Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has labelled the Morrison government’s gas fired recovery as “surreal”, saying it should be looking to phase out the use of fossil gas rather than subsidising its expansion in Australia.
Turnbull also took aim at federal energy and emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor during an address to the Australian Energy and Battery Storage conference in Sydney on Wednesday.
Turnbull said Taylor had achieved a rare feat of uniting the energy sector, but perhaps not in the way he might have hoped.
“Angus has united the energy sector in a way I’ve never seen in my life. Everyone disagrees with him,” Turnbull said.
“It’s really interesting. He is a galvanising, unifying, figure in Australia and Australian energy policy.”
Taylor’s falling out with major energy market participants was made clear by his exclusion from negotiations around the future of the Eraring power station, with Origin Energy opting to discuss the early closure of Australia’s biggest coal generator plant with the NSW state government and AEMO, leaving out Taylor.
Since leaving politics, Turnbull has taken a number of positions within the clean energy sector, including senior positions with the International Hydropower Association, Fortescue Future Industries, as well as being an active investor in ventures like 5B.
Turnbull told the conference that Australia still had a desperate need to build additional long-duration energy storage capacity.
“[The energy transition] will require not simply green power to replace coal and gas, but vastly greater supplies of electricity to cater for the electrification of sectors like transportation, household heating, which rely on fossil fuels,” Turnbull said.
“We need more storage. A lot. And above all, we need projects which provide at least eight-hour storage and more and in a form that can be widely emulated.”
“There is a temporal asymmetry between variable renewable generation and pump storage can only be addressed by getting started as soon as possible,” Turnbull added.
Turnbull said pumped hydro energy storage projects were likely to be best placed to provide longer-duration forms of energy storage, with the economics for battery projects of that scale not yet competitive.
“It’s easy to see a business case for a battery that can discharge for an hour or two or three or four,” Turnbull said. “Basic arbitrage will stack up.”
“But storage for eight or more and more hours is harder to justify, at least in today’s market. But if we want to keep the lights on all the time, we will need it.”
Asked about Taylor’s decision this week to award a fresh $50 million round of subsidies to the gas sector, Turnbull described the push to support the expansion of the gas industry as ‘surreal’, comparing it to the push with the Coalition during his term as prime minister for funding for new coal fired power stations.
“There are short term challenges and longer-term challenges, but the whole gas powered recovery thing is surreal. I mean, it is surreal. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” Turnbull said.
“We – not so much the federal government but Australia overall – have such a good story to tell if we choose to tell it and a big part of it is storage.”
“You’ve got the reality of Snowy 2.0 being built. Kidston [pumped hydro] is a smaller project but really innovative the way an old mining mine site is being used, and hopefully Origin will get on with the project at Shoalhaven, but we need a lot more.”
“But instead we are off on this sort of gas fired recovery thing and talking about handing out huge subsidies to the gas sector, when in fact what we want to do is burn less gas. Ideally, none,” Turnbull added.
Read Turnbull’s full speech here.
