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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-05-30 Daily Xml
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Renewable Energy

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (15:44): South Australia has a very proud legacy of leading the nation and the world in the transition to renewable energy. It is no accident that it is because of the strong leadership of the previous Weatherill and Rann Labor governments, who set us up as a state with a clear and ambitious framework for investment. We have more renewable energy than any other mainland state—sitting around the 50 per cent mark the last time I was privy to that information—and it was Jay Weatherill's leadership that saw the construction of Australia's first solar thermal power plant, which will secure Port Augusta's future. It was, of course, the Labor government that secured the world's largest grid-connected battery, much derided at the time by the Liberal opposition, now Liberal government.

Whilst climate change deniers and their friends, including many of those opposite and their federal Liberal colleagues, have railed against renewable energy, we have seen private companies invest directly in large-scale projects right across our state. It is great for emissions reduction. It is great for our environment. It is great for our research and development sectors and it is especially great, of course, for local jobs and employment for South Australians, especially in regional South Australia.

But last year, we saw the Minerals Council of Australia launch a bizarre and misleading television campaign aimed at promoting HELE, or high efficiency, low emission coal-fired power stations. It features an engineer talking about how great coal is. She talks about going to Japan to check out low emissions technology using 'our coal'. She then says that Tokyo has a very large number of people. That is probably the only accurate information conveyed in that advertisement. It then starts to get interesting. Even the representative from the power station that they tour in this commercial says that HELE only gets up to 40 to 45 per cent efficiency, only marginally more efficient than traditional power stations.

This, of course, is textbook Minerals Council—build a misleading narrative and back in some technology that does not work, but, by the way, requires shiploads of taxpayers' money in subsidies. They call it HELE. Some deluded people call it clean coal, but we all know that it is a con. HELE power stations have been around for decades. They are neither high efficiency nor are they low emissions. They are also incredibly expensive to build. They take years to complete and most estimates say it would cost in excess of $4 billion for a 1,000 megawatt plant. If it was so great, why is the private sector not investing their own money in these power stations? Why are they after government or taxpayer subsidies to build them? It is because the market, investors and the community know and understand that renewable energy is our future.

It was great to see Simon Holmes à Court, senior adviser to the energy transition hub at Melbourne University, call out the myth that is high efficiency, low emission coal. On Sky News on 10 May, he highlighted that HELE plants cost more than subcritical coal, which is already expensive. He then points out that it only emits about 10 per cent less carbon than normal coal and that it is not new, cheap or low emission. It is just marketing spin.

The only people buying the HELE concept are the Minerals Council and a large contingent of the Liberal Party. Instead of focusing on the failed technology, I have a suggestion for them: back in renewable energy. It is cost effective. It is creating high skill, high wage jobs across Australia.

In April, we learnt of the Monash Forum, a cabal of coal lovers led by Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz, Kevin Andrews and Barnaby Joyce, who back in the myth that is clean coal. Rumour has it that more than 30 Liberal and National Party members have joined the Monash Forum. That is more than 30 people who do not back science or even economics. On 22 May, Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce, in response to the AGL process about Alinta Energy's offer to buy Liddell Power Station, said:

We are calling on the Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg to either forcibly acquire the plant or build a new coal plant with taxpayers' money in the Hunter Valley.

So Tony Abbott told The Australian that the government should compulsorily acquire this power station for the price that Alinta were prepared to pay and then it should sell it to Alinta. Their beloved free market finally decides that coal does not make economic sense anymore and so now the Liberal Party, at the federal level, want to intervene in this so-called free market to protect a high polluting and a highly inefficient form of power generation. This, of course, would be very bad news for South Australia and our electricity prices. It would put at risk the significant renewable energy investment that AGL have said they will undertake. So, instead of new jobs, new investment and lower emissions, we are left with taxpayers liable for ageing, inefficient coal power plants—bad for the planet, and certainly bad for South Australia.

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