David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a bit of a Ponzi scheme. We are seeing policies that are going to double down and triple down on these policies that we have resisted. Everyone thinks that the federal energy minister controls everything. He gets to chair the meetings but the state energy ministers also have a say, and they appoint most of the people on AEMO.

The concept that your electricity is based on just the generation cost—add a windmill in the middle of a paddock or on a mountain or add a solar panel. Sure, it's cheap. But what you get with variable renewable energy is poor frequency control, low voltage and random availability, and that costs a lot to integrate into the grid. So the grid ancillary services and all the synchronous condensers, all the inverters, all the massive transmission losses because it's low-voltage energy—that's why your energy costs are going up. Rewiring the nation and repowering the nation will triple and quadruple the costs and really send us to the wall.

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