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

I can't agree with the premise of this. We have to have a total reality check about the misinformation that's been peddled for 15 years about a renewable system being cheap. An individual renewable generator might be cheap, and it bloody well should be—I take that back. It really should be because it doesn't deliver much energy. The capacity factor of renewables is incredibly low. Would you build a car that only worked 15, 10 or five per cent of the time? No, you wouldn't.

Well, the proponents on the other side are suggesting that we build up to 82 per cent renewables as the base for our electricity system. The full system cost of electricity under renewables is incredibly expensive because it firstly has to be overbuilt to try and, at least on paper, make up for the low-capacity factor. The University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland and Princeton uni have actually analysed this cost. It's called the Net-Zero Australia Study. It took all the highly trained academics and researchers two years, and their landmark report pointed out the cost that is needed by 2030 for the scheme. It's an absolute bargain! It's $1.3 to $1.5 trillion for a renewables-only system.

A renewables system is justified by the LCOE metric, but the levelised cost of energy, which is in the GenCost report—the CSIRO badged report—is the cost of generation. The generators don't set your electricity price. The grid and the delivery of electricity set the price, and that's the levelised cost of energy for the full system. For a grid built on renewables, that is incredibly expensive. That's what Princeton uni, Melbourne uni and Queensland uni have published and put on the record with a straight face. That is what it's going to cost Australia. It also means carpeting the equivalent of the state of Victoria with solar farms and wind farms.

Nuclear costs have been analysed by many bodies, including the United Nations, the EU, the OECD and Australian academics like the former Labor candidate for the seat of Goulburn—a good colleague of mine—Mr Robert Parker. A trained engineer who has a master's in nuclear science from ANU, he and Robert Barr, who runs Electric Power Consulting and came out of the New South Wales electricity commission, have actually done the cost, and a baseload system based on nuclear energy is the best solution both for the climate and the economy. Renewables based systems not only cost a fortune to build; they have a short lifespan, a huge geographic footprint and need massive backup with batteries. You need to expand the grid. A minimum of 10,000 kilometres is proposed at the moment, but if you really want to make hydrogen all over the country you will have to make about 23,000 kilometres. What it doesn't tell you is that, with this renewable system, your house, your battery, your car's battery are going to be the backups for a system that will inevitably fail.

During May, wind generation in Australia did what wind generation always does around this time of year. We had some beautifully sunny days and weeks. You couldn't feel a breath of wind. The amount of generation in most of these wind farm areas was in the single figures on more days than not. That's why you need all these massive backups of batteries and pumped hydro schemes that are yet to be built. It is absolutely misleading when people say that a renewables based system is cheap. Renewables will have a place in any system, but you can't use it as the baseload. Baseload energy is the same as every other energy: it's got to be there with frequency control, with the right voltage, at the right place, and it has to be reliable. You can't have a system if it depends on the weather. You can't run a nation depending on the weather.

See this speech in context