Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a pathetic effort by the member for Boothby. I have news for you: this is a national energy crisis, and you've been the national government for four years. This is a national crisis because we have generators leaving the market without sufficient replacements. We've lost 5,000 megawatts of base-load thermal power over the last decade. Guess how much has occurred under their government? Seventy per cent—twice as much has gone in their time in government in half the time; 3,500 megawatts of coal-fired power has been lost under their watch because they've been in chaos for four years. They don't have a national energy plan. They've given loads of uncertainty for generators, who are unable to make their investments. The truth is that we have a very old power fleet. In New South Wales, the average age is 35 years. In Victoria, it's 44 years. The real question is not: 'Can we survive with it?' It is: 'What replaces it?' Eventually, it has to retire.

The members on the other side are obsessed with South Australia. I've got news for them. Not a single wind farm in South Australia would have been built without the bipartisan Renewable Energy Target. That is the only reason they're built. If there's any issue with wind, they own it! But the truth is that we have an ageing power fleet which is causing curtailment all over the place. On the 47 degree day in February in New South Wales, we didn't lose a couple of hundred megawatts like South Australia; we lost 1,000 megawatts of thermal base-load power—old power stations that were unable to perform. What happened? They were forced to curtail Tomago Aluminium smelter in the member for Paterson's great electorate, imperilling the jobs of over a 1,000 direct employees. They had no choice. If they didn't turn off Tomago, they would have had to load-shed 400,000 homes—four times what occurred in South Australia—because old base-load power couldn't deliver.

So the debate here is about how we replace it. AEMO has belled the cat. If people had bothered to read the AEMO report released yesterday—

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