“Intermittent coal:” Bowen tells right-wing think tank and fierce critic that it’s got it wrong on renewables

Federal energy minister Chris Bowen has pitched the “conservative case for climate action” to one of Australia’s most right wing think tanks, in a speech describing renewable energy as predictable and reliable and coal as “intermittent energy.”

The speech was delivered by Bowen in the Gold Coast on Friday, at day two of the annual “consilium” hosted by the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), a right wing think tank that has been a loud and angry critic of the Labor government’s renewables policy, the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator.

As Michael Mazengarb reports here, the CIS notably ran a campaign supporting nuclear and opposing renewables, and attacking energy market institutions including AEMO and the CSIRO, in the lead-up to the 2025 federal election.

In this vein, Bowen’s appearance at the Consilium is on the agenda under the headline, “Are we still sure about net zero?” A follow-up conversation on Day 3 is called “What to do about net zero,” and features Coalition senators Matt Canavan and James Patterson.

No doubt the minister’s speech will serve as a great primer. And, notably, it came just two weeks after the state’s LNP government unveiled a controversial new energy roadmap that aims to keep coal “for decades” and which models an effective end to new large scale wind and solar projects.

“I have two fundamental arguments that I am going to put to you in the time that I have available today,” Bowen told the conference.  

“Firstly, that conservatives and liberals should care deeply about climate change, support the drive towards to net zero and dismiss the conspiracy theories of climate denial.  

“And secondly, in the unfortunate event that I don’t convince you on my first argument … the government’s move towards renewable energy, backed by storage and gas peaking is the economically rational, pragmatic and sensible approach.” 

Bowen’s main thrust was around the perils of relying on ageing coal generators, that are proving unreliable and a threat to grid reliability and security.

“Predictability in the energy grid is critical to reliability,” he said. “And coal fired power is no longer predictable generation in Australia.  

“During the second quarter according to the Australian Energy Regulator, high price events were observed 66 times across six days, with coal outages playing a central role in every single one of these events.”

He pointed to the “now infamous catastrophic outage” of the Callide C coal generator a few years ago left about half-a-million Queenslanders without power. One unit was out of service for 3 good years, causing the forward price to jump by over $30 per megawatt hour. 

“These examples represent a broader trend that will only worsen if governments continue to hope that unpredictably intermittent coal can keep the lights on,” he said.

“The evidence could not be more clear.  Coal’s intermittence puts households at risk. Over reliance on coal and “sweating the asset” of coal fired power is far more serious threat to reliability than renewables will ever be.”

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