Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor says families will be better off under them, but families don't see it that way when they open their electricity bills. Labor's dream of decarbonising the electricity system without nuclear energy is ruining the economy and the economy's capacity to pay for goods and services Australians need. Labor's plan is to increase the penetration of renewables and solve the intermittency problem renewables create with a green hydrogen plan. What could possibly go wrong?

Firstly, the government has underestimated the cost of meeting the demand for flow of electricity from intermittent generation sources like sunlight and wind—or they are making it up as they go along. These costs are in categories known as 'balancing costs', 'grid costs' and 'profile costs'. When politicians don't recognise these costs, they spread the false idea that solar and wind are the cheapest sources of energy. When the costs of intermittency are recognised, we find natural gas is by far the cheapest form of electricity, followed by coal and nuclear. If government were to consider the full cost of renewables, they would find solar is 14 times more costly than nuclear energy and wind is 4.7 times more costly than nuclear. These figures are sourced from Robert Idel's study titled Levelized full system costs of electricity, published in Energy, volume 259, November 2022.

The second problem with the government's plan is the way it wants to overcome the mismatch between the peak supply of renewable energy during the day and the peak demand for electricity at night.

The first part of this plan is to build enough wind turbines and solar panels to create excess electricity which can be saved in some form of grid-scale storage. Community objections to wind farms and lack of suitable sites have led to proposals for offshore wind farms, which are five to 10 times more expensive, last only 15 years and damage the environment at every stage from construction to operation and decommissioning. The solar farms compete with productive agricultural land because they need to be on a flat land facing the right way. The panels cannot be economically recycled and so end up in landfill and damage the environment as toxic metals leach into the soil and then the water supply. That's not to mention what happens to the wind turbines when they're finished. Where do they end up? In landfill.

Anyway, let's skip over the problems with generating enough excess renewable energy and pretend there are no problems so we can move onto the next step of the plan, which is to create grid-scale storage. The candidates for grid-scale storage include pumped hydroelectricity, batteries and green hydrogen. Australia has limited sites suitable for pumped hydroelectricity. If the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project is ever completed it could be used to restart the electricity grid after black systems, but it is not the answer for grid-scale storage. Batteries are too expensive to act on a grid scale and there are problems with mineral and metal shortages and recycling.

Green hydrogen is the government's preferred grid-scale solution to providing electricity when the wind and sunlight do not show up for work. The known technologies for producing green hydrogen need a constant electricity supply, but a constant electricity supply won't be available under the government's plan because they want to use sunlight and wind to create the electricity. The green hydrogen industry is reliant on government handouts, including subsidies, and it had a reality check when the first commercial-scale green hydrogen project in Western Australia was scrapped this year.

There has not been one wind farm, solar farm or large-scale battery built in Australia without subsidies from taxpayers and there is not one that will continue to operate without subsidies. Just think about that when you are struggling to pay your electricity bill and trying to cope with the cost of living. Labor needs to put people first, not ideology, and it needs to face facts before it ruins this beautiful country. The fact is that their pie-in-the-sky schemes aren't going to work. They are costing taxpayers billions of dollars. They are giving multinationals money that belongs in the pockets of the Australian people.