Kevin Rudd nailed the hypocrisy of Greens leader Adam Bandt on Twitter last week but lazy journalists keep letting the fringe party frame coverage of climate and power generation policy debates.
After bagging the Greens for pulling the rug out from his emissions trading scheme in 2009 — a plan both he and John Howard had taken to the 2007 election — Rudd wrote on June 18: “Their motive is not substantive and politically sustainable climate policy. It’s just to wedge Labor and bleed votes from the left.”
Every journalist assigned to cover a story about power should read the Energy Security Board paper released on June 22. Reporters need to be mature enough to see through the posturing of politicians who claim the high moral ground on climate but argue electricity solutions presented by experts have less moral worth than their own preferred, but unworkable, policies.
Part of the problem is the polarisation of media today. Lazy, ideologically naive journalists are tempted to judge solutions by the identity of the advocate. So in much of the media, Bandt was given free rein to bag the ESB’s clear-eyed position: in electricity generation, renewables and storage are not yet sufficiently developed to provide dispatchable power at all times. It’s not a moral issue, but a scientific fact.
Bandt, looking for cheap applause rather than cheap and reliable electricity, said the capacity mechanism — which would pay generators to secure enough base-load generation until the transition to renewables and storage is complete — was just a subsidy to fossil fuels and the ESB should scrap its report and start again.
The ESB makes another thing crystal clear. Reporters who fawned over billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and his bid for AGL need to realise that his plan to shut the company’s coal-fired power stations early would have destroyed reliable power. The ESB says increasing renewables does not sit easily with existing coal fired generation, that still accounts for more than 60 per cent of our power. In a highly technical market, renewables have an advantage bidding into the system during the day but the system relies on coal or gas at night.
It has become increasingly uneconomical for coal plants to run 24 hours a day when they can only sell power profitably for less than half that time because their costs cannot compete with renewables.
This column first discussed the issue in mid-2017 after it had become clear Germany would effectively need to run two separate power systems to ensure reliability: renewables, when they worked, and coal and gas when they did not. Hence Germany’s historically high electricity prices (even before Russia’s Ukraine invasion) and the contracting out of much of its manufacturing to China, South America and South Africa.
The ESB is explicit on battery storage: “Utility scale batteries can play an important role in contributing to the reliability of supply during at-risk periods due to their highly controllable output and quick response times. However, they are limited by their storage capacity (with most offering just one or two hours currently).”
Environment writers should challenge politicians and industry spruikers who glibly claim batteries can now guarantee reliability. Another former PM, Malcolm Turnbull, would not be working on so-called green hydrogen for billionaire miner Twiggy Forrest or have backed the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project if batteries really could offer grid scale storage.
When batteries run out after a couple of hours they need to recharge, exacerbating supply problems in the grid. They are, however, very profitable for owners. A study released on June 15 by energy researcher Cornwall Insight looking at Australian battery operations from June 2021 to May 2022 shows a strong link between higher prices to consumers and power dispatched from batteries.
“As energy dispatched from batteries increases, so do their charging requirements. This increases demand for electricity, in turn raising market prices,” the study found.
No journalists last week challenged the suggestion by new Minister Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen that because we have figured out a way to store water in dams even though it does not rain all the time, we can store power in batteries. Our dams do not empty in two hours but batteries do.
A separate paper by unlisted investment adviser Leithner on June 14 effectively bells the cat on opportunistic investments like the proposed AGL bid: “Many members of the public — egged on by lazy journalists, venal politicians and self-interested promoters — mistakenly think: ‘sunshine and wind are costless; therefore renewable energy is (or should be) virtually free’. They simply ignore intermittent generation’s considerable capital and external costs.”
So while climate campaigners want such external costs, or what economists call “externalities” — specifically environmental damage — factored into the price of fossil fuels, they do not demand externalities (the cost of storage and network expansion) be factored into the price of renewables.
Essentially, politicians and investors calling for an early closure of fossil fuels are proposing either taxpayers, electricity consumers or individual households underwrite reliability mechanisms, while billionaires reap the rewards of low cost but unreliable wind and solar power and shut reliable coal generators. A market mechanism that bundled such externalities into the price of renewables would allow like-for-like comparisons between the costs of different generation technologies.
Investors love talking about home storage, effectively contracting out reliability to households via domestic battery storage and rooftop solar. It’s why Cannon-Brookes has invested in Brighte, a business selling batteries and solar systems to rich people. Politically this plays well with rich ‘teals’ voters but in the wider electorate it will be just as damaging as the heat pumps Boris Johnson’s Tories tried to foist on UK power users at 10,000 pounds a pop.
Environment writers should remember poor people who don’t live in large freestanding homes with large garages and roof spaces. Feel-good stories about powering homes from electric vehicles are fantasy for many.
Many people in the large cities do not have off-street parking and would find charging an EV difficult. EVs are charged on a power grid largely dependant on fossil fuels. Night time charging will stress the grid at peak times in winter.
Residents in high rises or small unit blocks will not find it easy to charge EVs at home. Owners will not easily be able to install solar panels on roofs. What happens when an EV is driven at night? Do the lights go off?
Such equity issues are even worse at the international level.
On June 14, The Guardian reported on experts demanding African nations reject plans to explore for gas.
While former president of Ireland Mary Robinson — who also served as UN commissioner for human rights and UN climate envoy — backed African gas exploration, renewables advocate Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa think tank, said: “For Africans to achieve lives of dignity that energy access should bring, we cannot rely on the failed system of the past 200 years.”
The media fails its job if it swallows such unworkable approaches from politicians, think tanks or investors.
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