Coalition’s Ted O’Brien admits gas is a disaster for energy prices

It was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but in an interview with Radio National, shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien just casually admitted something very significant. In pre-empting the impending “modelling” to be released justifying their claims on gas price reductions, O’Brien said:

“That’ll be released in due course. We are supremely confident that we can get the price of gas down. I mean gas is just so critical to everyone’s lives. There are listeners this morning who would be using gas for their own heating at home or cooking. It often sets the price of electricity.

“A lot of products we buy we buy from the shelf – if you buy a loaf of bread, a bottle milk, jar of ham, the packaging: all requires gas. Any fresh produce, your apples and bananas, they’re probably made with the help of gas. You buy some pharmaceuticals from the chemist: gas. Um, steel, bricks: gas”

Earlier in the interview, O’Brien had already stated that “it is quite extraordinary that after three years of the Albanese government and Australians now paying among the highest prices for electricity in the world, the government is conceding that it has no modelling to back up its energy policy and let it ploughs ahead”.

It’s carefully worded to be un-fact-checkable, but the vibes are off: the IEA’s latest electricity price report shows that current Australian electricity prices are below the EU average, and nestled comfortably in the lower end of all of the selected countries for comparison. Simply, electricity prices aren’t that bad, in Australia.

As you can see from the chart above, a wide variety of countries suffered significant impacts during COVID19’s second year and then exacerbated during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Reliance on a fossil fuel with complicated, vulnerable supply chains has been the primary driver of this ongoing energy price crisis. And in Australia, it is gas’ price-setting impacts – identified by O’Brien – that have been a primary driver of power prices – gas and electricity are closely intertwined due this causal relationship:

It is strange that O’Brien voluntarily brought up the fact that the price of electricity is so closely connected to the price of fossil gas. It sounds like O’Brien is making the best argument against massively reducing its influence on electricity by replacing its services with batteries, new transmission and other forms of non-fossil dispatchable power generation.

In fact, O’Brien’s huge list of commodities and neccesities that rely on the burning of fossil gas seems like the best argument possible for decoupling society from it altogether, and shifting to clean power.

Here’s a quick reminder of why new forms of energy technology are far cheaper than relying on an over-complicated and out-dated fuel source….