We need more hydro, Turnbull says: But would many smaller projects have been better than Snowy 2.0?

The former Coalition prime minister Malcolm Turnbull says the growing dominance of solar power in Australia and other countries means that more storage is needed than previously thought, and is urging governments to act quickly to ensure these projects are built.

“We need more pumped hydro,” Turnbull says in an interview with Renew Economy’s weekly Energy Insiders podcast.

“Chemical batteries are doing a great job with storage of shorter durations. But when you’re talking about storage durations of, you know, 10, 12, 24, plus hours, pumped hydro still remains the most cost effective.”

Turnbull’s comments came a day after NSW announced that six huge batteries, some with 10-hours of storage, had won its latest tender for long duration storage, and as it flagged two pumped hydro projects were being made “state significant” as part of efforts to get that technology over the line.

Turnbull says the growing dominance of solar over wind means that more, not less, storage is needed, and particularly long duration storage. And while governments can step in, the private sector needs help to overcome the huge up-front costs of pumped hydro projects.

“You have got to recognise that the existing market signals are not really sufficient,” he says. “You’ve got to you’ve got to first decide how much you want, and then you’ve got to make sure that you get it built. And I think it requires innovative policies that just recognise that.”

Turnbull, of course, has some skin in the hydro game. He is president of the International Hydro Association and next week will present to MPs and ministers in Canberra about the need for hydro storage, which he says are still required – despite the emerging success of 10-year hour battery projects – for deeper storage.

His family company, Turnbull Renewables, also struck a deal last year with AGL Energy to sell two pumped hydro developments – Glenbawn Dam and Glennies Creek – and his company remains involved with those two projects.

But Turnbull is probably best known for his sponsorship as prime minister of the now deeply controversial Snowy 2.0 project, which has been beset by delays and massive cost overruns, partly due to bad planning, and partly due to the explosion in civil construction costs, and the difficulties of its tunnelling machines in uncharted terrain.

Turnbull questions whether the final costs will be as bad as some suggest, and insists there will always be huge value in a facility that can provide (at least in theory) 350 hours of storage, and its importance to tackle the so called “dunkelflaute”, the German term used for describing extended wind and solar droughts.

But Turnbull gave an interesting reaction when asked if Australia would have been better off with the sort of projects his private company developed and sold to AGL Energy, which he described as a “much simpler” ambition of connecting a dam to a big reservoir.

“Should we have done that first up, rather than Snowing 2.0?” Turnbull was asked on the podcast.

“Listen, Giles, I think that’s a … really good argument. That’s a good point to make, a good question,” Turnbull said.

“I don’t think the attraction of Snowy 2.0 was just this unique opportunity of two huge reservoirs, you know, 700 meters difference in head. .. about 20 kilometers away from each other, but the ability to link them gave you such a gigantic battery.

“I think if … someone … writes a history book about this, one of the hypotheticals will be, would it have been better to do, you know, do a location where you were building a reservoir next to an existing dam.

“And there were a couple of proposals to do that in the Snowy scheme … we had about four pumped hydro possibilities, and one of them was, you know, building a dam, I think, adjacent to Jindabyne, so that would have been a much smaller project.”

RE: “But are you saying that if you had your time over … ?”

Turnbull: No, no, I’m not saying that at all, because I don’t think, I don’t see how you’d get 350 gigawatt hours any other way. And I think that having that really deep storage is going to be very valuable. You can’t live your life backwards, as they say.”

Coalition’s lurch to the right

On the issue of politics, Turnbull was typically emphatic about his frustration with conservative politics, and the lurch to the right led by the LNP, the Nationals, and even with the Liberal Party.

“I think the Liberal Party, and this applies to the Nats as well, and it particularly applies to the LNP, which is a combination of both in Queensland, is that they have, over time, become more and more captured by that right wing populist message, or that echo chamber largely represented by the media that Rupert Murdoch owns.

“Sky News being the best example. They’re in this little echo chamber where they’re literally in a parallel universe. They’re interested in culture war issues. They’re not really interested in economics in any meaningful sense.

‘It is a sort of tribal culture, so that was the in the Coalition, or in the Liberal Party, that was always my problem. You know, I didn’t have too much problem with the Labor Party.

“Obviously they wanted to get me out of office … and had a fair crack at it in 2016, but the people that really gave me grief were the right wingers and their friends in the right wing media in the Liberal Party.

“And so this mob have got managed to get control of the Liberal Party. In the process, they’ve lost most of their most affluent urban electorates and most of their urban electorates full stop, and they basically burnt the show to the ground. And I don’t know how they can get out of that hole.”

He says the Nationals are now a party that serves the interests of the mining industry more than it does farmers, and is fixated that on “waging a war on renewables as though it’s like some kind of satanic fetish, which is how it sounds when Barnaby Joyce talks about it. It is just at odds with the lived experience of most Australians.”

But Turnbull says the disintegration of the Coalition could open the door to ring wing, anti-science parties like One Nation.

“You run the risk that one day, if people are just so fed up with Labor that they’ll just go for whatever the alternative is, that you end up with, you know, a crazy right wing party.”

Hung parliament may not be so bad

Turnbull now even concedes that a hung parliaments, something that he could barely countenance when head of one of the major parties, is now attractive.

“As a former leader, of a big party, I’ve always said, don’t vote for independents, you don’t want to have a hung parliament, (it’s) chaos. But possibly, (I) haven’t been very convincing when I’ve said it,” Turnbull says.

But he points to the success of the 43rd parliament, when Julia Gillard was prime minister for much of it, with the support of the Greens and the so-called country independents. It got a lot done, including some very good climate and energy policies, and the creation of key institutions such as the CEFC, the CCA and Arena.

“The instability was not caused by the cross bench, it was caused by Kevin Rudd wanting to take revenge on Julia,” Turnbull said.

“We don’t never have a majority in the Senate, you work with the cross benches. So I don’t have a problem with coalition governments. I mean, the Coalition is (or was) a coalition, after all.

“The real question, I think, for the Teals (one of whom now sits in his former seat of Wentworth) is how long do they want to just be feisty independents … on the cross bench. When do they say vote for me, I want to be prime minister, or treasurer, or defence minister or something like that.”

The Trump factor

And then there is Trump.

“The problem with Trump, from our point of view, (is that) Trump’s values are more in line with those of Vladimir Putin than they are with any of his modern predecessors as president, and he doesn’t make any bones that they’re not,” Turnbull says.

“Trump believes might is right. It’s not as though he believes it, but pretends he doesn’t. He says he believes that might is right.”

“He sees people who depend on him ,or depend on the US, and this this applies to us, obviously, with our defece ties as that dependence makes us vulnerable and gives him leverage to get something out of the other party.

“So this is how he uses Tariffs and Trades military leverage, and it’s and it is all about using that leverage to advantage the United States at the expense of other countries.

“Now, a cynic would say the world’s always been like that. Trump’s just being honest and, you know, saying the quiet bits out loud. But whether you take that approach or another one, the fact is, it’s very different to what we’ve been used to.”

You can listen to the full interview with Malcolm Turnbull, and our coverage of the news of the week, in this episode of the Energy Insiders podcast. See: Energy Insiders Podcast: Malcolm Turnbull on hydro, LNP, One Nation and Trump.

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