David Van (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Australia needs to transition our coal energy production to clean, green, firmed alternatives. I believe this can happen sooner than scheduled, or, at least, it could if managed properly. Unfortunately, our current approach to and energy planning is driving the transition at a painfully slow pace and with only limited decarbonisation gains. This is time we don't have.

That's why this week in the Senate I initiated a select inquiry into energy planning and regulation in Australia in order to bring some transparency and accountability to energy planners, operators and regulators. We are making progress, with renewable energy increasingly making up more and more of our electricity supply. South Australia, for example, is meeting 70 per cent of its electricity needs and occasionally, for a brief time, meets 100 per cent via renewables. But therein lies the difficulty the transition faces—time.

Emissions from electricity generation make up nearly one-third of Australia's overall emissions. So, you see, replacing coal-fired electricity would make a massive reduction in our carbon emissions. And as the South Australian example shows, it is possible to move to 100 per cent renewable generation, but only for a short period of time. That is the problem that we need to solve: time. Time is probably one of the most important aspects for the transition. Getting more and more renewables into the system alone will not solve our time problem. We see this almost every day, especially on sunny days like today, when more supply than demand causes negative electricity prices in the National Electricity Market, causing economic curtailment—that is, clean energy not going into the grid.

There are two key contributors to this, coal and household solar: rooftop solar because the system doesn't currently control behind-the-meter generation, and coal because it can't be turned off and on for short periods of time. Again, time is working against us. The result is that existing large-scale solar is curtailed because it's uneconomic to sell, and this curtailment will only increase as we build more wind and solar, particularly in areas where weak system strength leads to further network curtailment.

One potential solution is to remove coal. This would resolve the emissions issue but leave us with insufficient energy supply during times of peak demand later in the day. The key solution to the problem is to shift electricity across time, from peak generation times to peak demand times. This is usually only a matter of a few hours. The technologies we have to 'time travel' our energy mix exist now, with two key solutions being batteries and pumped hydro. Just imagine if our energy system planners had had the foresight to insist that, before large solar farms were permitted to connect to the grid in distant areas with poor system strength, they had to provide sufficient co-located storage so that they could change the time they exported the electricity to the grid. Not only would this make more business sense for the generators; we would be able to retire coal sooner. It is only when we get a handle on this time problem that we may see jurisdictions going from getting 100 per cent of the electricity from renewables some of the time to getting that from renewables all of the time.