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

This is a really important motion, even if it's been relegated up to the Federation Chamber. Everyone in this room is pretty much trying to achieve the same thing, but I'm just calling on everyone to call a timeout and see what is actually achievable. In our current plans, which are 100 per cent relying on transitioning away from fossil fuels and into a renewable energy system, along with changing land use, there will be massive connections of new grids and extra land needed for the production of low-density energy that's randomly variable depending on what the weather is. An individual household or a small isolated entity, once it's built, can go off-grid, relying on solar and wind. If you pay enough money and have enough batteries, you can do that. But you can't do that with an industrial economy. It's just physically impossible, and I'll just go through some of the reasons behind that.

The University of Melbourne, Princeton, the University of Queensland and the Nous Group have just spent two years looking at the cost of transitioning away to a renewables future by 2030, along with the other land use things. All we have to do in Australia, to get there by 2030, is spend about $1.5 trillion—that's all. That's a bargain, because the net present value of what we have to spend by 2050 is $5.5 trillion. If it's in the real world—you don't spend it overnight now and get it in 2050—it's $7 trillion to $9 trillion by 2050. We also only have to convert 5.1 million hectares of good agricultural land into native forest, and, depending on whether we've got a hydrogen based economy, we'll need up to 28,000 kilometres of new poles and wires. Considering the national grid is now about 3,500 kilometres from one end to the other, at least the main spine of it—the distribution network is another latticework of stuff, but, for transmission and distribution, if we're going to make hydrogen all over the place its 28,000 kilometres.

So we've got a problem with that. None of that is realistic, and that's why they did the study. It copied the same principles that they did on the net zero America study, which came to similar conclusions. But in that net zero study, they included nuclear because it's had a major renaissance and it's expanding everywhere. There's also a bit in this motion about giving a methane pledge, which I have big problems with because they're equating biological methane that comes from bovines with methane that's escaping from a coal plant. It's a closed energy system. Each animal itself is about 15 per cent carbon. So, if you're going to sacrifice a cow of 700 kilos, that's an awful lot of carbon. It's permanent.

Also, with this renewable plan to replace our fossil fuels, we don't have enough minerals. We are going to reach peak minerals before we reach peak oil. The amount of minerals in copper alone—and I'm quoting Professor Simon Michaux, University of Queensland trained, who now heads the highly respected Geological Survey of Finland, which is the equivalent of the US Geological Survey or Geoscience. He's highly respected. The amount of copper mined through history, to now, is about 700 million tonnes. The world's total reserves of copper are 880 million tonnes, and that's according to the US Geological Survey.

We will need, in the next 22 years, 700 million tonnes. If we're going to be recycling all the batteries, by 2050 we're going to need about 6.1 billion tonnes of copper, which is clearly not possible. We will have to mine 8.8 times more copper than has ever been mined since mining started. That is not realistic. Never mind all the rare earth batteries. It's just unbelievable.

With global reserves, we need a 12-week, 84-day buffer of stationary power storage to go off, and we don't have enough minerals to make batteries, let alone all the cars. Siemens, Orsted and CIP are all going broke, because the economics of wind power is only there if it gets huge subsidies. That's why they're all going broke. And none of the wind options are being taken up by anyone. So we really need to think that, if you're going to defossilise the economy, nuclear is the way to go. Everyone in Europe has worked that out. Everyone in America has worked that out.

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