Analysis: Australia needs to follow Donald Trump’s lead and declare a national energy emergency on high power bills | Paul Starick

I’ve spent 30 years writing about energy changes in Australia – most of them for the worse, writes Paul Starick.

Australia should follow Donald Trump’s lead and declare a national energy emergency, as a desperately needed circuit breaker to the impasse over unaffordable and unreliable electricity supplies.

For too many decades, state and federal politicians have been waging bitter ideological warfare with one another over the energy transition.

Households and businesses continue to pay the price – unless they can afford large solar and battery arrays costing tens of thousands of dollars. The nation’s low-cost energy advantage has been sacrificed, fuelling a cost-of-living crisis that makes Australia globally uncompetitive.

South Australia has been at the forefront of the energy transition.

Our state has been the canary in the coalmine for renewable energy and has been considered a global leader in the embrace of solar and wind power.

US President Donald Trump in Doral, Florida at a the three-day planning session that was expected to lay out Trump's legislative agenda. Picture: Joe Raedle/Getty Images/AFP

Now, we should do the same for nuclear energy, something that both major parties have talked about for decades and federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton now has had the courage to put firmly and decisively on the agenda.

The time has come to stop talking about the energy crisis, shed ideological constraints and act firmly in the interests of consumers, businesses and households.

For most of the past 30 years, I’ve written about electricity system changes, mostly for the worse.

In late 1999, more than half of SA’s electricity customers suffered load-shedding blackouts when a heatwave overloaded the grid.

The national electricity market manager had issued warnings almost every day that year that the state’s power supplies were hovering dangerously close to demand.

The state-owned ETSA utility, perhaps, should not have been privatised in 1999. But SA had a huge debt burden after the 1991 State Bank financial catastrophe.

The statewide blackout of September 28, 2016, triggered extensive debate over its causes but, ultimately, tarnished SA’s reputation for years.

Almost a decade later, the electricity impasse continues. National electricity market figures released on Thursday show record Q4 wholesale prices in NSW and Qld, plus record-breaking demand.

The purpose of President Trump’s executive order of January 20 could equally apply to Australia.

“The … leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, and generation capacity of the United States are all far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs. We need a reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy to drive our Nation’s manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, and defence industries, and to sustain the basics of modern life and military preparedness,” the Trump order says.

Nuclear energy is being embraced across the US, particularly to fuel soaring energy demands from data centres and the like. TerraPower, a nuclear company founded by Bill Gates, on January 21 signed a deal to deploy reactors at Sabey Data Centres.

Premier Peter Malinauskas, who more than a decade ago declared “nuclear energy can be a safe source of base load power, with zero carbon emissions”, should start seriously examining the Coalition plan for a Port Augusta reactor.

Federal and state Labor have not managed to shoot down the Coalition's costings for its $331bn plan for a net-zero nuclear-powered grid by 2050, unveiled in December last year.

Those costings were prepared by Frontier Economics, which modelled state Labor’s $593m Whyalla hydrogen power plant and the 2017 energy plan that delivered Elon Musk’s big battery.

SA has the world’s largest uranium resource, at Olympic Dam, and will build AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines in Adelaide’s northwest.

Mr Malinauskas has argued nuclear is uneconomic for Australia, but Labor’s traditionally preferred economists insist otherwise.

Australians have paid the price for decades of indecision on nuclear energy. The challenge now is to act on the evidence and in the interests of consumers, rather than be subsumed by politics.

Originally published as Analysis: Australia needs to follow Donald Trump’s lead and declare a national energy emergency on high power bills | Paul Starick