David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a very important motion. Shadow minister Ted O'Brien is not present because he has had a baby. I wish him and his family all the best.

Industrial-scale renewable projects are being rolled out across the country in a reckless and haphazard manner, upsetting so many people, mainly electricity customers whose bills keep going up all the time. The last default market offer went up 20 to 30 per cent across the east coast market. Input tariffs for their solar panels are going down. Lots of large industrial companies, particularly in my electorate, want to expand, but they can't get enough energy. The network providers can't give them any more. Many other businesses have already offshored their businesses because the cost of electricity is too great.

This is due to increasing amounts of variable renewable energy on an industrial scale. People are only accepting it because the Minister for Climate Change and Energy keeps saying that renewables are the cheapest form of energy. He uses the levelised cost of energy to justify that. But just so you can be clear, Madam Deputy Speaker Claydon, the levelised cost of energy is not a good measure of the cost of electricity. It is a standalone cost at the bottom of a wind tower or at the bottom of a solar panel. It's not the cost of delivered electricity to your power plug. That is a complex, additional set of costs which goes up exponentially. Because renewable energies are so dilute and so variable, you have to overexpand across pristine bushland and pristine, high-quality farmland, and it's destroying the value of those lands. It's actually turning good grazing country into industrial parks. Offshore wind development at Port Stephens, Newcastle and up into the Myall lakes will put at risk huge fishing grounds, national marine parks and New South Wales state marine parks—all those environmental gems of Australia. There are Ramsar protected islands and wetlands. The birds and marine life that inhabit those areas will have almost 1,900 square kilometres of industrial wind farms that are uneconomical. They use huge material intensity. They only have a life of maybe 20 years unless you have an east coast low, when something that's 261 metres tall will probably get blown over and drift. All these extra costs are never mentioned. Levelised cost of energy is a poor measure. What you should have is the all-up, delivered cost of energy as your comparisons.

Now, the GenCost report is the generator of this information. The whole policy of the government relies on it. But the GenCost report and the subsequent integrated system plan that relies on it have been criticised. CSIRO and AEMO have both received extensive correspondence from well-known economists and power grid specialists, who have identified this, and they have been ignored. David Carland did a report for the Energy Policy Institute identifying what CSIRO calls 'sunk costs'. That money that's already been spent. Trust me: Snowy Hydro has partly been paid, but all the grids and the 15 gigawatts of extra storage haven't been paid for. Battery of the Nation hasn't been paid for. They're all the upfront costs of relying on so much renewable energy, let alone all the frequency control and auxiliary services.

In the wind farm off Port Stephens there's a $1 billion fishing industry. There's a blue-water economy with whale watching. There are 10,000 whales that migrate up and down the east coast of Australia. Their acoustics will be blown out of the water, literally, by all the acoustic testing and drilling. Renewable energy is cheap if you can get it, but all the grid costs, all the land-use costs and all the environmental destruction just get a leave pass.

We need to stop this madness now, maintain our coal plants and consider clean, zero-carbon, nuclear energy, which has none of those problems.

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