“Best and brightest:” Perrottet hires ex-Snowy chief as energy advisor, bats for gas

New South Wales premier Dominic Perrottet has tapped the ex-chief of publicly-owned utility Snowy Hydro to advise his government on “the biggest issue facing our country” – the energy transition.

In a radio interview with 2GB host Ben Fordham on Friday, Perrottet confirmed the appointment of Paul Broad as a “special advisor” on energy, just a couple of months after his abrupt departure from Snowy.

“Paul Broad starts in my office today, Ben,” Perrottet said. “I’m bringing him on as a special advisor to me in my office for energy because this is a real challenge.

“It’s the biggest issue facing our country and I want the best and brightest minds giving me advice,” he said.

Broad left Snowy Hydro in late August after nearly a decade at the helm of the utility that was first established by the NSW and Victoria state governments but is now fully owned by the federal government.

At the time, the reasons for Broad’s unceremonious departure were left largely unspoken, but there was speculation that he had been sacked at the urging of federal Labor’s energy minister, Chris Bowen.

These rumours gained some traction during Senate Estimates hearings at the start of the week, when both Snowy Hydro executives and senior energy department officials cited problems around communication as an ongoing point of friction between Broad and government ministers.

Communication breakdown

Snowy chair David Knox told the hearing on Monday that at a meeting with state and federal energy ministers on August 23 – just three days before Broad’s resignation – Snowy’s board had been warned to lift its game on communication.

“The minister [Bowen] was very clear that he needed to see those communications improve that they were unsatisfactory,” Knox said.

“And that was one of the core bits of feedback we had from that meeting. And I took that away and, obviously, fed that back to my chief executive.

“[Broad] wasn’t giving them a heads up before saying things in in the public forum,” Knox added.

From the government’s side, the secretary of the department of climate and energy, David Fredericks, also confirmed this view.

“I spoke to Mr Broad about that on at least a couple of occasions,” Fredericks told the hearing.

“And I had those [conversations] off my own back… because, I’ll be really frank with you, this was a … communication issue for the department. So I, personally, was worried about it.’

Cost blowouts, delays and not-so-hydrogen ready gas plants

The communication problems were likely to have revolved around the cost blowouts and delays of the massive Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project, and the finer details of the “hydrogen ready” Kurri Kurri gas plant being built by Snowy in the Hunter region of NSW.

Perrottet, however, seems confident this will not be an issue for his government, even as Fordham describes Broad’s appointment as a “slap in the face” to his strongly pro-renewables energy minister, Matt Kean, who has been overseas in the UK and at the UN climate talks in Egypt.

“I think Matt Kean has lost a lot of faith out there in the community because of demonising fossil fuels in the past and likening coal to Blockbuster video and claiming that the business case for gas was on the clock – so you’ve never had to bring in a special energy advisor,” Fordham said.

At that point, the Premier – perhaps taking into account his audience at that moment – opted to go into bat for gas, rather than for Kean.

“I’ve always been a strong supporter of gas, let me make that very clear,” Perrottet said.

“And we are moving, over time, to a renewable future, but we’ve got to keep the lights on and keep our prices down on the way through.”

Perhaps Broad’s first order of business in his new role can be to advise Perrottet on what is going on with gas prices at the moment. Hopefully he doesn’t remind the premier of his views on batteries, and demand management, which he once described as “enforced blackouts.”