James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Speaker. I'll happily take the opportunity. I assume someone's communicating with the member for Clark on the situation, but, nonetheless, I'll take my opportunity to make a contribution on this motion.

I welcome the opportunity to talk about what the Commonwealth government is doing to undertake the three important elements of the energy transformation in this country, not only reducing emissions but also ensuring that we are reducing electricity prices and making sure that we have a reliable energy and electricity system. As a South Australian, I've got particular interest in the latter two points being done in concert with the challenge of emissions reduction, because it's very important that, in this country, as we reduce our emissions, we're also ensuring that the collateral outcome of that doesn't involve dramatic escalation of electricity prices for struggling families and businesses and, of course, the additional lack of reliability that is a risk if we're not ensuring that we have a transition that provides not only a reduction in carbon but also a stable, reliable electricity grid that is affordable.

I welcome the news today from AGL in my home state of South Australia that they are building a new battery system on Torrens Island, a 250-megawatt-hour plant that goes with a lot of the other grid-scale battery schemes that are being invested in in my home state and across the nation, in many cases with support from the Commonwealth government through ARENA and other agencies. In South Australia, we now regularly have the situation where the entire grid consumption for our state is being provided from renewable energy. I'm proud of that and want to see that growing into the future.

Recent decisions around an interconnector to New South Wales will put South Australia in an enhanced position to export more renewable energy out of South Australia to the national electricity market. We already have the 800-megawatt interconnector through the Heywood line to Victoria and now we're talking about building a 750-megawatt interconnector through New South Wales. That will put South Australia in the position to install a lot more renewable energy generation in South Australia and have the interstate export markets for our renewable energy there to firm up investment decisions, attract capital and see us investing in more renewable energy generation in South Australia, where there is a market and a home, which makes it a lot more viable. That will see a continued increase in renewable generation for South Australia, continued periods of time where renewables are the entirety of generated electricity while also ensuring that the affordability is there and the firmament of supply is there, because the challenges of intermittent electricity generation are still there with the renewables that we're installing. The more diverse generation we've got the better, and equally the ability to send that electricity interstate makes them a lot more economically viable.

I'm also very proud of the partnership between the CEFC and the South Australian state government to provide finance for home-scale battery installation in South Australia. We now have, on some metrics, the largest distributed grid on the planet, and this involves us being able to marry up installed PV solar on rooftops with a storage solution that genuinely means that a household in Adelaide can generate electricity when the sun's shining but be able to use it when the actual demand profile is there. One of the real challenges so far has been that you don't necessarily want to consume the energy at the same time that you're generating it, so storage at the local level is vital for that.

As I said, we've got the largest distributed storage grid in the world and we proudly want to continue to expand that. It's these technology solutions that are going to see us address the important objective of reducing emissions. Of course, as a government we are very ambitious to get to net zero as soon as it is possible to do so. But the Prime Minister has made it clear that we won't mislead the Australian people by setting targets that we don't have a plan to achieve. That's what our government is about: practically investing in technologies that can see us meet those objectives while reducing emissions while also ensuring affordability and stability in the grid. I've outlined some of the things that we're doing. I'm proud to be a part of a government that is investing in those initiatives and many more to achieve these important objectives.

See this speech in context