Grievance Debate

Electricity Supply

Mr PATTERSON (Morphett) (15:06): There is no doubt that the National Electricity Market is facing significant challenges at the moment, to the point where the Australian Energy Market Operator has had to suspend the market due to skyrocketing wholesale electricity prices. AEMO has warned of potential forced blackouts across the NEM across the eastern coast and also here in South Australia.

Unfortunately, South Australians have experienced these uncertainties before, with the statewide blackout in 2016 and, over and above that, also continual forced blackouts for a number of periods either side of that blackout. In fact, in the 2014 to 2018 term of the former Labor government seven million customer hours were lost. They were hours lost for households and they were hours lost to business.

Today, I had the pleasure of joining Andrew Ferguson, owner of fantastic South Australian business Ferguson Australia, to discuss the impact of this uncertainty on his business. Ferguson Australia deals with lobster. We know they have been affected by the trade issues with China, but they also depend on reliable electricity, electricity for tanks of water which these lobsters stay in after they are caught live. If the tanks cannot circulate and filter water, resupplying it with oxygen, within half an hour to 60 minutes these lobsters can be stressed and die, so of course making sure reliable energy is there is important.

In the statewide blackouts, they were affected heavily for three days, especially in their Port Lincoln processing plant. Luckily, they had diesel backup, but they had to get diesel petrol to make sure those backup generators could run, so that caused them a great sense of stress. Coming into this new crisis or experience, we have to make sure the grid is reliable.

When the former Marshall government came to power in 2018, that was certainly a key focus. We put in place a very sophisticated energy solution to make sure that was the case—the Home Battery Scheme and grid-scale storage to really try to get that grid stability. Fast-tracking the interconnector between South Australia and New South Wales was also a key tenet towards that. The result was that between 2018 and 2022 we had zero customer hours lost through forced load shedding, so this is a fantastic show of support for those plans that were put in place by the former Marshall government.

As to capacity, when we came to government another thing we experienced was this rushed purchase of diesel generators by the former Labor government. The Livesey report showed it would cost South Australian taxpayers $609 million over the lifetime of these generators that were only there to run maybe once or twice a year. We wanted to put them to use because we know that to give grid stability we need to have this generation capacity running much more frequently. We did that.

We leased those generators out to Nexif and Iberdrola, and they have been put to work. They allow these fantastic companies, who are looking to produce mass-scale renewable energy, which is intermittent, to have this dispatchable capacity. It then allows them to be a base load generator. It allows them to bid into base load contracts for our big energy users: BHP, Woolworths. In fact, just in May, the Premier himself was at a photo shoot with Woolworths when they announced they were going for a 100 per cent renewable energy source powered by these generators, yet there he is, trying to scare people by saying this was a bad decision.

I will also mention that they are available to dispatch energy into the grid at all times. They can be directed by AEMO to support the grid. In fact, during summer, that six-month period when a lot of peak demand occurs, we put in place that they cannot do maintenance. No matter what, generators need to have some sort of maintenance in place, and that does happen, but what we have today is the majority of these generators running.

We are back to the playbook of the energy minister, where he would rather blame someone than take responsibility—the same energy minister who saw us through the statewide blackout. You cannot trust this energy minister.