Letter to the Editor: No plan to make electricity cheaper

DEAR News Of The Area,

THE COALition seems desperate to live in a fact free zone.

Let us dissect their decision to abandon their Net Zero policy to concentrate on power prices.

What options are available to any government to lower electricity prices?

To make this simpler, let us ignore any commitment to lower carbon emissions or to slow global warming, as important as these are to what is an existential threat.

The cheapest ways to generate electricity today are photovoltaic solar and wind turbines combined with battery storage.

It has now become cheaper to build a new solar plant than to keep an existing, amortised, coal plant running.

Our existing coal plants are old and due to be retired over the next fifteen years.

As they age, like an old car, they become unreliable and putting money in to fix them only makes them more expensive.

One would only do this if there was no alternative to stop the lights going out.

So, what about gas?

Gas turbine plants can be built quickly and can power up and down quickly to meet a changing demand, unlike coal or nuclear.

This makes them useful as peaker plants.

But, over the last few years the price of gas has trebled, making them very expensive.

The international situation is also to blame for our current situation.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed up coal and gas prices.

This is the main reason our electricity prices have increased, not the increase in renewables, which have prevented them from rising even higher.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence data centres has placed a great strain on equipment supply chains as demand for electricity has started to grow.

The wait time for transformers has grown from one year to three years.

This is one of the reasons why the renewable energy roll out has not happened as fast as is needed.

We need to replace all our ageing coal plants over the next fifteen years.

Would nuclear power be able to address this?

Even if we changed the law to allow nuclear power plants to be built there is no way that a plant would be able to be operational before 2040.

By then all our electricity demand will be met by solar and wind and not only would the nuclear plant be redundant but it would be unable to compete economically with renewables.

Nuclear power is very expensive.

To summarise, building new coal plants will make electricity more expensive.

Building more gas plants will make electricity more expensive.

Building nuclear plants will make electricity very expensive.

But, more than this, policy uncertainty will stall the investment in renewables.

It is almost as if the COALition seems intent on sabotaging the policy of investing in the cheapest form of electricity.

They certainly have no plan to make electricity cheaper.

Peter SOBEY,
Valla.