Premier Chris Minns is preparing to squander about $3 billion of taxpayers’ money to extend the life of the coal-fired Eraring power station.
When I was NSW’s minister for energy, I always asked four questions when I was making decisions about power: Is this good for the economy? Is it good for the environment? Is it good for taxpayers? And: Does it help us transition to the future with a reliable, affordable and clean energy supply?
We all remember JobKeeper. It was a big and vital handout that kept people going during lockdowns. It was temporary assistance to get us through an emergency. Minns, however, is preparing to sign us up for “CoalKeeper”. It means handing over billions to stall the energy transition, and keep coal going way into the future.
Minns is already running the idea that Eraring needs to be saved because the lights are about to go out in NSW. That’s simply not true. It was Eraring’s owner, Origin Energy, that first raised the prospect of bringing forward its closure to 2025. Why? Because it was losing money. Coal prices had gone up, while the cost of renewables and storage investment was going down. Origin’s business model was ageing even faster than its plant.My No.
That tender is currently under way and is going so well that the federal government has decided to increase its size to 930MW. In other words, NSW will not only have the generation it needs to meet the tightest reliability standard in the nation, AEMO last week confirmed we will have enough capacity to ensure we meet those standards when Eraring closes.There is no reason a competent government could not deliver these batteries before Eraring shuts.
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