press releases from Canberra. Familiar positions were rapidly occupied and defended.

Nationals leader David Littleproud issued a statement arguing that the collapse of transmission towers carrying power from Loy Yang in south-eastern Victoria underscored the vulnerability of Labor’s plan to replace the nation’s ageing coal power stations with renewable power generation and storage projects distributed across the country.

“If small-scale nuclear power plants were built where retiring coal-fired power stations are now, we could minimise the need for new transmission lines, reducing the risk of these incidents,” he said.

Opposition spokesman on climate change and energy, Ted O’Brien, also an advocate of nuclear, criticised Labor’s “blinkered renewables only” approach to rebuilding the grid, saying Australia needed an “electricity system resilient to the weather, not reliant on it”.

The opposition’s case is that if we replace our clapped-out coal stations with small modular nuclear reactors on the same sites, we would obviate the need to replace the transmission lines they use. This would save money and reduce the need for extra transmission lines that would be needed to move power in a grid where generation is more widely spread over the countryside.

The problem with this argument – aside from the fact these reactors don’t yet exist – is that however power may be generated at the old power stations, it would still need to be moved to the cities.

If Loy Yang had been producing nuclear power on Tuesday, the grid would still have been threatened by a storm that took down transmission lines to it.

“It was not Loy Yang A tripping that caused the blackouts, it was the grid connected to Loy Yang that got taken out, and Loy Yang tripped because [it] couldn’t export the power [it was] generating,” explains energy analyst Tim Buckley.

He says distributing the sites at which power is generated and stored and the number of transmission lines connected to these sites to end users would strengthen rather than weaken the grid.

“It’s about having a spiderweb so if the one line or one string goes down, the grid overall doesn’t collapse.”

Besides, he says, new transmission towers built to survive new climate conditions will prove stronger than those deployed a generation ago.

The problem with this is both practical and political. The cost of creating so many new sources of energy and storage and transmission is proving to be eye-bleeding. The government has dedicated $20 billion to transmission alone via its Rewiring the Nation program.

And while some cheerleaders may claim to love the look of wind turbines, transmission cables have few friends. Some communities are already pushing back hard against new transmission and generation projects.

This is good ground for political combat to the detriment of an urgent public debate, says the Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood.

The government wants to talk about the deployment of renewable energy, and the technology that is key to replacing the vast bulk of our ageing grid, while the opposition wants to talk about nuclear energy, which might one day be useful in finishing the job, Wood says.

So they stick to their positions, he says, “blowing bubbles at each other”.