Scott Hargreaves Discusses Australia’s Weakening Energy Security On ADH TV

Executive Director Scott Hargreaves joins Fred Pawle on ADH TV to discuss the IPA’s latest research into Australia’s energy security following the closure of New South Wales’ Liddell Power Station.

All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.

Below is a transcript of the interview.

Fred Pawle:

Now various governments around Australia are imposing another perfectly predictable crisis on us, they are shutting down our electricity generators before any ability to replace them has been built. The Institute of Public Affairs has just released a report into this, and the executive director, Scott Hargreaves, joins me now. Scott, welcome.

Scott Hargreaves:

Thank you, Fred, thanks for having me.

Fred Pawle:

Scott, can you give me a little update on how much energy generation we have demolished in the past few years?

Scott Hargreaves:

Well, I think all over Australia we’ve seen, say, the Northern Power Station in South Australia, Hazelwood in Victoria, which was about 1600 megawatts, and now Liddell, which at its peak was more than 2000 megawatts. So we’ve stripped literally thousands and thousands of megawatts out of the system, and what’s concerned me even more is that what is slated for closure this side of 2035, like that’s some kind of magical date, is 40% of the energy that was sent out last year, all of those power stations, and I’ve got the list, which I can bore you with, Fred, that’s 40% of the capacity of the system in terms of energy sent out that would actually be closed down and, like all these other stations, literally blown up. There’s this strange mania to blow things up.

Fred Pawle:

I know, it’s really comical the way they want to make a spectacle of it. But let’s hear the list, because some of the viewers will be familiar with these because it’ll be their local power station.

Scott Hargreaves:

Yeah. So I called this report Liddell: The Line in the Sand, which you can of course find on the IPA website, ipa.org.au. But the big one coming up, which I’ve pointed out to the premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, is the Eraring Power Station in New South Wales. We also have, for instance, Bayswater, Callide C in Queensland, Gladstone, Stanwell, Loy Yang A in Victoria, which would be disastrous. But Eraring is due to close by 2025. This is Australia’s biggest power station, and its owner has said, “Well, we’re going to close it down in 2025,” and the premier of New South Wales can’t allow that to happen.

Fred Pawle:

Well, let’s move from the closure of these, which is tragic enough, to what is being planned to build in their place. What’s coming along is mostly renewables, right?

Scott Hargreaves:

Well, that’s right. And there’s two problems with that. First of all, even if they could be built on the scale that they promise, and remember, to replace two and a half thousand megawatts of a reliable base load power station that runs 80 to 90% of the time you would need seven and a half thousand megawatts of a wind farm, because it only operates a third of the time. So a massive, massive scale. And what we’ve seen in the system over the past two decades is that the greater the share of renewables, the more the cost goes up. So the first issue is it’s actually a bad plan. You can have a certain amount of renewables, and we’re probably at about that level now, but to try and do it on that scale is impossible. But the second part, of course, is they are not being built in the timeframe promise. We’re blowing up the power station in the hope that these massive amount of wind farms, solar farms, transmission lines, could be built in that timeframe. We’re going to be left without the power that we need to keep the lights on, Fred.

Fred Pawle:

So yeah, let’s talk about what effect this will have. There’s two effects, prices and blackouts. What’s your prediction, Scott?

Scott Hargreaves:

Oh, certainly prices is an absolute definite thing that is already happening, we’ve already seen increases of 25 to 31% announced for the forthcoming financial year. This is devastating for households and industry, and then certainly the risk of blackouts is going up all the time. And what the system operators are doing, incidentally, is actually telling people to switch off. So the only way they can keep the lights on is to shut down industries, to tell factories to stop producing stuff, to tell workers to stop coming to work. So we’ve got an increased risk of blackouts, which they’re going to manage in ways so they’re actually devastating for the economy.

Fred Pawle:

Well, here’s another warning, this is from Queensland LNP Senator Matt Canavan on this show way back in November, talking about the deadly consequences of energy poverty in Europe, which the Queensland government at the time was using as a prototype for its own policies. Let’s have a listen.

Matt Canavan:

Well, Fred, it’s worked so well in Europe, why wouldn’t we try it here ourselves? This is gobsmackingly incompetent. At a time where we can all see that European people will be freezing this winter, some people will die because of the energy incompetence we’ve seen right across Europe. They’ve shut down their coal-fired power stations, some countries like Germany, as you said, have also decommissioned their nuclear power plants. They’ve become reliant on weather dependent renewable energy, exactly what our Annastacia Palaszczuk wants to do, and people are dying because of it. As I say, it’s gobsmackingly incompetent, because we can see all that. Maybe you could give the German greens party a leave passed because they were the first to try it and didn’t see any other real world examples. Well, there’s no such excuse for the Queensland Labor Party because the experiment with renewable energy has been tried and it has failed and failed spectacularly. We have to turn around from this approach.

Fred Pawle:

So we’ve seen the writing on the wall in Europe, you and I have just discussed the consequences as far as price of energy and blackouts go, but there’s another measure, isn’t there, Scott? It’s the quality of life and the fact that people might very soon freeze to death in the dark in Australia.

Scott Hargreaves:

Isn’t it terrible, Fred, that we’re reaching the situation where ordinary Australians are faced with a decision whether it’s heat or eat. Household bills are under tremendous pressure at the moment from all sorts of inflation, much of which caused by government. If you’ve got a mortgage of course you’re in dreadful strife with inflationary government pushing up interest rates, and faced with that decision to heat or eat, and that is not where Australia should be. There’s no reason why in a resource rich country like we are that consumers should face that choice.

Fred Pawle:

Well, let’s talk about one of those resources, nuclear, which is obviously a viable alternative. We saw the Federal Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, warning us that small modular nuclear power plants cost $5 billion to build. Here’s a reminder of that message.

Chris Bowen:

Nuclear power is very expensive. Wherever nuclear power plants are being built around the world, they’re taking longer and costing much more than budgeted for. Even small modular reactors would cost a massive 5 billion each to build, and proponents say we need as many as 80 small reactors spread across the country. That’s a whopping $400 billion in cost.

Fred Pawle:

What Bowen wasn’t saying is that these modular reactors produce about 1.5 gigawatts of energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for more than 60 years. Now Scott, do you think it was irresponsible for the energy minister to say that this is a bad thing?

Scott Hargreaves:

I think it was very irresponsible, and I think it’s a bit rich also for anyone who’s just locked into this dream that somehow wind and solar can deliver low emissions energy, which may or may not actually be true, but the lengths that they’re willing to go to, and to then turn around and say it’s going to cost too much, is a bit rich. We’ve already seen, when they’re throwing around figures of $300 billion to finance this supposed energy transition towards renewable, and then Chris Bowen turns around and says, “Oh my goodness, it’s going to cost $5 billion for a power station,” which as you say, it’s technology that we know about, it’s technology that we know could be delivered, and when you switch it on, it can operate for a very long time at a very high capacity factor, and it doesn’t matter if the sun goes behind the cloud, and it doesn’t matter if the wind stops blowing. And that’s why he was forced, no doubt, to take that video down, it was a terrible video which did a disservice to everybody.

Fred Pawle:

Well, baked into that 300 billion that you referred to are the subsidies for renewables. One of the interesting things about the nuclear industry is that they’re not asking for subsidies. Here’s James Voss, the Managing Director of Ultra Safe Nuclear Australia at a Senate hearing last month. Listen to this.

James Voss:

We believe that the owners of these reactors should be fully responsible for all costs of operation, including decommissioning, site restoration, and waste disposal. We believe that the people of Australia should not be subsidizing any part of such development, particularly since all of these developments are now off the shelf. There is no development, for the most part, that is needed.

Fred Pawle:

Scott, how can an Australian energy minister ignore something like that?

Scott Hargreaves:

Exactly. And of course what’s happening is there’s now calls for even more subsidies for renewables, and nuclear power stations, and indeed base load coal-fired power stations, could continue to operate reliably and with a secure financial base if it wasn’t for the fact that subsidized renewables were coming in, cutting their lunch, sometimes the price is zero, but then the wind stops blowing and it peaks again. So you haven’t got a stable financial base for these things, so end all of the subsidies and base load energy, like coal-fired or nuclear, just takes care of itself. That’s what we have to do, end all of those subsidies for renewables.

Fred Pawle:

And then Australians won’t be freezing in the dark, which is where we’re heading. Now before we go, Scott, you’ve got a piece coming up in the Spectator this week. It’s a unique angle on the Voice debate, it’s the implications for the separations of power. Can you elaborate on that?

Scott Hargreaves:

Yeah, I’ll just do it briefly, Fred. Great magazine, of course, the Spectator, big shout out to Rowan Dean.

Fred Pawle:

We love it, we love it, yeah.

Scott Hargreaves:

And it was prompted really by, you may recall Justice Harrison of the New South Wales Supreme Court wrote an impassioned email, a very improper email to a federal coalition MP, denouncing a speech that he’d made in Parliament about the Voice for being racist. Now, this is a breach of the separation of powers, and once you start talking about the separation of powers, you come to the issue that the Voice to Parliament is itself something that would destroy that principle in our Constitution, it will be a whole new chapter in the Constitution. There’s only eight chapters in the Constitution, and this referendum, if it was successful, would insert a new one, chapter nine, solely concerned with the voice to Parliament.

Fred Pawle:

Where would it sit within those separated powers in our Constitution?

Scott Hargreaves:

Ah, well that’s exactly the question, Fred. Justice Isaacs, who was Chief Justice, later Governor General, made it very clear, he said, look, chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, spells out the parliament, the judiciary, and the executive, there’s your separation of powers right there, all other institutions must conform to one or the other. So we’ve had that as settled doctrine since 1915, at least in Australia, it’s a 300-year-old doctrine, and along comes the Voice to Parliament, which doesn’t sit within any of those, which has its own powers. It has the ability to influence the executive, influence the Parliament, and it’s going to be decided by the High Court. This is absolutely uncharted territory, a wrecking ball through the Constitution,

Fred Pawle:

As if there wasn’t enough that we didn’t know about this Voice to Parliament. I’ll be voting no, I’ll let you know that right now. Scott Hargreaves, thanks so much for your time.

Scott Hargreaves:

Thanks, Fred.

This transcript with Scott Hargreaves talking on ADH from 1 June 2023 has been edited for clarity.