Meanwhile,Victoria’s Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio saysthe development of a capacity mechanism to secure the power supplycannot include coal and gas. Pause on that proposition for a moment. Victoria is demanding that 70 per cent of the National Electricity Market’s generating capacity be excluded from a capacity market.
Andthis is the minister who struck asecret deal withEnergy Australia to ensure brown-coal-burning Yallourn Power Station keeps its capacity in the market until its scheduled retirement in 2028. This raises pretence to performance art.
Last week,this column asked federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen if the short-term fix to the energy crisis was to keep coal-fired generators operating until their retirement date,fix the ones that are broken and include them in the capacity market.
There followed an impassioned speech.
“No,that has been a long-held view of yours,and it is not one I agree with,” Bowen said. “The problem is there is not enough investment in renewable energy. There hasn’t been enough investment in storage. Yes,you can say the wind doesn’t always blow,and the sun doesn’t always shine. The rain doesn’t always fall either,but we can store the water and we can store renewable energy if we have the investment. That investment has been lacking for the last decade. That is the problem.”
In no particular order,storing water involves digging a hole in the ground,storing energy is a tad more complex. The question asked about dealing with the real world,in the short term,with the assets that we have. The answer was a lament to a world that does not yet exist.
Andthis reporter’s long-held view is that “renewables are the future but,today,they present serious engineering problems. To deny that is to deny the science”. I could lie and claim the transition was easy and win plaudits from the conga line of dopes on Twitter,but that show is already oversubscribed.
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Some things in politics can be spun and don’t matter. But the electricity system is governed by physics and is really serious. No amount of rhetoric will power it. Like gravity,you get this wrong,you fall.