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

I rise today because we noticed in question time our energetic energy minister was talking about a massive amount of capital going from the federal government into state government hands to expand the grid, and I would like to talk a bit about this stage of the transition and what is likely. I have before me the fact sheet regarding the decommissioning of Liddell Power Station's closure to turn it into an energy hub site. But I note that 1,500 megawatts will vanish in April 2023, after the Easter holidays, and the last time we had an unscheduled loss of even 500 megawatts there, followed by the loss at Callide Power Station because of an accident where hydrogen gas in the generator blew up, we had energy chaos and the National Electricity Market was suspended. I can't see how that won't happen again when this planned closure happens. Our reserve margin is wafer thin, many times potentially negative, and this will precipitate blackouts in some shape or form. Not necessarily the whole grid, they will just prune supply to the edges of the grid to keep everything running. I would like to point out that the bring forward and even the planned transition haven't adequately planned for another replacement reliable generator. It is really quite scary. You only have to look at what is happening in Germany. They relied on a lot of gas from Russia and on energy coming from France and other places. All of a sudden they have opened up over 20 coal-fired power plants which they had kept in care and maintenance. In fact, the oldest station in Berlin was constructed in 1928.

The moral of the story is: I think we are mad to let Liddell be destroyed. We should put that in care and maintenance because we will need—

Honourable Member:

An honourable member interjecting—

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

I know, but we are meant to be the sensible ones. I know individual companies are as part of their plan, but it is part of what's keeping the modern industrial city complex called Sydney and the rest of New South Wales going and there is not an adequate replacement. They managed to maintain all their assets. Even though they have nuclear power plant's opening up, they have repowered these coal plants. That is the approach we should be adopting. Again, Eraring with 2.9 gigawatts—that is 2,900 megawatts—has had its closure brought forward and is now scheduled to close in 2025.

An honourab le member: Possibly.

Well, that is what they have announced. A lot of people are adding up installed capacity of replacement renewable generators, planning on the mythical economic hydrogen appearing and a solar thermal plant at Liddell. But as many people may not realise, solar thermal is not just a solar concentrating thermal plant; it has to have a backup gas plant as well. So we are just replacing coal with perhaps gas and, on the occasions it is nice and sunny, which on average is about 20 per cent of the time, we will have some replacement electricity.

But, as we all know, the wind and the sun are randomly variable. You've got to disconnect from measuring the installed capacity of a solar farm or wind farm with what is actually delivered. So installed capacity might be a 1,000 megawatts solar farm but that doesn't mean it produces 1,000 megawatts all the time. Some days and every night, every evening, it produces nothing. But many people are just adding up the installed capacity and think it is a like for like. Wind capacity is a bit better at 30 to 35, depending whether you are onshore or offshore. But there are plenty of times in Australia—there are three months—which are low-wind months. You can go to the wind maps data bank and you can see there are many days where for more than 17 hours there is next to no wind. So you can have all the wind in the world but then you can have none for six to 12 hours. In four hours it can change.

The other issue is a lot of this renewable energy is asynchronous and can only be generated when it can be incorporated, so they are having to whack in these huge synchronous condensers to try and make up for the loss of those huge 150-tonne generators that are spinning at exactly 50 hertz. It is getting increasingly complex for any of the operators to maintain that frequency, voltage, and inertia control that is critical to keep the grid stable. Most people don't realise that what goes into the grid has to match what is going out. If there is too much, sparks fly. If the frequency goes up or down, plus or minus one hertz, you can find machines stop working.

The National Electricity Market wasn't always the National Electricity Market. Back in the day when states used to act like self-reliant institutions and built freeways and dams and roads, they also built the modern grids, state by state. A lot of young people don't realise that. They think it has always been run by this thing called a market. That's only a construct that came in the early nineties, first in Victoria. But then it was just a market within Victoria comparing coal with coal, energy with energy, whereas now it's a complex amalgam of environmental laws, restricted trade practices, subsidies in the form of certificates, legislative assistance with restrictions, renewable energy targets. It's not just chosen on availability and kilowatts that are delivered; there are all these other distortions. We are criticised for trying to keep the lights on for the last nine years, and the minister says, 'Why didn't you do anything for the last nine years about fixing this up with nuclear plants?' The reason is that there's a ban on nuclear, which could replace these retiring power stations with synchronous, reliable energy.

But what I really want to put on the record is that the federal government, even our current energy minister, doesn't control the NEM. All the board appointments are by the member states. We only get to appoint the chairman and the CEO, and it has to be agreed on by the states, whereas everyone turns to the federal government, and this mess has been made by many authors. At the root cause of this is that a lot of them have believed and taken as bible what AEMO's plan for the future grid would look like, as though it is absolutely rock-solid. That plan is called the Integrated System Plan. And it used to be done heavily by industry with a bit of government oversight. The GenCost report that is used as part of the ISP planning used to be generated not just by academics and people in AEMO; it used to be assessed by industry players like power utilities, like grid operators. So the GenCost report is a different beast from what it was 10 or 15 years ago. From what industry people have told me, in the last 10 years it's really been much more of a political document. It's a disappointing thing that CSIRO's reputation, in the eyes of many engineers, has gone down, down, down, because they put their moniker on it, calling it a CSIRO-authored report, whereas it is actually done by engineering consultants.

Across the whole regulatory structure, there are a couple of engineers, but they are thin on the ground. And there are no deeply experienced power systems engineers amongst them. Recently, all the most senior grid and energy experts that one could assemble came here to Parliament House for free and had a two-day forum. These things that I have been mentioning are not my words; they are the assessment of people who have got hundreds of years of operating the New South Wales power grid and the Victorian power grid, who drew up the original rules for the National Electricity Market. These are deeply experienced engineers, and they are very worried that we are heading for blackouts.

Madam Deputy Speaker Ananda-Rajah, with your background I'm sure you'd understand a lot of these things, but you can't fault the points that these wonderful engineers have made. We really need to get more people like them running and looking at this, because it isn't viable, and it's destined to fail. (Time expired)