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

I rise tonight to inform people of a part explanation for why the Minister for Climate Change and Energy keeps standing up in this place and saying that renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, but your bill keeps going up and up. Not only is he a maestro at engineering and electrical system distribution but he is a master of spin. But might I tell you, people know this because they see their bills going up. They also see their feed-in tariffs for solar panels going down because the market is flooded with unusable energy in the middle of the day. When solar panels first came in, yes, they did put your prices down because you got paid an exorbitant feed-in tariff of 14c or 20c a kilowatt. Now it is down to maybe 4c a kilowatt.

There are lots of days when Essential Energy, which is the distribution and transmission authority here in our part of the world, can't accept any more electrons because, if all the solar panels and all the major solar farms and the windfarms plugged into the electricity grid, you would see sparks flying and fuses blowing everywhere. It is just like when there is too much current going into your kettle and then all of a sudden the fridge and all the lights go out. You have to have the right amount of energy going into the system and coming out of the system. Why the energy ministers is confused about your energy bill is that he doesn't understand how the system works—he is just in charge of it all! But, when you get your electricity bill, the wholesale electricity generation that he talks about as being the cheapest form when he says that renewable energy is the cheapest form, is only 36 per cent of your bill.

Transmission and distribution, like all the charges for poles and wires, make up 48 per cent of your bill. Your retailer charges you about 13 per cent, and green schemes make up six per cent of your bill. All those costs for poles and wires, as we heard years ago, are affected because gold-plating is happening. That refers to building unnecessary grids at a really high capital cost when they didn't really need them, but you haven't seen anything yet because Rewiring the Nation involves this government and you taxpayers out there giving lots of your hard-earned tax dollars to build grids to collect electrons from solar farms that on average only generate for 20 per cent of the time or from windfarms that generate only 30 per cent of the time. The rest of the time they won't have the electrons in them. They have stranded assets everywhere, and all these renewable energy zones will be the same. They'll be great on a sunny day or a windy day, but when it is cloudy or it's nighttime or dawn or dusk, so two-thirds of the time, they will be generating diddly squat because that is what nature does. They are overbuilding everywhere, and there are more solar panels on more roofs than they can get into the electricity system. That is why you are getting a lower rebate.

They have worked out we can't accept electricity generation from other generators and take households' generation because then other big industrial users won't have enough electricity. Also, people don't realise that there are other costs in your bill that will come down the line. Rewiring the Nation will have $20 billion of government assistance to trigger $40 billion of investment. The current grid is valued at about $29 billion, and they are getting a regulated return of about seven per cent, maybe eight per cent. They have hushed up what it is because people have cottoned on to things. But imagine what your transmission and distribution costs in your bill will be if it's not $29 billion but another $60 billion worth of infrastructure that has to get a seven per cent or eight per cent return. Your bill will double or triple, plus all the extra things you need for renewable energy to create direct current, like a battery. When he said the levelised cost of energy in the GenCost report is the cheapest, the levelised cost of energy is not a good indicator of the delivered cost of energy. You need to add the levelised cost of poles and wires, of these new batteries and of the 10 or so Snowy Hydros. It is already costing $12 billion, and it will go through the roof. (Time expired)

House adjourned at 20:00