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

This motion, moved by the member for Fairfax, is reality mugging people back into common sense. People have been notified their bill, if they're a householder, will rise by 30 per cent. That's for most of my region. For some of my small businesses, industrial users, it's absolutely business destroying. That's particularly because a lot of their energy systems are gas based. Their electricity and their gas prices, in some cases, have gone up 300 per cent.

The problem is the plan. No-one using any rational engineering or economic analysis can, in truth, support it, but AEMO do. They are the architect of it. It is beyond belief that the regulator is encouraging the nation to commit economic harikari—no joke intended, because Kurri Kurri power plant is part of it—by, for instance, trying to build a power plant that runs on hydrogen when it was designed to run on gas.

Some of this plan is scary. Eighty per cent of our base-load power system is to be closed down—blown up—by 2035 without any equivalent replacement. We are going to have five times more rooftop solar. We're going to have nine times more wind farms. Part of the plan is that the number of batteries will increase 30 times, and that includes the virtual power plant. For listeners out there in Australia, the virtual power plant means your power plant—your Tesla or other electric car that's plugged into the grid. That's the power plant.

Part of this plan is to build 28,000 kilometres of new transmission and distribution. But this doesn't just include things like VNI West, which is 820 kilometres through hundreds of thousands of hectares of remnant native forestry or pristine agricultural land that won't be able to be utilised fully, or the HumeLink, which is another 45,000 hectares. These new grids are going to isolated assets that can't connect to the grid, but they are insisting on being paid a regulated asset based return—a fixed return—as though they were being utilised all the time. But because they are renewable producers, they're only going to be carrying current between 20 per cent, if they're solar farms, or 35 per cent, on average, of a year. For a lot of the time, they will not carry any electrons anywhere. But, already, half your bill is accounted for by transmission costs. Your transmission costs on your bill won't be going up by these latest numbers of 30 per cent, which is outrageous; they'll be going up multiples of times. With the transmission costs and the costs of all these grids, which in all estimates have gone up 425 per cent in cost, building all this stuff is going to bankrupt us.

The University of Melbourne, Princeton University and the University of Queensland have analysed this plan. They've copied what they did in America. In America, it was only going to take two states out of 50. But, for us to deploy all these solar farms and wind farms, it's going to use land equivalent to Victoria. The thing about this plan that's renewables dependant is that all the renewables that have been installed in Australia for the last 23 years—guess what—are just about at the end of their lives. Not only have we got to do all this extra stuff out to 2030 or 2050; you're also going to have to reinstall everything that's already been installed. It is never-ending building and consuming land. All these renewables are great when you can get them, but you can't build a grid and an industrial system on them. Once you get to about the level that we are, we are going exponentially to a very brittle grid because of poor frequency and voltage control. Without any physical inertia, because of the development of harmonic circuits, which is malignant to big machines working, we will have blackouts, even though there's electricity in the wires. It's an engineering disaster, an economic disaster, an environmental disaster and an agricultural disaster. The last thing in this plan is that all we need to do is reforest six million hectares of agricultural pasture land. (Time expired)

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