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Malcolm Turnbull: trend is your friend
symptom of the way we have treated the world. We are supposed to be stewards not rapists. The Australian government quite frankly does not control the agenda, the climate does. We humans have caused climate change and we have to control it.”
Australia remains as divided as ever, and former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull who fell victim to the ongoing and bruising ‘climate wars’ joined forces at the Global Summit with UN Climate envoy Mark Carney who flagged the very real prospect of the European Union implementing tariffs on high carbon products. The US too could join the ‘carbon club’ by punishing countries that don’t cut emissions fast enough.
Carbon taxed Australian exports would be hit hard, from the production and output of steel to aluminium, cement, glass and other products, unless we take full advantage of the abundant natural resources and establish low carbon intensive industries.
“We are in the happy position that technology has allowed us cheaper electricity from renewables and storage and lower emission electricity at the same time,” Turnbull said.
“We have the opportunity to put aside all the arguments about what we are prepared to pay to save the planet but ideological policies on the right and in the media persist. All that is lacking is political will and a reining in of vested interests.”
He characterised the Coalition’s approach to a gas-led recovery as “bonkers as it’s a transitional fuel, and we run the real risk [of] funding what will become, inevitably, stranded assets. Some people are trying to persuade the government to spend literally billions and billions of dollars to pay for infrastructure to, in effect, subsidise gas,” he said.
Gas has an important role as a peaker (for fast switch on) but there is not a bonanza of cheap gas in Australia, and we need to take into account that the cheapest form of new energy generation is renewables and storage.
The Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan spells out how by 2030 when significant investment in new dispatchable capacity is needed, the advantage could shift to batteries as costs reduce.
Specifically: for gas-powered generation to remain a competitive investment as battery costs reduce (to $922/kW by 2030), gas prices need to be as low as $4/GJ in the long run, while charging costs need to remain relatively high at $30/MWh.
Turnbull said even in 2019-20, four-hour batteries would have been able to charge at an average price below $30/MWh in all regions except New South Wales.
“Trend is your friend,” Turnbull said. The government is better off investing in renewable technologies not pouring money into a transitional fuel.
Worryingly, one significant global investor revealed they would not be investing in Australia due to the political uncertainty, and now regards China as a more attractive and stable environment for investment.
China’s net-zero emission target by 2060 will only boost investment in renewables around the world, he said. “The task of getting China, the world’s largest burner of coal, to net zero emissions by 2060 might seem impossible but if any country can do it it’s China with its authoritarian
