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

I'd like to take this opportunity this evening to update the parliament on some of the excellent initiatives of the government around investing and supporting new technology for future energy needs. It was my great pleasure to attend the opening of the Australian Hydrogen Centre Friday week with Minister Taylor, which was just outside my electorate and the member for Boothby's electorate. It's a very important initiative that's going to be significant across not just South Australia but the whole nation. It's a very exciting project that the Commonwealth government are involved and investing in. It's essentially a pilot program which we're undertaking with the Australian Gas Networks to build a hydrogen electrolyser, thereby creating hydrogen from water, or H2O, with hydrogen and oxygen as a by-product, and blending that hydrogen into the mains gas network in the vicinity of this project at the Flinders University Tonsley precinct. From memory, up to about 700 homes will be supported through this pilot program, and there'll be about five per cent hydrogen blended into the ordinary gas pipeline for that area.

The expectation and the hope is that that's going to be successful and lead to all kinds of opportunities to put hydrogen into the natural gas network across the country, across the state of South Australia, initially at five per cent, but who knows what that could lead to. Obviously, if that's successful, it's going to result in a reduction in CO2 emissions from the use of ordinary natural gas in our homes. When hydrogen burns, unlike natural gas, it doesn't emit CO2. Effectively, it emits water. So that is really exciting, and it underscores for me some of the really practical and sensible investments and initiatives that we're undertaking. I really commend Minister Taylor for the work not only that he's done so far but that he'll be doing as we roll these sorts of pilot projects out across the country into the future.

Hydrogen is a very exciting alternative fuel source for a variety of current CO2 emitting elements of our economy. Transport in many ways I think is probably one of the most exciting applications for hydrogen. The rule of thumb, the scientists were musing on the day, was that, if you think about the future of transport, anything that's currently using unleaded fuel is more likely to be replaced by electric in the future, but anything you run on diesel is more likely to be replaced by hydrogen. For electric you need to carry a battery source on that vehicle, and long-haul transport would require an enormous amount of battery capacity which would mean the cargo component of what you would move would be miniscule. Therefore that solution to replacing large freight is not viable, but hydrogen absolutely is. Hydrogen, just like any other fuel, can be carried in a tanker and run through a combustion engine to generate energy, and the by-product, as I said, is water.

Hydrogen is really exciting. For Australia, it's really exciting because there's so much interest now from other economies like Japan and Korea, who are working with various partners in this country including the government. The Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, has recently spearheaded the National Hydrogen Strategy, which has got a vast array of exciting initiatives within it. That plan, that blueprint, gives every corner of this country the opportunity to participate in the future of hydrogen, which in this country not only could address the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in an economically responsible way but could create a spectacularly exciting future export industry. That is the real difference between our approach and the approach of the Labor Party. We are being very mindful of the fact that as we transition to a lower carbon future we need to make sure that we create economic opportunity out of it, rather than economic cost. Hydrogen is one of many examples of how we can actually achieve both.

I am also very proud of the pioneering role that my home state of South Australia has played in the rollout of home-scale battery storage systems. The Liberal government in South Australia introduced the home battery subsidy scheme—up to $6,000 per battery, means tested of course. That is the maximum that you can get to support the installation of a battery, or battery-solar system if you don't already have solar. This is a very exciting way of dealing with the challenges of intermittency we have had with the rollout of rooftop solar. Rooftop solar is fine when the sun is shining, but after the sun has gone down in the evening, which tends to be the peak consumption time from a household point of view, if you don't have a mechanism for storing the energy that you generated during the day the full benefit of that and the ability to wean people off the broader grid is lost. It is the Liberal government in South Australia that has introduced this scheme. More importantly—which I think people on our side of the House need to do a better job of prosecuting—the Commonwealth is actually supporting this, through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, with a $100 million loans program to support the rollout of these batteries and battery-solar schemes. So, the state government grant for up to $6,000 is available, but you can also then access a loan from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which means in some cases people can get a full installation and have no up-front cost to that.

Home-scale storage is not just good from an environmental point of view, it also has a fantastic economic outcome, because you can store energy that is captured through the day from photovoltaic cells on your roof. You can charge up your battery. You are not paying for that from a fuel point of view. Mother Nature doesn't charge us for the sun or the wind. You can charge your battery up during the day and then in the evening, when you need to draw down on that power source, it is in your battery. It is your electricity that you own and you can use.

An even more exciting component of this is that, particularly with virtual power plant technology, which is being piloted, again in South Australia, under the Liberal government there, you have the potential to sell your excess electricity into the grid and even make money. So in the sort of nirvana of this scheme, which is probably a long way away to be sure, we will be able to generate our own electricity and store that electricity and in fact sell it into the grid. We would go from the situation that was created from the terrible energy policies under the Labor Party, where we've had some jurisdictions with the highest electricity cost in the country, to having electricity become a competitive advantage for us again, not only in my home state but across the country. That is what we had in my state in the post-World War II period. People like Sir Thomas Playford understood that if you could create cheap housing and produce cheap electricity you would create an industrial capacity, because that would lead to a competitive advantage from wage cost and also from your main input in industry, which is always going to be electricity and power. We had that in our state of South Australia and many other parts of this country for a long, long time. We have got the get back to that. I make the point—and I really emphasise it—that as we continue having this debate about the important need to reduce carbon emissions in this country, it can't be at the expense of jobs and it can't be at the expense of people's ability to pay their electricity bills. We need to do it in a way that is also reducing electricity bills. If we can achieve both of those things, then it is a great win-win. As I said, with the initiatives of this government around technology, particularly in areas like hydrogen and home-scale battery storage—which I have just talked about with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation—and many other initiatives, we will achieve both of those things. We will reduce emissions and we will reduce power prices, and that is going to lead to great economic outcomes for this country.