Luke Foley pledges to 'massively increase' rooftop solar if elected

Opposition leader Luke Foley is promising to "massively increase" solar generation in NSW if elected in 2019 by installing panels on the rooftops of government buildings including schools, hospitals and police stations.

Opposition leader Luke Foley is promising to "massively
 increase" solar generation in NSW 

In his budget reply speech to be delivered on Thursday, Mr Foley will also call on the government to invest in battery storage technology to avoid blackouts and pledge to not build the F6 extension through the Royal National Park.

According to speech excerpts released by his office, Mr Foley will note that on February 10 this year "NSW ran out of power" – a reference to the strain on the electricity grid during extreme heatwave conditions.

Mr Foley will say that due to inaction by the Berejiklian government, NSW is "staring down the barrel at the possibility of blackouts this coming summer.”

Read Sean Nicholls’ story in The Sydney Morning Herald - “Luke Foley pledges to 'massively increase' rooftop solar if elected.”

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.”