Gas industry still talking garbage about big batteries, knowing they will kill its dirty cartel

big battery tesla Neoen Victoria
Victoria Big Battery. Image supplied

Australia is getting used to fossil fuel misinformation campaigns. They have their foundations in the climate and technology denial and the protections of a trillion dollar industry, and became a performative art under the federal Coalition government.

Batteries and electric vehicles were and remain favourite targets. So are wind and solar. The mocking of advanced technologies remains the bread and butter of the troglodytes in the conservative media, but the misinformation is so ingrained it has infiltrated into the mainstream to the point where it is often parroted without question, or thought.

And if you had any doubts about the source of this nonsense – the fossil fuel industry, of course – they would have been laid to rest listening in, as I did on Thursday morning, to the half-year results presentation of the listed gas and energy infrastructure company APA Group.

It was the first presentation by the new CEO, Adam Watson, and he wanted to make a big impression, and emphasise the importance of dirty gas to the clean energy transition, and the comparative uselessness of battery storage.

His primary target was the country’s biggest battery installation to date, the 300MW/450MWh Victoria Big Battery facility near Geelong.

Source: APA group presentation.

“If you take, for example, the Victorian big battery, one of the largest in the world, it’s likely to only provide enough power for around 1 million Victorian homes for around 30 minutes,” Watson told analysts.

“Yes, technology is improving at pace, as it should be. But it’s well, well short of what’s needed to ensure our energy system is secure and reliable when the sun doesn’t shine, or when the wind doesn’t blow. And that’s why renewable energy, coupled with firm gas, is essential.”

Recognise anything here? Of course you do. But here’s the thing; it is so misleading and so deceitful that you wonder if the corporate regulators would consider charges of deliberately misleading the market.

Here’s why.

The Victoria Big Battery is smarter and more useful than APA would have you believe. It’s not a one trick pony like a gas generator, it can perform multiple tasks.

And the VBB’s primary function is not to supply power to one million Victorians for 30 minutes, but to act as a kind of “shock absorber” to the grid, allowing an extra 250MW to be transported on the major transmission lines from NSW to Victoria for long periods, longer than most gas generators that struggle for supplies.

At times of peak demand, that’s important. And it can do this for far longer than the 30 minutes suggested by Watson. It can do it for hours, days, weeks, and even months, because it is sitting there as a backstop, using its instant response and flexibility to intervene if and when needed.

The huge Waratah Super battery in NSW, at 850MW and up to 1600MWh, to be built on the site of a demolished coal generator, will do the same thing and at a greater scale, allowing hundreds of additional megawatts to be brought into the major load centres such as Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong.

For this valuable service, the Victoria Big Battery gets paid the royal fee of $12 million a year (the service is actually only needed for the four hottest months in the year, and the battery provides a multiple other services for the remainder of the time).

To put that $12 million a year contract into context, a single 300MW gas generator would pocket $12 million in less than three hours running at full capacity at the market price cap, which is what they are designed to do, and is the gas industry’s preferred response.

But with big batteries like the VBB, the gas generators get to do this less often. Eventually, as big batteries and other long duration storage is integrated into the grid, gas plants will get to do this less and less. Then they will be redundant.

In South Australia, the world’s leading renewable grid with already a 70 per cent share of wind and solar over the last year, that will likely happen within a decade.

That’s why the gas industry hates big batteries. Big batteries are smarter, cleaner, and cost less than gas generators, and – as we saw pretty quickly with the very first “Tesla big battery” in South Australia – they don’t waste much time smashing the cosy little cartels that the gas industry has created for itself.

The gas industry lies and misleads because it is used to having absolute power, over the market and governments, and now it is getting desperate. More people now know it is a horribly dirty technology, killing people in the home and workplace, and doing little to reduce greenhouse gases in the grid. The methane it leaks is a climate disaster.

The gas industry is defending itself on multiple fronts. It’s trying to inveigle itself into the green hydrogen hype, it’s trying to stop governments from kicking its technology and pipes out of homes, and frightening consumers and policy makers into thinking its importance to the green energy transition is a huge multiple of the reality.

But the gas industry, and the fossil fuel industry in general, doesn’t give a flying freckle, or molecule, about the consumer, or the green energy transition.

Santos this week announced record multi-billion profits, and nearly doubled its dividend because its costs haven’t changed, but the gas industry has been able to screw its customers on prices. It even had the gall to rail against the “reasonable pricing” measures introduced by governments to protect consumers.

The global oil and gas industry has never raked in so many tens of billions in profits, and far from using this to invest in and accelerate the green energy transition, is reducing it and trying to slow it down. Even the IEA, originally established as the industry’s own global lobby, calls it obscene.

Back in Australia, local petrol retailer and refiner Ampol this week revealed it had doubled its operating profits in 2022, while jacking up prices at the bowser.

Over the last two years, it has paid out nearly $1.2 billion in dividends, special dividends and share buybacks, but it still insists it needs government handouts to help it install new technology such as EV chargers.

Ampol says wants only a “measured” transition to electric, which means it wants to be able to bleed consumer pockets at the petrol pump for as long as it can before that technology is finally killed off by batteries on wheels.

APA has made some useful investments, including some wind farms in Western Australia, a new solar farm in Mt Isa, and an interesting renewable micro-grid at Gruyere. But these are just side shows to its big game plan.

Its real interest is to protect the primacy of the gas industry, its generators, and its network of pipelines. Paris-based climate targets be dammed. Watson says he wants the transition to be “orderly”, which is code for “not too fast please, our bonuses are at risk.” He and his ilk can’t pretend otherwise.

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