The very big assumption Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan makes

The energy plan Peter Dutton revealed on Friday morning is even more radical than it appeared to be when he announced this year the opposition was embracing nuclear energy.

Announcing costings crunched for the Coalition by Frontier Economics, Dutton said his plan would allow Australia to get to net zero emissions by 2050 at 44 per cent less in cost than the current government plan – a saving, he said, of $263 billion.

To get to these figures, the costings report makes some fairly heroic assumptions about how quickly and cheaply nuclear power stations can be built, but also how much electricity Australians will need by 2050.

In simple terms, Dutton predicts that Australia will need far less electricity in 2050 than the government is planning for, and he assumes it can save money by not building unnecessary power generation, storage and transmission infrastructure.

This position puts the Coalition at odds not just with the government, but with a global effort to reduce emissions by electrifying economies and building renewable energy infrastructure to displace fossil fuels.

Dutton also insists the world is engaged in a race towards nuclear that Australia is missing out on.

“If we look at the international experience, in Asia, in North America, in Europe – all of these countries have recognised the fact, firstly, that there is no hope of achieving net zero by 2050 without nuclear in the system,” he said on Friday morning, echoing his repeated assertion that Australia is the only G20 country not to have nuclear or be in the process of acquiring it.

In fact, according to the International Energy Association, 14 G20 nations have nuclear energy and two are considering it.

But even that does not paint a clear picture of the global state of nuclear power.

According to the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report, which tracks every nuclear plant on Earth from development proposal through to decommissioning, the industry is stagnating, at best. Last year, five reactors were switched on, and five were decommissioned. In 2023, nuclear energy’s share of global electricity generation was 9.15 per cent – a slight decrease from the previous year, and far lower than the industry’s peak of 17.5 per cent in 1996.

One country in particular is forging ahead with nuclear – China, which has 27 reactors under construction. But even there, nuclear is being eclipsed by renewables. In 2023, China installed 1GW of nuclear and about 278GW of wind and solar.

This global surge in renewable capacity has been caused by massive cost reductions and the ease and speed of installing the technology.

Economist Nicki Hutley, a councillor with the Climate Council, says the Coalition’s plan appears to rely upon curtailing renewables deployment in Australia over coming years to make way for more nuclear in the grid.

“It has to do that because nuclear power is always on,” Hutley says. “It can’t be flicked off when there is a lot of energy coming from our rooftops.”

Despite the potential for curtailing renewables, Dutton says the plan accords with Australia’s global climate commitments because it would still help Australia reach net zero in 2050. This is not strictly true. Even if Australia were able to build nuclear fast enough to meet that target, by keeping coal plants open until nuclear replaced them, Australia would fail to meet its interim targets.

But it is in the amount of electricity that Dutton’s plan presumes Australia will need in the future that it radically departs from the path Australia is already on.

To transition the economy fast enough to keep in line with Paris Agreement goals to stabilise the climate, the Albanese government is pursuing an energy model described by grid operator AEMO as a “step change” scenario. It means emissions fall as Australians swap internal combustion engines for EVs, electrify homes and develop new energy-intensive export industries that can be powered by electricity, such as green steel and hydrogen.

The Coalition’s costings are based on a more modest scenario, referred to as the “progressive change model”, which would simply rely on far less electricity.

This is at odds with a global movement to “electrify everything” that has become central to international discussions at global climate and energy meetings.

Dutton and his team are unrepentant about this.

“Labor believes they can force the hand of every Australian to behave the way Labor wants them to behave, to electrify exactly how Labor wants them to electrify,” said Dutton’s energy and climate spokesman, Ted O’Brien, on Friday.

“Ours is realistic. Theirs is a fantasy.”

That’s one way of putting it. Another is that Dutton’s vision of the energy future looks remarkably like the past.

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