Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is exactly right! That is a very good question. I hear the member over there, and I am sure that he would be very concerned, because we know that South Australia relies on an extension cord—the interconnectors through to those brown-coal power stations—to suck about 700 megawatts of electricity to keep the lights on in South Australia. What will happen now that Victoria is becoming a net importer of electricity? South Australia is going to flick the switch to Victoria and there will be no power there. The lights will go out again! This is where we see the insanity of this Renewable Energy Target, because whatever we build in wind or solar we have to back up 100 per cent in fossil fuels.

The Renewable Energy Target undermines all of the business case for that fossil fuel generating capacity—the baseload capacity that we need to keep the lights on. The RET drives the power stations out and it makes them uncompetitive. You need to run these things 24/7, and when you have to turn them on and off to let the wind come in and out of the grid, they become inefficient to run and they become uneconomic to run. No-one is going to invest in them simply because of the RET. We are undermining the economic viability of our nation. We need to have a complete revision of where we are up to in energy generation facilities in this nation. We cannot continue to keep building wind turbine after wind turbine and closing down our fossil fuel generating facilities, because it drives the prices up, it drives people out of business and it makes our nation uncompetitive.

This is all about the economy. There are so many things that we, as members of parliament, want to spend our money on. There are so many things we want to invest in, from schools to aged care to education to hospitals. But we need to create wealth in this nation. If we wipe out our coal-fired power stations, we wipe out the best wealth creation facilities— (Time expired)

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