Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker. I want to speak this afternoon about electricity. The focus has been on South Australia and what has become the rolling disaster of electricity supply in South Australia, it must be said. The cause of this can be linked back to the premature closure of Alinta's coal fired power station in Port Augusta. It was not so long ago that Alinta expanded their coalfields at Leigh Creek and gave them a life through to 2030. They and we expected that they would operate that plant until around 2030. If that had been the case, that would have given time for the development of the transition away from fossil fuel to renewable energy—time to build storages, and we do not fully understand how we are going to do it, and time to develop new technologies to address the shortfall.

South Australia now has an installed capacity of wind of well over 50 per cent, which delivered around 41 per cent of our total consumable electricity in the last 12 months. That led to a period of time when we had oversupply in the market. On average, our wholesale prices were at around $45 per megawatt hour, and Alinta became very concerned about this around 2011 or 2012. I had a lot of ongoing discussions with the company at that time.

I also took the opportunity to meet with the commissioner of the Australian Energy Market Commission, and I said to him at the time, 'If we allow Port Augusta to go offline prematurely'—and remember that at that time prices were very low, on an average basis, because the market was being flooded. They were losing money. They were losing millions of dollars a month—'that will plunge South Australia into darkness.' I was assured at the time: 'Mr Ramsay, we are in the process of upgrading the Heywood interconnector to Victoria, and we think, even without Port Augusta, the South Australian grid will continue to operate soundly.'

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