Nuclear part of profound debate between Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Ted O’Brien

Ted O’Brien’s ability to perform in an intense public debate is not known but he is one of the few people in the parliament who helped develop a major family business. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton are already skirmishing on environment and carbon reduction issues.

But that’s just a prelude to an emerging profound debate between the Energy Minister and his shadow counterpart.

The government’s Chris Bowen is a professional politician while his shadow, Ted O’Brien, is a business person who rose through the ranks of his family-owned Toowoomba flour milling operation and then took its marketing into China. Later he joined the Accenture group in China.

Chris Bowen communicates well and is no stranger to election contests but will always be remembered for being a big contributor to Bill Shorten losing the 2019 election because of a botched franking credits policy.

Ted O’Brien’s ability to perform in an intense public debate is not known, but he is one of the few people in parliament who helped develop a major family business (now owned by Goodman Fielder) and recognises the need to be backed by skilled people.

The Bowen-O’Brien contest might not only decide the outcome of the looming federal election but is likely to deliver Australia’s first detailed energy master plan.

O’Brien is vowing to put before the nation “well before the election” a detailed, integrated energy plan to co-ordinate wind, solar, hydro, gas and nuclear facilities, plus existing coal, to set achievable carbon reduction targets.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Treasurer Jim Chalmers at a press conference at Ampol Oil refinery at Lytton in Brisbane. Picture: NewsWire / Lachie Millard

Bowen will harness all the expertise in the public service and the CSIRO in an attempt to blow the O’Brien plan out of the water. But that will require details of a rival Bowen plan.

That will test Bowen because O’Brien is using his knowledge of business planning to put together what looks set be a unique plan for the nation.

The Bowen plan will rely on wind, solar, hydro and batteries to dominate the production of power in the next decade, although more recently he added gas to his power mix.

Bowen is a good political marketer, and given his public service and CSIRO backing, he will vigorously oppose following other nations down the nuclear route.

Given that Bowen is the incumbent and O’Brien has the analytical skills he developed in the business community, if either leave out facts or make mistakes, both combatants have the firepower to expose them.

Already O’Brien has picked up Bowen when he ignored key costs in a renewables cost estimate. Politicians on both sides often leave out facts so this has the potential to be a rare high-quality debate about the nation’s energy future.

Normally an opposition policy that included nuclear in the mix would be in trouble but young, carbon-concerned voters are showing increasing support for nuclear in opinion polling. And there is no doubt that the renewable energy program to date has boosted power prices and the cost of living.

Bowen will attract many supporters for his plan. On the O’Brien side, people are emerging from the shadows.

Few are more vocal than one of our top nuclear experts, Dr Adrian Paterson, the former chief executive of the Australian Nuclear ­Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), which operates the Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney, which is important for nuclear medicine.

He asks: “Why are we as a modern democracy banning nuclear at the federal level and then a number of the states when low-carbon nuclear provides the cheapest consumer costs? It would transform and electricity grid which is getting … less reliable plus getting very, very expensive.”

Regarding a CSIRO report that claims nuclear will be too expensive, Paterson says: “CSIRO has no expertise in the cost of generation.

“What they do is take publicly available figures of the construction costs of nuclear power plants – usually in countries that have got regulatory environments that are kind of designed to stop nuclear – and convert them into a generation cost using an algorithm which is provided to them by a private sector firm that is not an expert in the nuclear industry,” he says.

“I’ve engaged the CSIRO for a number of years both directly and also through the press to say that we can work together to sort this out and they have no inclination to do it. People don’t know that to build all of the planned solar panels and wind turbines we’re going to have to double the size of the grid, which is 40 per cent of electricity bills.

“The eastern grid in Australia is the most complex machine in the southern hemisphere. The policy of this government is to make it twice as big as it is and twice as complex if you have to integrate intermittent sources into it.

“How do people believe that we can create a grid that’s double the size with lower energy density and still have the current quality of life?

“The current policy is based on a failure to get proper engineers in the room. Engineers are being banned from giving talks as we speak,” Paterson says.

The debate between the various alternative energy strategies to reduce carbon should have been held years ago.

We wasted a lot of time debating whether we should lower the carbon content in power instead of working out the best way to do it. That’s what makes the Bowen-O’Brien debate so important.