Four Corners reporter Stephen Long did a terrific job on Monday night pulling together the various strands that are bringing about the global energy revolution: the fall in technology costs, the emergence of new business models, and the overwhelming and inevitable push to low carbon electricity production.
Readers of RenewEconomy will be familiar with many of the themes, long reported on (we lent him a few contacts on the way). But what I found striking was the obduracy of the incumbents – the power generator operators and the government ministers – in the face of this massive change.
Take, for instance, Richard van Breda, the CEO of Queensland government owned Stanwell Corp, which has felt the pain from the impact of rooftop solar more than most, and has blamed it for slashing revenues, pushing it into the red and forcing it to close half the capacity of its biggest coal-fired power station.
This is what van Breda said about coal:
RICHARD VAN BREDA: First of all it’s, it’s the cheapest form of electricity we have and we need to have the debate around is it cheap electricity or is it a move to renewables?
Actually, as he well knows, it is the search for cheap electricity that is driving the move to renewables, particularly rooftop solar. More than one-fifth of the state’s 1.1GW of rooftop solar has been built with a derisory feed-in tariff. Homeowners and businesses are installing PV for the simple reason that relying on van Breda to supply “cheap” coal-fired electricity down through the network will cost them twice as much.
Network operators such as Ergon and Energex have effectively conceded this point. They have now thrown open the doors to unlimited rooftop solar and battery storage on the simple proviso that they don’t allow exports back into the grid. That will encourage more energy self reliance and even defections from the grid. It will certainly mean less demand for Van Breda’s coal and the end of his centralised  business model.
Then there was Matthew Warren, who heads the ESAA, the lobby group for generators like Stanwell.
MATTHEW WARREN: The market conditions in Australia, with so much over supply of generation means that we think that the RET, as designed currently, is likely to fail and half, up to half of the RET will never get built.
Sorry Matthew, but that’s garbage – and as the former head of the Clean Energy Council, you know it. Even ACIL Allen, the consultants picked by the RET Review headed by climate sceptic Dick Warburton, concede that claim is nonsense. The only thing stopping the RET being met is the policy uncertainty that lobby groups such as ESAA have been assiduously creating.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt, meanwhile, highlights the incredibly parlous state of knowledge about energy matters in the conservative government. It is not certain whether this is willful ignorance, along the lines of Joe Hockey, and his infamous attack on wind mills, or just a lack of knowledge about energy economics and trends.
Hunt speaks of a “balance” between renewables and costs, ignoring the modelling – confirmed by the government’s hand picked consultant – that weakening the renewables target will result in higher prices than otherwise.
Hunt holds out the prospect of new “clean coal” technologies that could achieve “significant reductions” in the emissions from coal fired generation – although in reality it is only around 30 per cent.
The problem with this is the cost. Coal, as we noted this week, is already unable to compete with new technologies. Even on a like-for-like basis with utility-scale solar and wind, it will be out-priced within five years in all the major markets in the world.
Clean coal technologies will simply add to that cost, and not bring down the emissions of coal fired generation to anything close to its renewable energy rivals.
GREG HUNT: Look, whether it’s wave or solar, whether it’s wind or geothermal, whatever the source of energy, there are always operating costs and the renewable energy companies actually make that point to me almost every day.
Yes, but these are small. The biggest element of renewables is the upfront capital costs. All major analyses suggest that wind and solar are at or about the levellised cost of energy for new build fossil fuels, and in some cases approaching that of installed plant. And they don’t have the fuel price risk.
If you haven’t seen the program, it’s worth a look – if only to underline just how far Australia is drifting behind the rest of the world when, until recently, it had the opportunity to lead.
Van Breda, Warren and Hunt are representing the interests of an industry that has no future.
As Sungevity’s Australian co-founder Danny Kennedy puts it:
 “The coal and other protected, vested interests of Australia are going the way of the Dodo if they don’t adjust to this reality.”
Quite so.
