Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thought the member for Grayndler might be interested in this example; he might want to include it in his policy instead of being totally negative. If you take my index finger as a representation of the generating capacity of the tides of the Kimberley, the generating capacity of the Snowy River scheme would be the thickness of my fingernail. This is a good way, in a visual context, to make that comparison—and I was not sending a sign to the member who interjected! But I hope he listens closely, because, as I have said in this place before, if the Labor Party wants to do something positive after 10 years in opposition, it might want to steal my ideas.

We have wind power, which is so variable. New Zealand is experiencing variations over five minutes of 100 megawatts, which means that somewhere you have to keep burning coal in anticipation of that variation. The sun is quite helpful in a way, provided you do not need to turn the lights on at night time. We have hot rocks energy, which may have some potential as, more particularly, it is compliant with a grid; you can turn it up or down.

You can predict the tides of the world for 100 years. If you were proposing to have tidal generation power without the available adjustments that you can achieve through the pump storage of water during high-tide flows, you could back it up with coal, because it is predictable: you know that at a certain time on a certain day you would need the generating capacity of a coal-fired power station to replace the power that was not available from the tides because they were neap or whatever else.

On clean-coal technology, I might add that the best that the CSIRO can offer us to date is that a power station requires 20 per cent of its energy production to be used to actually clean up its own mess. That means that somewhere else you have to burn 20 per cent more coal. That does not seem to me to be a high-priority option. I would say the same about nuclear power whilst, as I said earlier, I am neither frightened by it nor opposed to it.

The problem with Kimberley tidal power has been that there has not been a customer as the site is too far away. As we all know, technology in Australia changes every day, and a very significant customer is now in the immediate vicinity of the Kimberley tides. It is the liquefied natural gas industry. For every million tonnes of liquefied natural gas exported out of Australia, we burn 100,000 tonnes, or 10 per cent, of that gas resource. What is more, there is an emission problem associated with that. When we burn the gas as a gas, we pay little attention to the amount of natural carbon dioxide that is found within that gas. The big problem for Gorgon is that it is up to 14 per cent, and the government is negotiating with them to attempt geosequestration, which is significantly easier to do in a liquefied natural gas process than in taking it out of the very hot chimney stack of a power station.

So there is a customer for tidal power. The Browse field, yet to be developed by Woodside, requires 900 megawatts of electricity generation. That is the output of a very big suburban power station. I doubt we have got many of that size in Australia. That field is one of many; Gorgon has not started yet. In other words, we could meet those gigawatts of demand in the immediate vicinity by developing the tidal resources of the Kimberley—totally renewable, perpetual and predictable.

But now it so happens that Australia has walked into the high-voltage DC transmission industry. We have a very credible facility called Basslink. We have crossed Bass Strait with a power line that obviously could not have transformers and all the usual things by which we pump electricity along wires. It is based on HVDC technology. It is two-way traffic—and very sensibly so. Instead of wasting the hydro resources of Tasmania on baseload, they are now consuming baseload from coal, topping up Victoria’s and their own grid with hydro.

America’s HVDC transmission capacity is such that it is now transporting electricity over 2,000 miles, or 3½ thousand kilometres. The other day I got out an old Main Roads map that I had when I was a truckie and that tells me distances around Australia, particularly distances around the state of Western Australia. I was surprised when I suddenly found that Perth is only about 2,300—don’t hold me to the exact number—kilometres away from Derby, the centre of this tidal power region. We could transmit that power all the way to Perth and the south-west. It is not that much further to Port Augusta, where there is a substantial power station and, to the best of my knowledge, an interconnection throughout the eastern seaboard. In other words—for the information of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, who is sitting at the table—we could give some tidal power to Melbourne and we could balance that against the emissions from their brown coal. Instead of wasting 20 per cent on trying to clean the coal, we balance it with probably 40 per cent renewable power that creates no emissions. Of course, you can also go across Australia and hook up to the coal-fired power stations and resources of Queensland. Then, as you do with Basslink, you go back and forth: from the coal to the liquefied natural gas when that is needed and to tidal power for the major cities of Australia when it goes the other way. In my closing remarks, I am asking the opposition to come with me and ask the Prime Minister for another Switkowski inquiry into the potential of tidal power generation. I do not see why it should be left out.

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