Renewable energy: It's not South Australia's scheme, it's the Commonwealth's
Updated
Danny Price is a respected energy expert who helped design Australia's national energy market rules. This is an edited extract of his interview with AM.
We are heading towards a third-world power system very rapidly.
Parts of it are quite low reliability at the moment — South Australia in particular because of a very large quantity of renewable generation.
Victoria, following the closure of the Hazelwood power station in March, will become increasingly unreliable and that will have implications for the interconnected states of both South Australia and New South Wales and it'll have a knock-on effect right through to Queensland.
We currently don't have the technology in place to manage our power system reliably with very large quantities of renewables.
We have to find technological solutions to overcome that.
SA's wind farms in place because of 'Mr Turnbull's scheme'.
All but one wind farm that's gone into South Australia has gone in because of the Commonwealth Government scheme and not because of the State Government.
The Prime Minister's particularly critical of the South Australian Government for what he describes as the South Australian Government's scheme.
It's not the South Australian Government's scheme — it's Mr Turnbull's scheme.
Federal Government has 'no policy'
[The Federal Government] has no policy to achieve the Paris emissions reduction pledge it itself on a national level.
But it is critical of the states who have stepped into the policy vacuum created by there being no national policy.
The state governments — in particular Victoria, the ACT and Queensland — have committed to quite significant renewable targets by about 2030-35 of about 50 per cent.
If nothing changes, we actually achieve the 28 per cent reduction with no national policy.
So the Federal Government gets the opportunity to criticise the states for these schemes for being expensive and leading to greater insecurity, which will certainly happen, while claiming the benefits of the emissions reduction.
No sign of Canberra working to fix the situation
It's very hard to arrest a decline in the quality of a power system; it takes a lot of very bad decisions to get to this point.
Given the way that the politics are panning out right now in Parliament, it doesn't look like as if we've got any movement towards an improvement.
We've now got the Federal Energy Minister parroting what Penny Wong said seven years ago about the Emissions Intensity Scheme.
Labor criticised the Emissions Intensity Scheme back in 2009; Turnbull at the time supported it.
And that's completely reversed.
The Emissions Intensity Scheme was the policy the Labor Opposition took to the last election.
Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, business-economics-and-finance, industry, electricity-energy-and-utilities, alternative-energy, australia
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