Energy security: a litmus test for the PM and his deputy

For years the federal government published an annual stocktake of major electricity projects in the pipeline: some firmly committed, some undergoing feasibility studies, some simply proposals. But in 2016, the stocktake was suspended. There was too little investment to report.

Good policy versus poor politics: deputy prime
minister Barnaby Joyce, prime minister Malcolm
 Turnbull and foreign affairs minister
Julie Bishop at a meeting of cabinet’s energy
committee at Parliament House last week.

The only information we have now is from the Australian Energy Market Operator, which publishes a simple graph and table of future projects on its website. It shows committed investment amounting to just 634 megawatts of new electricity generation – 583 MW of wind and 51 MW of solar – within the national electricity grid. Proposals exist for gas-fired stations, but none are definite. And there’s not a single plan for another coal-fired station.

To put that in perspective, the extra wind and solar generation would add a little over 1 per cent to the capacity of the national grid – if the gain wasn’t dwarfed by the 1618 MW of coal- and gas-fired power stations that have recently closed, and the further 3835 MW, overwhelmingly coal-fired, slated for closure. (The closures include Australia’s biggest polluter, the fifty-year-old Hazelwood power station, near Morwell.)

Read what Tim Colebatch has  written on Inside Story - “Energy security: a litmus test for the PM and his deputy.”