Trevor Evans (Brisbane, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This report,Powering our future: inquiry into modernising Australia’s electricity grid, is a significant contribution to this parliament's work on the very important topic of energy. It's significant for a number of reasons. This report is, indeed, bipartisan. It's worth reflecting for a moment on what it means when members with diverse world views, such as the member for Melbourne and the member for Hughes, stand together for what is essentially a consensus on energy policy. The point is that this report is bipartisan, and it contains very sensible work that will help take some of the ideology and politics out of the energy debate, hopefully, and help to restore that important certainty that the member for Werriwa just spoke to—the certainty that is critically needed in the energy industry to attract future investment and, ultimately, to put downward pressure on prices.

The first recommendation of this report makes that very clear—the importance of policy certainty. The report goes on to make a number of very other important recommendations, 23 all up, that underscore the importance of some of the other key planks of this government's energy policies. They are an increased focus on dispatchability, the flexibility of the energy grid going forward and the need to promote stability in both a technical and an economic sense.

I want to outline some of the significant recommendations of this report. The first ones relate to grid planning. The recommendations about better future planning of transmission investments and those testings of the business cases for new interconnectors or other transmission assets, for example, I think will prove to be critically important for the future operation of the National Electricity Market. The recommendations around changing the market rules, speeding up that process, are also quite significant. When the industry is undergoing such rapid change, it's very important that the regulatory framework and, indeed, the bureaucracy don't move slower than the technology. We don't want to block sensible, efficient innovation from occurring.

Some other very notable recommendations relate to the search for efficiencies in industrial and business customers. The recommendations to help industrial users to audit their processes, plus updated resources for small and medium businesses, should be welcomed, especially by those small business operators who are often so busy in their businesses that it becomes very difficult for them to find the time to work on their businesses by researching and considering some of their other energy options. In many cases, the options available to those small businesses will have moved on; the costs and the benefits may have changed significantly since they last considered the state of play, possibly some years ago.

It's also important to understand where this report fits into the broader energy debate. Obviously, the energy grid is but one important part of our energy system. That's why there are a number of other key planks to the government's energy policy suite. Separate to the grid and the area of generation for wholesale markets, the government's National Energy Guarantee is the mechanism that will help settle that energy trifecta of affordability, reliability and emissions reduction. The reliability guarantee in the National Energy Guarantee helps deliver that right level of dispatchable energy when it's needed by customers, while the emissions guarantee will ensure that Australia simultaneously meets its international environmental commitments. This two-part guarantee designed by the experts and, indeed, by the Energy Security Board will help deliver that affordable and reliable energy supply we want to see by creating the future policy certainty that all members of this committee have strongly sought to endorse—that certainty that we need for our investment and our wholesale markets.

Another key plank of our energy plan, reflecting the need for storage relating to intermittent electricity from some new and emerging technologies, is Snowy Hydro 2.0. I visited the Snowy Hydro scheme last week to see the opportunities it presents, given that pumped hydro is the more mature, proven storage solution that's been both technologically feasible and commercially feasible for years now. The one thing that struck me more than anything else, I think, was probably the sheer scale of the project in terms of its relativities to the size of our entire energy system. To put it into perspective, Snowy Hydro 2.0. is the equivalent of 35 million household batteries—35 million household units. It provides up to 350,000 megawatt hours of supply. To put that number into perspective, the Tesla battery plant that's recently been installed in South Australia provides 129 megawatt hours of supply—129 compared to 350,000 megawatt hours of supply for Snowy Hydro 2.0. In other words, Snowy Hydro 2.0 is essentially the equivalent of 2,700 of those South Australian Tesla battery installations lined up one against the other. That's not to denigrate or to choose between the two; it's to give an explanation of the scale of the solution that we're talking about here.

There are some other key planks in our suite of energy policies. One is supporting those very important trials and the research and development that's needed to ensure that some of those new and emerging technologies can continue to come down the cost curve and become more financially and commercially viable alternatives. Another key plank, obviously, is the pressure that we're putting on gas markets to ensure that the price of gas is kept down by ensuring that our abundant local supplies of gas meet our own domestic demand. That's important because gas power plants are now so often setting the spot price in wholesale electricity markets.

On top of that, the government has also removed the ability of energy companies to use limited merits review—that's a form of lawfare, essentially—in tribunals to potentially undermine the pricing decisions of the regulator. That should help to keep downward pressure on prices from that aspect of our energy system. And at the retail end of the industry, we have also obviously done a lot of work to ensure that customers can take advantage of whatever better deals there might be for them out there in the marketplace amongst various energy retailers.

I wanted to spend the time going through that checklist just to reinforce the point that there are all of these planks to our energy policy. I wanted to make the point very firmly that the energy policy debate has moved on in the last 18 months. Less and less is it about the politics, and more and more it's about the competence in managing and delivering the transition currently occurring in our energy industry. That transition is being managed and delivered by this government. That transition does include the transition for a modernising electricity grid. This report, focusing as it does on that transition in the grid, is therefore one more plank of that certain energy policy future that we all want to see.

I want to give some very quick thank yous, first of all, to all of those stakeholders who gave evidence to the committee as it did its very important work; a very big thank you to the secretariat for their work; and also a very big thank you to my other committee members for all of their bipartisan efforts. It was important work.

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