Chris Bowen flags batteries, EV charging as next energy reform priority
Energy Minister Chris Bowen said households could soon be further incentivised to buy into batteries or be able to use an EV to charge the home.
Infrastructure to support community batteries, using electric vehicles to fuel the energy grid and giving households better access to batteries will be the government’s next priority as it transitions to renewable energy.
Fronting the National Press Club on Wednesday, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said he would be meeting with state and territory energy ministers on Friday to finalise a consumer energy road map.
The plan, flagged in November last year, will focus on strategies to “empower households to take control of their resources,” such as solar, batteries or reverse charging EVs to feed power back into the grid, he said.
“That is, I think, the next vital piece of reform to enable households.
“We’ve made some work. NSW has introduced battery rebate for batteries. We’re focusing on grid scale batteries.”
Currently most state and territory governments offer rebates or low-interest or interest-free loans for small-scale batteries to help households store energy generated from rooftop solar.
Mr Bowen said Australian homes and businesses topped the world in roof top solar installations with more solar panels than swimming pools.
While he acknowledged there was a long way to go, he said there was demand from households.
“When we came to office, one in 60 houses had a battery. Now it is 40,” he said.
“A long way to go but progress is being made.”
Using how electric vehicles could be reverse charged back into the energy grid, was another opportunity, said Mr Bowen.
Ruling out policies that would restrict when an EV user could charge their car in order to reduce pressure on the grid during an emergency, he said cars could be harnessed to feed power back into the system.
“If you’ve got an electric vehicle and you can decide not only when you’re going to charge it, but you can decide when you’re going to take the power in it to charge your home or charge the grid and get paid for that,” he said.
“If every car in Australia was electric – and we’re a long way from that – but for the sake of the argument, that would be the equivalent of storage of five Snowy 2.0s.
“That is a lot of storage that you want to harness.”
Nuclear would ‘wreck’ renewables
His speech in Canberra was split into advocating for renewable energy which would be bolstered by the government’s major Future Made in Australia scheme, to use government funding to boost private sector projects in the renewable energy space.
Mr Bowen warned a move to nuclear energy would “wreck the renewables rollout” and leave Australia with more expensive and unreliable power for longer.
In the past decade Australia had lost four gigawatts of dispatchable energy, which was replaced by just one gigawatt.
The Coalition’s nuclear election bid further risked the loss of investment in renewables, which would put greater pressure on Australia energy system due to ageing coal-fired power plants.
Australia’s current fleet were already causing issues, with plants across the country’s eastern states experiencing daily unplanned outages.
“We don’t have the luxury of delaying investment in new generation for another 15 or 20 years while we wait for a new form of generation that Australia has never had,” Mr Bowen said.
“Far and away the biggest threat to reliability in our grid is over reliance on ageing coal fired power stations.”
In June, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton unveiled plans to build seven nuclear power plants by 2050, with the first reactor slated to be operational in just over a decade in a move designed to deliver more reliable, and cheaper zero-emissions power supply.
The large-scale and small modular generators would be Commonwealth-owned, similar to arrangements governing the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme, requiring a multibillion-dollar funding commitment from taxpayers.
The plants are planned to be located in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, and would add to the energy mix alongside renewable sources.
But Mr Bowen said nuclear power is “incompatible” with renewables, which now provided almost 40 per cent of energy to the grid, and would be more expensive.
“A baseload nuclear power plant will need to keep generating even when there are ample renewables, losing money for every watt of energy produced,” Mr Bowen said
“Baseload nuclear plants simply don’t stack up economically in a grid with significant renewable generation.
“From the perspective of our energy system, the biggest problem of all is that in Australia, nuclear and renewables are simply incompatible.
“While the Opposition purports to support an ‘all of the above’ energy mix, their ideological pursuit of nuclear reactors in two decades’ time would wreck the renewables rollout now.”
Mr Bowen said current and future investments in the energy transition would be “at risk because of the policy uncertainty caused by an ill-informed nuclear frolic.”
He said by curtailing
“Is the Coalition’s plan to curtail zero cost renewable energy to make room for expensive nuclear energy when renewables drive wholesale prices to very low levels, or is their plan to bankroll these baseload plants to bid into the system at prices where they’ll bleed money?” he
“I’ve said before and I’ll say again that I’m not ideological about nuclear.
“But the simple reality is that we can’t have them both, and so we face a critical choice in this critical decade.”
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