Market operator explains why the lights won’t go out with wind, solar and storage

The Australian Energy Market Operator has become the second major institution to fight back against efforts to demonise their work, issuing an explanatory animated video as to why the lights won’t go out in the switch to renewables.

The video posted by AEMO on social media platforms on Wednesday comes just days after the CSIRO was forced to intervene, issuing a statement defending the GenCost report it prepares in conjunction with AEMO, and science in general, against repeated attacks from the Coalition and right wing commentators.

The AEMO video, posted on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, has not been issued in direct response to the political polemic and the attacks from right wing media and so-called “think tanks”, but is part of a broader information campaign aimed at reaching bigger audiences.

In the animated video, the third in a series, AEMO explains how the grid’s bulk energy needs will be best served by lower cost wind and solar as coal fired generators exit the system, with gaps being filled by flexible and dispatchable energy sources.

“AEMO has developed an animation to answer this important question, ‘what will keep the lights on in the future?’,” it writes.

“As coal power stations retire, renewables, connected with transmission, supported by storage and gas, is the lowest-cost way to supply electricity to consumers.”

The video explains how the bulk of electricity during the day will be delivered by solar, with wind, battery storage, pumped hydro dams and gas turbines filling in the gaps during daytime hours and in the evening and overnight.

“The next day we will do it over again,” the video says.

And it notes: “There is a plan,” in relation to the Integrated System Plan, which is promoted at the end of the video. “The energy transition is happening. Australia needs to get on with the job of building the generation, storage and transmission to power us through the day and night.”

The timing of the video is interesting because both AEMO and the CSIRO are under attack from conservatives vowing to halt the roll of large scale wind and solar, and to keep ageing and increasingly decrepit coal fired power stations open until such a time that nuclear can be built.

The renewed culture war over energy has seen O’Brien and Dutton warn repeatedly that the “lights will go out” if the transition to renewables continues apace.

“It will be lights out Australia,” O’Brien trumpeted in a statement issued last August, predicting blackouts over summer that never eventuated.

“I don’t want to see Australian manufacturers exported under Labor’s energy policy,” Dutton said last week. “If we have intermittent power, lights going out … businesses will leave and power bills will continue to skyrocket under Labor.”

However, the country’s biggest manufacturers, the owners of aluminium smelters and refineries, have made it clear they want to switch to wind and solar because they are the lowest cost. Nuclear, they say, is too expensive, a view echoed by the country’s biggest generation company, AGL Energy, and other big utilities.

The Coalition is co-ordinating attacks on key institutions, including the CSIRO and AEMO, particularly their jointly produced GenCost, an annual report which has noted – since 2018 – that wind and solar are the cheapest form of energy, even after including back-up and transmission, and that nuclear is by far the most expensive.

The attacks have also focused on AEMO’s Integrated System Plan, which outlines scenarios to reach near 100 per cent renewables in little more than a decade, and maps out how to replace the ageing coal generators with wind, solar, storage and other firming capacity.

The Coalition and conservative media, however, have made misleading claims about the speed and cost of nuclear, and have sought to demonise new technologies such as EVs, battery storage, concepts such as demand management. This is part of a broader and global fossil-fuel industry led campaign against climate solutions.

Mostly, the Coalition is insisting that a modern economy cannot be supported by energy supplies that are not “baseload”, even though this is directly contradicted by virtually every major utility and investor in the grid, and energy experts, including the CSIRO and AEMO.