Energy crisis deepens while nation dithers on renewables

Malcolm Turnbull should look across Bass Strait to find out how to get electricity mix right, writes Lisa Singh

IT’S been nearly a decade of watching the conservatives in politics tear themselves apart over renewable energy, but recently it became absolute madness.

The saga of the Turnbull Government’s energy policy is bewildering, particularly for an energy company seeking stable guidelines on which it can base its investment decisions.

Yet does anyone have the foggiest idea about what sort of energy policy Malcolm Turnbull stands for?

We used to. In 2009, as opposition leader, he worked hard to get the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislated.

As a backbencher, he dismissed the Abbott opposition’s “direct action” disaster as a “fig leaf covering a determination to do nothing”.

The Abbott government introduced Direct Action as the centrepiece of its energy policy. As Malcolm Turnbull predicted, it’s done nothing. Worse than nothing.

In fact, the Government has done everything in its power to try to destroy Australia’s share in one of the world’s fastestgrowing industries.

Under their watch, we have lost one in three renewable energy jobs. Wholesale power prices have doubled.

Carbon pollution is consistently rising, with recent data showing an annual increase of 1.4 per cent, and government projections showing pollution in 2030 being the same as in 2005.

And now, when Malcolm Turnbull is not ordering energy executives to mail letters to customers, or trying to force a private company to keep open a 50-year-old, wheezing coal station beyond its use-by date when it already decided it would close in order to build a solar farm, he talks up how he is fixing the energy crisis by building Snowy Hydro 2.0.

Turnbull’s Snowy Hydro 2.0 is many things, but being built isn’t one of them. Neither is it a solution to the current crisis or the longer term need for new generation. If it ever gets built, Snowy 2.0 will be a large wet battery, not a source of new generation.

He is throwing more money at a feasibility study for the project and pretending it is news and leadership.

The only news is that the feasibility study will cost at least $29 million. The total cost could be twice the original $2 billion he flagged.

Even if the feasibility study stacks up, as well as environmental approvals and an economic analysis, Snowy 2.0 will probably take seven years to complete.

Labor supports the principle of pumped hydro projects to support a more reliable and cleaner electricity system with more renewables, but no one should be under the illusion Snowy Hydro 2.0 will fix the energy crisis.

The Prime Minister must come up with a legitimate renewable energy policy. But he is even scuttling away from the Clean Energy Target concept he introduced in July.

We all know that if the Prime Minister is searching for a best-practice example of how to get the renewable energy mix right he should look across the Bass Strait.

Renewable energy investment has been a pillar in Tasmania’s electricity market for a century. In 1914 the Tasmanian government bought out a small electricity company in financial difficulty and created the Hydro-Electric Department. Within 10 years, hydro-electric power was revolutionising farms, factories and mills all over the state.

In recent decades Hydro Tasmania has expanded its