Australian federal election outlook: The nuclear debate

360info

"I don't know why. I am not in the Opposition's head.  What I know is that with our very rich renewable energy resources, nuclear is an expensive option. It is also an option in the far distant future, long after a lot of our coal plants start falling apart.  No one wants to build a new coal plant. It's obviously uneconomic in competition with renewables. Some people say: 'Well, France and China are using nuclear energy, so why not Australia?'  Those countries do not have Australia's renewable energy opportunities. And often their nuclear programs are being cross-subsidised with their nuclear weapons programs.  That is the case with France, where nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation are developed side by side. For Australia, the economics wouldn't take you in that direction."  Economist Ross Garnaut AC, who is Professor Emeritus at both The Australian National University  and The University of Melbourne  analyses the viability of the Coalition's nuclear energy plan in the lead-up to the federal election.

Transcript

00:00In Australia, with our very rich renewable energy resources, nuclear is an expensive option.

00:06It's also an option in the far distant future, long after a lot of our coal plants are so old that they're falling apart.

00:13Coal can't get us there to the time when nuclear would be available.

00:20No one wants to build a new coal plant. It's obviously uneconomic in competition with renewables and storage.

00:27In any case, the nuclear would be much more expensive.

00:30All the analysis shows that. Why the opposition is committed to that, I don't know.

00:35Some Australians say, well, France is doing it, America's doing it, lots of countries are.

00:40China's doing it, lots of countries are using nuclear.

00:43The countries that are making big use of nuclear don't have Australia's renewable energy opportunities.

00:49And often there's cross-subsidisation from weapons programs. That was the case in France.

00:55High energy prices to consumers come from a number of sources.

00:59The cost of poles and wires, the cost of generating the electricity.

01:02The part that depends on the cost of generating electricity is getting cheaper and cheaper with renewables.

01:08Places like South Australia, where we've made most progress on renewables, renewables are very cheap in coming into the market.

01:16We certainly will not lower the cost of energy by slowing down progress on renewable energy.

01:23We will get reliable power from renewable energy when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining from a whole range of mechanisms.

01:31Battery storage is one of them.

01:33Since Musk put in that battery in South Australia half a dozen years ago, we've had a great battery boom.

01:40There's more large-scale, grid-scale batteries to stabilise the grid being put in in Australia than in any other country.

01:49I'm on the board of a company, Zen Energy, that's just reached an agreement and is implementing an agreement with a Taiwan-based company

01:58to put in a pipeline of a gigawatt of big batteries, multi-hour batteries.

02:04Well, a gigawatt is big. That's the demand of the whole of Adelaide in the middle of the night.

Category

Transcript

Comments

Recommended