Chris Bowen’s ‘bill busting batteries’ show what’s wrong with Labor’s renewable energy policy

Climate Change and Energy Minister in Chris Bowen in Bidwill in western Sydney on Tuesday launching a local community battery. Picture: Jane Dempster

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

A day after Anthony Albanese walked away from Labor’s failed 2022 promise to cut $275 off electricity prices by this year, Energy Minister Chris Bowen has offered a swath of western Sydney suburbs a $400 cut in electricity prices.

The Prime Minister has had to defend his dumping of the RepuTex modelling which was the basis for the repeated promise in the last three years to cut power prices by $275 but also the basis for carbon emission reductions and expansion of renewable energy.

Bowen backed the PM’s position on Monday that “circumstances” had changed and said the RepuTex modelling was “done in 2021 and we’re now in 2025” and Labor was achieving the emission reduction targets.

On Tuesday the Climate Change Minister announced a series of “community batteries” in western and southwestern Sydney which will store unused rooftop solar energy and feed the energy back into more than 1000 homes that “could save households up to $400 a year”.

The community batteries, Bowen said, will boost reliability by absorbing excess rooftop solar and help “avoid costly upgrades to the electricity network’s poles and wires”.

The new “bill busting batteries” are in the western Sydney Labor-held electorates of Industry Minister Ed Husic’s Chifley and Macquarie as well as the ALP’s targeted seat of Fowler held by independent MP Dai Le.

But there are few problems for the community-battery policy as a microcosm of Labor’s macro energy and climate change policy apart from, once again, raising the prospect of a nominated price cut for consumers – $400.

For a start, only 21 of the 400 taxpayer-subsidised community batteries promised at the last election at a cost of $200m to “support 100,000 households” are in operation and only one of those is from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency $171m plan.

Community batteries were a key plank in cutting the cost of energy and reducing carbon emissions.

Bowen said in 2021: “Power to the People will unlock the full potential of rooftop solar for Australian households: lower power bills, cut emissions, help stabilise the grid.”

Now, Bowen, in cookie-cutter media releases where the suburbs are changed, admits that one of the advantages of the community batteries is that they will “help to avoid the costly upgrades to the electricity network’s poles and wires”.

This is one day after he rejected the Coalition’s major argument about the need for at least 10,000km of “poles and wires” to connect renewables and said it had to be done anyway.

What’s more, the MP for Fowler Dai Le, who wasn’t invited to share the news of the community batteries in her electorate, called out the whole plan at the most basic of all grounds – cost.

“The Albanese Labor government has misled our Cabramatta community with claims of lowering electricity costs with their community batteries announcement! Instead of seeing bills decrease, we’re being charged to use a tiny battery system that benefits energy retailers, not local residents,” she told The Australian.

“It won’t even provide enough power to cook a few dozen spring rolls at a few restaurants on John Street! Yet, we’ll all be paying higher electricity prices to fund this small system, which will run out quickly. The government should focus on a battery support program for residents who’ve invested in solar systems, not continue to make empty promises.”

Bowen’s initiative was low key and small but it has managed to raise all the same questions about the principles and promises upon which Labor’s renewables energy policy is based.