02/10/2016

The Lights Go Out In SA And Turnbull Flicks The Switch To Peak Stupid

The Guardian - Lenore Taylor

The PM ridiculed state renewable targets after the South Australian blackout, the very targets he has to achieve to meet his own emissions promises
Turnbull has to convince the climate sceptics in his party that change – and some impact on power prices – is inevitable. Backing in their belief that renewables can't keep the lights on is a bad way to start. Photograph: Angela Harper/AAP
One big storm and our climate and energy debate is surging back to peak stupid.
Now Malcolm Turnbull has encouraged the campaign to use the South Australian blackout to slow the shift to clean energy, saying state renewable energy targets are "extremely unrealistic".
Except all the evidence says the state targets are exactly what Australia needs to meet the promises the prime minister made in Paris last year about reducing greenhouse gases.
Of course it would be preferable to have a consistent national policy to reach those goals, but it's not exactly the states' fault that we haven't got one.
That vacuum was Tony Abbott's proud achievement, with the abolition of the carbon price and the winding back of the federal renewable energy target, after a lengthy debate about whether it should be abolished altogether, which of course dried up almost all investment in renewable energy.
And consistent, credible national policy hasn't been any more evident in the year since Turnbull took over either.
His own officials admitted in a Senate inquiry this week they had undertaken no modelling at all about how to meet the target Turnbull pledged in Paris for reducing Australia's emissions out to 2030. That's the target he is about to ratify, the target that will be Australia's legal obligation.
But plenty of others have done modelling and analysis for him, and they all conclude that he won't meet it, not with the Coalition's current policies.
They all say he will have to introduce significant new policies, including to shift electricity generation away from coal and towards renewables more quickly.
In fact they all conclude that the state targets he so ridicules (Victoria's 40% renewables by 2025, South Australia's 50% by 2025, Queensland's 50% by 2030) are more or less what he is going to have to try to achieve.
There was his own Climate Change Authority report, which concluded electricity generation needed to produce zero emissions "well before 2050". If that's the goal and we haven't got to 40% renewables by 2025, we're in big trouble.
There was the Climate Institute modelling, which found he needed to phase out high-carbon generation over the next 15 to 20 years or else face a crunch so severe after 2030 that it would cause severe economic disruption.
And there was the recent Reputex report, which also concluded the Coalition's current policies cannot reach its own targets, even factoring in the state-based renewable energy schemes Turnbull so criticises. It says he desperately needs a credible and consistent national policy, including measures to reduce emissions from power generation much faster. Who knew?
Of course the government has to find ways to shift generation from fossil fuels to renewables while ensuring we keep the lights on, and while trying to minimise the increase in power costs.
It could, for example, start the switch with an intensity-based emissions trading scheme for the electricity sector, which is Labor party policy and would therefore win bipartisan support, is very similar to the policy Turnbull proposed as opposition leader in 2009, and which the energy market regulator – the Australian Energy Market Commission – recommended he adopt last year and said could operate "without a significant effect on absolute price levels faced by consumers". (It is also something the government's "Direct Action" could be converted into, and most in the business community are assuming it will be.)
It could extend the current watered-down federal renewable energy target, which ends in 2020.
And Turnbull and his energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, absolutely should urgently consider how to make sure the electricity grid is better able to cope with increasingly frequent bouts of extreme weather.
But whatever Turnbull does has to involve convincing the climate sceptics in his own party that change – and some impact on power prices – is inevitable.
Backing in their belief that renewable energy can't keep the lights on is a bad way to start. When Malcolm Roberts, the One Nation senator and former project leader of the climate-sceptic Galileo movement, tweets how great it is that Turnbull is "coming around to One Nation's position" that's not a good thing, not if the prime minister meant anything he said on this subject in the past or has any intention of keeping the promises he made in Paris.
And whichever way he does it, he will still have to shift electricity generation to renewables, at least as quickly as the state targets are suggesting.
The longer the delays, mired in the grand delusion that his current policy is fit for purpose, and the more he entertains the view of his conservative wing that renewable energy is just some kind of leftwing plot to take the country back to the dark ages, the bigger the economic shock and disruption when Australia finally gets around to doing what it has to.
In his attack on the states this week, Turnbull said "You've got to take ideology out of it. You've got to work out what you want to achieve and then make sure that your measures will deliver that for you."
Exactly right. But what his government has done so far is the definition of putting ideology before sensible policy planning. That's irresponsible, not the states' attempts to fill a policy vacuum of the Coalition's making.

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