Australia will find it ‘difficult’ to meet Paris Agreement commitments under Coalition’s energy plan, expert says

The Coalition’s energy plan is missing details as to how the proposed changes will lower power prices and reduce emissions, while backing coal and dumping green energy incentives, an expert says. Earlier this month, the Coalition announced it would get rid of green mandates and scrap the 2050 net-zero emissions target, favouring a “technology neutral” approach that backs gas, coal and nuclear power in an effort to lower electricity costs. The opposition claims reduced emissions would be a “welcome outcome” but not at the expense of affordability. “This is the Coalition’s strategy for a plan to write some policy – not a policy. You don’t expect it at this stage … but in saying that, there is no evidence that we can see as to what the policies will be that will achieve these goals,” Monash University Associate Professor Roger Dargaville told NewsWire. “They’re saying that they will apply downward pressure on electricity prices and on emissions, but how they’re going to do that is completely unclear at this stage.” The lack of clarity in achieving these two goals wasn’t entirely surprising, Professor Dargaville said, given the Coalition wasn’t in government and didn’t have a federal election coming up “anytime soon”. The Coalition has made it clear that the centrepiece of the policy is affordability. But it was important Australian power prices were analysed in the context of their OECD counterparts, Professor Dargaville said. According to the Australian Energy Council, Australia’s residential electricity price is 39c per kWh, 1c higher than the OECD average. But when adjusted against a cost-of-living index, measuring the impact of broader economic conditions on daily expenses, Australian electricity prices sit below the OECD average of 45c. “To suggest that we have overly expensive electricity is not correct when you compare it to similar countries, but prices have no doubt increased,” Professor Dargaville said. “There are a range of factors, including increasing fossil fuel prices, increasing network charges, even retail margins, which have certainly been a factor from time to time.” The scrapping of net zero, which became a flashpoint for internal divisions within the Coalition in recent months, is another key detail in the opposition’s plan. The 2050 target is a long-term goal of the Paris Agreement, an international climate change treaty that aims to keep global temperatures below 2C on pre-industrial levels. To achieve that, global emissions must reach net zero by 2050. The Coalition says it would repeal green energy incentives but maintained it did not plan on walking away from the Paris Agreement, claiming emissions will still fall under their plan. “The problem is, there becomes a big disconnect between achieving the Paris commitments and having any policy in place that actually drives it,” Professor Dargaville said. “So the suite, the complex tapestry of policies we have in place at both federal and state levels is very complicated. “The reason why it works as well as it does, which is not as well as it should, is that you have penalties for not meeting targets or incentives for meeting the targets. “If you remove the incentives or the penalties, there is no reason to achieve the targets, and they become idealised.” Repealing these mandates would mean producers of “around 70 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse emissions would have no incentive to cut”, Professor Dargaville said. Thirty-two per cent of Australia’s greenhouse emissions are attributed to energy – the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity – while the remainder is made up of stationary energy, which includes residential and commercial use as well as transport, agriculture and waste. “Those other sectors, they are the significant majority, and while the trend towards renewables means that the electricity sector will decarbonise relatively easily and quickly, the other sectors are so far behind, it’s really disconcerting.” The Coalition has also focused on extending the life of “reliable” generation – i.e. coal-fired power plants – to back up the baseload power on the electricity grid out of fears of unreliable power from renewables. However, Professor Dargaville said new coal-fired power stations or nuclear power stations did not need to be built to provide a backup for the variability of renewable power. Examples of this variability, he said, were the “rare occasions where the sun isn’t shining across the entire country or the wind isn’t blowing or demand is extremely high”. “We do actually have a backup system which is open cycle, gas turbines, diesel generators.,” Professor Dargaville said. “There’s about 10 or 20 gigawatts of capacity that sits idle almost all the time and is only called upon very rarely that can still be in place.” “It’s scare mongering, saying that on the occasion you might have no wind and no solar and no hydro that you need everything backed up.”