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

Before I start my comments on the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (Grid Reliability Fund) Bill 2020, I'd like to comment on some of the member for Macquarie's comparisons with the UK. And it is good that the member for Macquarie considers what is happening in other countries and compares herself with them. However, if you want to compare us with the UK, they are a nation that get 20 per cent of their electricity from nuclear power. If the member for Macquarie wants to stand up and praise the UK's electricity policy, is she in favour of nuclear power? Is she in favour, and are those on the other side of the chamber in favour, of having something like 20 per cent of our electricity in this nation generated from nuclear power like it is in the UK? Unless you are going to stand up and say that is what you want, any comparison with the United Kingdom is irrelevant.

You also need to understand that the United Kingdom have an undersea cable across the channel to France's nuclear power. So when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow and the Thames freezes over, as it did last week for the first time in 60 years, you have no intermittent generation from those renewable sources. England has an extension cord to the French nuclear power stations—something that we don't have.

Getting back to my comments on this particular bill, it's called the grid reliability fund bill. The problem: why do we need extra dollars for grid reliability? Over a decade ago we had one of the lowest cost and most reliable grids of anywhere in the world. We used that beautiful black coal seam that runs down our eastern seaboard, close to our population centres, to generate the majority of our electricity. We had the Snowy Hydro project to come in during peak periods with hydroelectricity. We had our gas peakers. That gave our eastern seaboard the most efficient, most reliable and some of the lowest cost electricity anywhere in the world, but then people knew better. All the experts knew better. We could bring in all this intermittent generation, and it wouldn't cause any problem they told us.

We see the confusion in this policy debate by a recent statement by the member for McMahon who, I understand, has been punted from the health portfolio after being punted as the shadow Treasurer before the last election. Now, after failing in all those other portfolios, he's been given the energy portfolio. He recently said, 'Renewable energy can create thousands of jobs.' He's partly correct, because we're creating thousands of jobs in China. Our subsidies for the year ending June 2019—and Dr Alan Moran has detailed them—are: the large-scale renewable energy target was $1.4 billion; the small-scale energy target, which is the rooftop scheme, was $1.68 billion; $951 million for state regulatory support; federal fiscal support was another $2.4 billion as well as state fiscal support. The total of subsidies for the year ending June 2019 was $6.913 billion.

Who has been the biggest beneficiary of this job creation? It has been the workers of China. If we go through the data, we have something like imports from China in solar panels alone approaching $2 billion a year. So we pack up shipping containers of cash and send them off to China which we exchange for solar panels. The data from 2019: 80 per cent of the imported solar panels into this country came from China. Over the last six years, it is something like $10 billion that has been sent out of this country to buy solar panels from China. These people talk about creating jobs. I'm sure, in Guangzhou province, they are very happy about all the jobs that we're creating for them because of these policies.

Also there is great confusion on the other side of this chamber. Our electricity sector, our electricity generation, is not a job creation scheme. The entire purpose of our electricity generation is to do it as efficiently and at the lowest cost as you possibly can, so industry can take that low-cost electricity and have a competitive advantage to actually produce real wealth for this nation.

That is how you create jobs. You create jobs by lowering the cost of electricity to consumers so they have more money to spend in other sectors of the economy.

The idea that you would use your electricity sector as a job creation scheme would head us towards an economic disaster in this country. We've got to have real jobs that are internationally competitive, and that is where industries need low-cost energy. I hear from some that, 'Wind and solar are cheaper than coal, so the more wind and solar we put into the grid the cheaper electricity becomes.' They will argue that. But to make a comment comparing the cost of intermittent generation with base-load generation is like comparing apples with oranges. You are not comparing like-for-like products. They are not 100 per cent being substituted one for the other. If you are going to do that, you've got to build in the costs of your intermittent generation, your wind and solar. Firstly, there are the additional transmission costs. Billions of dollars in additional transmission lines need to be built and you've got to include that cost. Secondly, you've got to include the cost to back it up, and that's not just for five minutes or 10 minutes. You've got to include the cost to back up your intermittent, weather-dependent generation in the worst possible circumstances and the worst possible weather events that you can have. You may have several days in a row of overcast weather where your solar panels are working at very low capacity and, of course, with nothing at night. You may have several days where your wind gets very low capacity, in the single digits. That is what you have to back it up for.

I'll give you some idea of what sorts of numbers you would need. It was good to hear Dr Gillespie, the member for Lyne, talk about the need for big batteries. If we just replaced the Liddell coal-fired power station with some intermittent stuff and some big batteries, let's just do some numbers on that. We have the world's largest big battery over there in South Australia. It's about 120 megawatt hours. So it dribbles—and 'dribbles' is the right word—about 30 megawatts into the grid per hour. But it can only do that for four hours and then it goes flat. Then you have to have excess generation of electricity to recharge it again. How many of these world's biggest batteries would you need to replace the Liddell coal-fired power station for just one 24-hour period? Let's do the sums. Liddell's actually a 2,000-megawatt power station, but with its age it is rated down to 1,680 megawatts. Over a day, running at full steam for 24 hours, that is 40,320-megawatt hours. Again I ask members on the other side to try and learn the difference between megawatts and megawatt hours so they're not confusing and misleading the Australian public. We know the world's largest battery can do 30 megawatts for four hours, so it would need 56 of the world's largest batteries just to replace Liddell for four hours only. To replace it for 24 hours, you would need 336 of the world's largest batteries that they have over there in South Australia. That's just for 24 hours. That is not enough for the worst circumstances of weather. Anyone that stands up in any parliament and says we can replace our coal-fired generators with big batteries should go and do the maths, because they have no idea what they are talking about.

The other issue that we have when we come to this debate is that every single thing we seem to do in this policy space gives an advantage to the Communist Party of China. I said that about $10 billion of wealth has been transferred out of this country to import solar panels from China over the last five to six years. You've even got what I consider to be misleading and deceptive conduct. There's a group out there called Canadian Solar. If I went and bought solar panels from a company called Canadian Solar I think it would be fair enough to expect that they might just be made in Canada. But, on their own website, this company says, 'Canadian Solar is a producer of tier 1 panels.' Despite their name, any panels you may buy from them in Australia will not be made in Canada. Canadian Solar panels, those from outside North America, will most likely be made in—you guessed it—China. With everything we do in this space, we're transferring billions of dollars of our wealth to China. We are putting our own Australian industries at a competitive disadvantage compared to China. When we talk about going down the track of net zero emissions, of making the cost of air travel greater, who are we harming? Our Pacific neighbours. We are damaging the economies of our Pacific neighbours by making the cost of air travel higher when we go down this net zero track. Again, who gets the advantage out of that? If our Pacific regional neighbours are weaker economically, they are more exposed to influence from China.

We go to see what's happening in China today. Here we have it. A report from Reuters, only two weeks ago, says, 'China put 38.4 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020.' Hang on a minute. Liddell, at full capacity, is two megawatts. The new capacity that China has added in 2020 alone is 38.4 gigawatts of electricity. People say, 'Oh, yes, but they're closing other power stations down.' The net increase last year in China's coal-fired power stations was 29.8 gigawatts. That's more coal-fired power stations than we have almost in our entire nation. And that's their increase in just one year!

The article goes on. It says, 'China approved the construction of a further 36.9 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity last year, three times more than a year earlier, bringing the total under construction to 88.1 gigawatts.' That's the equivalent of 40 new replacement Liddells. It goes on: 'It now has 247 gigawatts of coal power under development.' Two hundred and forty-seven! That's more than 100 Liddell power stations at their full capacity. And here we are wanting to close down our coal-fired power stations! We want to ship our own Australian coal off to China for the Chinese to use to create wealth and prosperity and jobs in that country. Yet we have so many members of parliament here who are prepared to sell our nation out, to sell our nation's sovereignty out, and say, 'We can't use that same coal.' It's okay to ship it to China and let China use it, but we can't use it here. That is a betrayal of our nation. That is a betrayal of your constituents. It is going to destroy jobs and transfer wealth out of this nation to the Communist Party of China. I for one am not going to sit here in this parliament and just allow that to happen without using my voice to say how absurd and how ridiculous and how anti-Australian this policy is—just to chase a few green votes. Shame on you all! Shame on the lot of you! We need to put our nation's interests first.

When it comes to these nonsense net zero emissions policies, are we going to exempt our military from them? We heard talk in the paper the other day about wanting to develop solar-panelled tanks. Battle tanks are there to protect the nation, to protect the Western alliance. They are not there as part of some green scheme to try and reach net zero. I will leave my comments there, but I call on all members of this parliament to put the interests of this nation first. Don't sell out to the interests of the Greens and the Communist Party of China.

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