Hansard debates

Tim READ (Brunswick) (16:32): It is a pleasure to rise to debate this motion. I have tried very hard to get excited about the announcement of nuclear energy from the federal opposition leader, but I am struggling. I am struggling to get excited about the idea of nuclear power plants at the sites of our major coal-fired power stations. Frankly, I do not think it has got a hope in hell. I think that the prospects of this happening are close to zero. The member for Clarinda has easily and efficiently debunked the arguments against renewable energy and in favour of nuclear energy. I barely need to repeat them, but to summarise, as carefully explained by CSIRO, the cost of building and, people forget to mention, decommissioning nuclear power plants and dealing with the waste, which will last thousands of years, not to mention their voracious water use and safety concerns, is massive. Nuclear energy will be the most expensive form, and we will have to go a long way, I think, to find a billionaire willing to invest in it in Victoria when we have got so many other wonderful options. We could, for example, just drill for gas near the Twelve Apostles or we could invest in Victoria’s abundant renewable energy resources – whatever. I think that the fairly scientifically illiterate arguments that we have been hearing against renewable energy really need to be called out for what they are, which is a sort of modern version of the Luddites, who opposed technology a couple of centuries ago. I think that given Victoria’s abundant wind and sunshine and Australia’s landmass available for renewable energy, we would go a long way before we could find anything more cost-effective.

I will just single out a couple of other points made by some of the speakers from the coalition. The idea of renewables competing with farming has been debunked by the Clean Energy Council, who have calculated that we would need 2 per cent of Australia’s landmass to generate 27 times more energy than we currently are using. Also, as a previous speaker mentioned, renewables and farming can coexist in many places. Certainly wind farms do not take up a lot of space, but solar farms can coexist with sheep grazing. In fact in some places they have found they have got more green grass with the condensation run-off from the solar panels, giving them more prolonged green pick through the year, increasing, believe it or not, the productivity of the sheep farm.

As I said, the member for Clarinda debunked all of these arguments, and it is not surprising really, because in a way the coalition, by promoting nuclear energy at this time, is doing both the federal and state governments a service by creating a sort of straw man. The nuclear argument is so easily defeated that it is a convenient distraction from the far more important issue, which is that every single day that we stand here and talk about nuclear or not nuclear we are burning over 100,000 tonnes of brown coal in Victoria, which is an extraordinary amount and kind of hard to visualise. So I will make it a little easier for you. If you put our daily coal consumption onto a coal train – which we do not do in Victoria, but just imagine if you did – the train would be over 20 kilometres long. It would be arriving at Glen Waverley Station before it had left Flinders Street. That is a massive amount of coal, and we burn that every day, and when you burn 100,000 tonnes of coal even something that is present in a very small concentration in the coal can become quite voluminous in the atmosphere. We produce over a year about a tonne of mercury compounds in the atmosphere over Gippsland, and that mercury is found in tests taken from wildlife in Gippsland and would probably be found in humans as well if it was done.

The 100,000 tonnes of coal we burn every day is burnt in 10 electricity-generating units found in three power stations. I think it is four at Yallourn, four at Loy Yang A and two at Loy Yang B. That is 10 ‍units that we have got to retire between now and the government’s target year of 2035. I reckon we could do it faster. I reckon we should be able to close one of these units each year over the next decade. One of the other things we could do to burn less coal is require coal power stations to turn off one or two units during forecast periods of lower demand. Demand for electricity is seasonal, and at the moment peak electricity consumption is on hot summer days, presumably due to air conditioning. We probably do not need all 10 coal units burning through winter when peak demand is during summer, so there may well be months in the year, particularly perhaps as we move increasingly towards getting rid of gas from homes around autumn and spring, when we could turn off a coal-burning unit for a month or two and put less of that mercury, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while we are waiting to build all the renewables that we need or, if you are in the coalition, the nuclear power plants, which I do not think we are ever really going to get.

I do not know if the member for Box Hill is here. Oh, yes, the member for Box Hill is here. I wonder whether the Prime Minister has gone on a bit of a fission expedition here just trying to pull out opponents and provoke them by suggesting nuclear. I wonder whether it is really a serious proposition. Further, we need far more renewable energy than we have got. Right now we have got something over a third of Victoria’s electricity generated by renewable energy, and we have got a target of over 65 per cent, I think, by 2030 but certainly 95 per cent by 2035. So to get there we need to build a lot more. A lot of the easy spots have been taken, so we need to build out the grid with more transmission lines so we can hook up more solar farms but we also need to build wind farms in places that are harder to build in, like Bass Strait. That is going to cost a lot of money, and it is not clear that the renewable construction pipeline is quite ready – that there are enough projects in the pipeline to meet the 2035 target. To do that, something like a government-funded renewable energy agency would do the trick to fill in the gaps where the private sector is falling short. That is why the idea of the SEC seemed like a good one before the election, when it was announced. The problem is the SEC only got $1 billion and around a third of that has already been spent on some battery projects, and a fair amount has been spent on photo ops and T-shirts. There is not enough money left in the SEC to fund a decent-sized renewable project to contribute towards the 2035 target. The SEC needs more funding.

To give you a sense of the scale, the SEC’s billion dollars pales into insignificance compared to the almost $10 billion achieved by selling the Port of Melbourne. Because renewable energy projects will generate money – they will generate revenue – I do not believe we need to privatise anything to build more. It is an investment into a revenue-making venture. I believe that we can dramatically increase the funding to the SEC and build enough renewable generation and transmission projects to cover the shortfall in the pipeline of planned projects to get us on the path to 100 per cent renewables by the end of the decade.

I think that given we have heard a bunch of arguments against renewables because of their supposed impact on agriculture, we do need to listen carefully to questions about where transmission lines and renewable projects are situated. We need to take account, for example, of the type of farming affected by renewables projects. Some agricultural land is very productive and worth a lot more, and having a blanket compensation fee per kilometre over all kinds of land might not adequately compensate farmers who have a small farm that is highly productive. They might need more compensation per kilometre than someone who has got relatively low-grade farmland that is far less productive. I think that transmission lines and, where possible, renewable projects should be situated on agricultural land, particularly degraded agricultural land, rather than native forest.

I also think we could do more to put renewable energy generating projects where the grid is strongest. That might mean putting more solar panels in the Latrobe Valley in and around currently coal-fired power stations, because they have got the best grid connections, and putting more of them around the Portland aluminium smelter, which is Victoria’s biggest energy consumer. Even though Portland and the Latrobe Valley are not the sunniest parts of Victoria, the fact that they have got the best grid connections would mean that the need for urgent transmission lines is reduced, because we know we can hook those projects up where the transmission lines are strongest.

I think that the other thing we can do is look at some of the new technology that Loy Yang A is introducing to enable them to just dial down the amount of coal they are burning from time to time. One of the problems with brown coal fired power stations has been that they have been unable to switch off or slow down. If you turn off a brown coal power station, it takes about a day and a half to start it up again. But Loy Yang A is installing some new technology which will enable it to dial down its rate of generation, and we should require Loy Yang B to do the same. As it is the youngest power station, it is probably going to hang around the longest.

Another bit of interesting technology has been installed in some aluminium smelters. We need to think about the Portland aluminium smelter kind of on the same page as our coal-fired power stations, because that smelter uses about as much electricity as one of those power stations produces. If we were, for example, to close the smelter, one of those power stations could close overnight, and vice versa.

Dylan Wight interjected.

Tim READ: To reassure the number for Tarneit, I am not suggesting that we close the smelter. Instead what we should do is require the smelter to introduce modern insulation around the aluminium pots so that when it is switched off the aluminium does not solidify and need to be thrown out. There is at least one smelter in Germany that does this. What it does is accept payment from the government for switching off, and because it has got this extra insulation it can keep the aluminium molten. This then means it has got an alternative source of revenue and it can switch off at times of high power demand. As we get more and more renewables onto the grid we are generating more power than we need at lunchtime and not enough at dinnertime, and so instead of continuing to consume electricity at 7 pm we want a smelter that can switch off for a few hours. Simply doing that will mean that we do not have to build as many batteries, and batteries, as the SEC has discovered, are way more expensive than some of this new technology that makes a more rational use of the power that is available.

I will conclude by pointing to one other area of technology, which is now present in the parliamentary car park. Every week I go out into the parliamentary car park, I see more electric vehicles. The car that was going to ruin the weekend only a couple of federal elections ago is now a popular possession of Labor and Liberal members alike, and I am delighted to see EVs proliferating in the parliamentary car park. But what people do not quite appreciate is that the combined battery power of half a dozen Teslas is about the same as the battery capacity of the community batteries being opened up around the suburbs with great fanfare. The community battery that opened with much hoopla and spin in North Fitzroy – and it is a wonderful thing – has a storage capacity of about 300 kilowatt hours. That is about five Teslas. In other words, the point I am making here is that very soon the family car will be able to be used as a storage resource for our grid. If you can take, say, 10 kilowatt hours out of your car battery and use it to power your home overnight, you are not drawing from the grid.

Some cars are capable of putting power back into the grid or back into your home, but currently most electric vehicles on sale in Victoria are not. But if you read Saul Griffith’s book, you can see the potential of using electric vehicles as a kind of electricity storage so that we can essentially shift electrical power from lunchtime, when we have an abundance of solar, to dinnertime, when we need the power but the sun is not shining. I am only aware of one brand of EV currently capable of doing that, but I think we should require all EVs sold in Australia to have that capacity. If the Nissan Leaf can do that, why can’t all of them?

I had better return to the motion before someone calls me out on this, and I am very glad that the member for Tarneit has not yet. But as I said at the beginning, nuclear energy is a distraction. It is a straw man. The member for Clarinda destroyed the coalition’s arguments in favour of nuclear energy. It is dead in the water. We need to focus on why we are still burning 100,000 tonnes of coal every single day in this state and what we can do to get off coal faster. That is the motion that we should be discussing, and I will retire before someone tells me to shut up.