This Friday will mark two years since the South Australian blackout when the entire state lost its electricity supply.
And the reality is, SA and the national grid has never needed a new Hunter power station more than right now, especially with the determination to close down Liddell.
South Australia and Victoria need power from the Hunter to stay in business and to keep the lights on.
The cost of not having access to this power is enormous.
South Australia and Victoria need power from the Hunter to stay in business and to keep the lights on.
Business SA, the state's peak business group, estimated the cost of the blackout two years to the state’s businesses at $367 million and it took several days to restore power, leaving families in the dark.
Since that time, Australians have had two prime ministers and two federal Energy Ministers.
We have had a plethora of reports, taskforces and consultations – including the Finkel Report and the National Energy Guarantee – that were meant to ensure that the South Australian state-wide blackout would stay in the pages of history.
Despite this, there has been no real change in energy policy in the last two years and what happened in South Australia could soon spread to other states.
The cause of South Australia’s woes was over-subsidy of renewables at the same time as reliable low-cost coal-fired generators were forced out of the market.
Now private operators are hellbent on closing Liddell despite national reliance on its output.
The pain of the SA blackout didn’t end two years ago in South Australia. Since then, wholesale prices for South Australians has increased by 60 per cent.
The risk of blackouts hasn’t declined either, with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) reporting last week that South Australians have a one in 10 chance of blackouts this coming summer.
South Australia has rightly made building an interconnector to NSW a priority which is a signal that South Australians need the baseload coal-fired power that NSW produces.
But as we saw two months ago, the Queensland and South Australian interconnectors went down simultaneously and power had to be cut to big industrial users and households.
But building new interconnectors isn’t the entire answer.
With AGL forcing the closure of the Liddell power station in 2022 South Australia won’t be able to rely on NSW for its surplus energy.
AEMO has already warned that Liddell’s closure could mean blackouts for 200,000 homes in NSW alone.
South Australia’s existing link to Victorian baseload power won’t be of much use either, with a report last week stating that Victoria has a one third chance of blackouts this coming summer, and the closure of Hazelwood has driven up their price of wholesale electricity by 100 per cent in the last two years.
The simple truth is that Australia needs new baseload energy to replace the 5200MW of generation that has been forced out of the grid.
The Morrison Government should get on with facilitating the construction of a new high efficiency low emissions (HELE) coal fired power station, and the Hunter is the place to do it.
A like-for-like replacement is needed for the Liddell power station. This isn’t just for NSW, but to ensure supply of real baseload power for other states too.
Australia needs HELE to avoid another blackout on the east coast in four years’ time that would be devastating to families and businesses – across the powerhouses of the economy.
Other countries around the world continue to build HELE stations while mitigating their carbon emissions and maintaining their economic growth.
China has 299 new coal-fired plants under construction, India 132 and Australia’s closest neighbour, Indonesia, is planning a further 32.
Australians don’t need another report, Australians don’t need another two years of uncertainty or more consultation.
Only boots on the ground and cranes in the sky building a new HELE power station in the Hunter will solve ever rising power prices and greater risks of blackouts.
If the Morrison government hopes to be true to its word to be the government for affordable and reliable energy, it must start by admitting it understands the lessons of SA’s blackouts two years ago.
Australia cannot afford to go through that sort of energy crisis again.
