Reducing the complexities of national energy policy to a clean energy brawl is the last thing Australia needs in the middle of the biggest industrial rebuild in the nation’s history.
. We should be talking rationally about nuclear energy in Australia because we might need it, and the world certainly will. With the biggest uranium reserves on Earth, it is an economic and geopolitical own goal to persist with bans and moratoriums on uranium mining.But reducing the complexities of national energy policy to a Ford vs Holden clean energy brawl is the last thing Australia needs in the middle of the biggest industrial rebuild in the nation’s history.
That was an unofficial watershed moment. In the 2007 election year Howard pivoted towards carbon pricing and renewables, throwing millions of dollars to subsidise household solar PV. We’ve learnt a lot of lessons over the past 15 years. A renewables grid is operationally riskier than a nuclear one because it’s a novel, experimental system that relies on aggregating thousands of intermittent generators. By contrast, nuclear is a straight swap for coal.
The numbers are so large and the build time so long, that we may never confidently know whether renewables or nuclear would have been cheaper. But they’re in the same ballpark. Because renewables tend to generate at the same time, the more we build, the less value the electricity produced, the more money each additional generator will need.Chronically negative spot electricity prices and curtailments through the middle of the day are the result of this deliberate, massive oversupply. It will eventually render the electricity market uninvestable.
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