Just as grandfathering has been rebranded as grandparenting by Jim Chalmers so as not to offend, blackouts appear to have been excised from the official vocabulary.
Absent an obvious replacement colour, the Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest grand plan for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 comes up with a variety of obscure phrases to describe how to deal with insufficient electricity in our largely sun and wind-dependent grid.
It all sounds almost fun. Consumers will be playing “an increasingly active role” in ensuring the power system remains stable, AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman writes in the foreword to the latest Integrated System Plan released on June 25. “First Nations” communities will be “empowered”.
“Involuntary load shedding” is the new blackout: the deliberate disconnection of customers to keep the grid functional. This may arise in times of “unserved energy”, when the power system simply cannot meet the electricity demanded.
About 1 per cent of the national electricity market is expected to depend on “demand-side participation” by 2050, where households or businesses agree in advance to have their power turned down or switched off in exchange for financial compensation. The old electricity grid once served households; now households and businesses increasingly serve the grid.
Consumers are supposed to be “virtual power plants”, handing control of their home batteries and electric vehicles to third parties that can draw on them when required. Rather than generating more reliable power, the system increasingly seeks to “reduce the total energy drawn” from the grid.
The huge strides in living standards across the past century have been predicated on using more energy, not less. In any case, none of this is likely to happen.
AEMO’s latest ISP is solving a problem created by unrealistic political targets.
Increasingly – and laughably – it continues to assume Australia will achieve an 82 per cent renewable electricity grid by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. The plan is described as the “least cost” pathway, but only in the sense that the genuinely low-cost alternatives have been ruled out.
The 36 per cent of suitable Australian dwellings that have installed rooftop solar did so largely because governments showered households with billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies across the past two decades.
Those subsidies, largely taken up by higher-income households, are barely acknowledged in the ISP’s cost estimates. The same applies to the nation’s roughly 600,000 household batteries.
Importantly, such subsidies are also unlikely to continue indefinitely given the rapidly deteriorating fiscal position of state and federal governments.
Does anyone seriously think Victoria’s Yallourn coal-fired power station, which still supplies about 15 per cent of the state’s electricity and helps insulate South Australia against disaster on cloudy, still days, will close in less than two years as the ISP assumes?
Moreover, about 120 gigawatts of additional large-scale wind and solar capacity must be constructed by 2050, roughly five times today’s installed level in less than 25 years.
Construction has not begun on even one of the 83 offshore wind projects slated for completion across coming decades, according to online tracker TGS, and investment has collapsed globally.
Another 6000km of transmission lines also must be built to connect remote wind and solar developments to existing cities, which is certain to invite fierce community opposition.
Curiously, nuclear energy is not mentioned once in the ISP’s 141 pages, despite the fact the Liberal Party, the Nationals and One Nation all support the one proven technology capable of delivering reliable, dispatchable, low-emissions electricity at scale.
We’ll will happily dig up uranium, put it on a ship to India and congratulate itself when it produces reliable zero-emissions electricity there. The only place we apparently can’t use Australian uranium is, of course, Australia.
The Coalition should be making hay with the rank hypocrisy and absurdity of the targets but has barely said boo about dumping net zero since last year’s recantation through gritted teeth.
Countries such as South Korea and China have demonstrated that modern nuclear plants can be built relatively cheaply. A genuine planning exercise at least would model it alongside the alternatives rather than pretend it does not exist. More fundamentally, the whole exercise rests on an extraordinary assumption: that anyone can accurately map Australia’s electricity system a quarter of a century into the future.
A decade ago almost nobody foresaw the explosion of artificial intelligence and the demand for data centres, or the shale gas revolution. Who knows what technologies will emerge during the next 25 years? The ISP increasingly resembles less an engineering blueprint than a work of central planning, complete with heroic assumptions about consumer behaviour, technological progress, political consensus and construction timetables extending all the way to 2050.
At least the latest CSIRO GenCost report, released alongside the ISP, acknowledges what was once heresy, conceding that net zero costs 5 per cent to 39 per cent more than abandoning the target altogether.
Rebranding blackouts as “involuntary load shedding” and power shortages as “demand-side participation” may delay the political reckoning but it will not prevent it. Physics and economics have an inconvenient habit of ignoring government communications strategies.
