Throughout the developed world, nuclear power plants are used extensively to provide, cheaper, cleaner and consistent base load electricity. But not in Australia. The Albanese Government rejects nuclear energy and instead it is putting all its eggs into the unreliable, expensive and environmentally destructive renewables basket.
In reality, there is no country of the industrial scale or size of Australia that has, or is even considering, powering homes, businesses and industry from all renewables. The rest of the world knows that it can’t be done cheaply or successfully and without serious environmental degradation.
The Albanese Labor Government repeatedly claims that renewables are cheaper than nuclear. But Labor’s forecast of a $122 billion price tag to achieve a net-zero National Electricity Market by 2050 has now been exposed by the recent release of an independent assessment of costs by Frontier Economics.
Frontier Economics independent assessment estimates Labor’s reckless renewables plan will actually cost Australians at least $642 billion.
The staggering figure of $642 billion is five times higher than Labor’s claims of a $122 billion, because they either failed to take into account, or deliberately hid from us, the additional costs of critical expenditure such as the new transmission lines that are proposed to cobweb large tracts of Wide Bay.
The Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen has told us that we need to build 27,000 kilometres of new high-voltage transmission lines to link industrial, land-intensive solar and wind to the grid. He also said that Australia must install 22,000 five hundred watt solar panels every day for eight years, along with 40 seven-megawatt wind turbines every month to meet the government’s emissions reduction commitment.
Your electricity bill includes network or distribution costs for transporting electricity from the generation source to the point of consumption. Customers pay for what they use, but they also pay to cover the costs of the physical infrastructure. Increasing the size of the network only adds even more costs to household electricity bills.
With Frontier Economics now revealing the cost blow out of the Government’s plan for our electricity market, the situation will only worsen. Under Labor’s plan Australians will face even higher bills, higher debt, and an energy system at greater risk of instability.
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has raised concerns that we could soon have to start importing liquified natural gas, despite Australia being one of the world’s largest gas exporters.
AEMO has made it clear that our energy market is balancing on a knife edge, with most of the eastern states at risk of blackouts starting this summer, and our reliability on gas will only increase over the next decade as it is essential to underpin the energy grid. Under the Albanese Government, 90 percent of our existing baseload power will be forced out of the energy grid by 2035, without any guarantee of an alternative baseload substitute being put in place.
Australians deserve to know the truth behind Labor’s policies and hidden costs and the impact it will have on energy bills, the economy, and the environment. The Coalition is continuing to develop our policy, but it is abundantly clear that in spite of its $642 billion price tag, it will be impossible for the Government to reach its environmental targets without including nuclear in our energy mix.
In 2022, Labor promised Australians energy savings of $275 by 2025 on annual electricity bills, yet prices have soared – increasing by up to $1,000 more than they promised.
Labor claims that renewables provide the cheapest electricity. If that is the case then why are taxpayer funded subsidies applied to every segment of the electricity market, from the components, to generation, to transmission lines, and subsidies to consumers, yet our electricity prices are amongst the highest in the world? This demonstrates that Labor’s energy policies have failed completely.
