The Real Cost of Net Zero: The shocking truth of the renewable energy push

[Music] Australia is in the middle of an energy Revolution the Albanese government wants over 80% of electricity generation to come from wind solar and hydr Power in the next 6 years that's more than double what it is now and both major parties have committed to cutting carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2050 it all comes wrapped in a government guarantee of a Greener and cheaper future but will it be if the costs blow out who will pay if the lights go out who will be responsible and the rush to Net Zero goes far beyond re-engineering

the electricity grid to reach into every aspect of our lives so it's time to take a long hard look at the task ahead and to ask what is the real cost of Net Zero we actually are Target of 82% Renewables by 2030 it's a revolution built on a promise renewable energy is incredibly cheap because it's fuel is free because it's the sunshine and the wind but as power costs soore we have to swap basically lighting for heating heating for [Music] eating our Energy prices uh in the last 5 years have gone G up by more

than a third weather dependent electricity generation is being found wanting one of the issues with renewable energy is it doesn't work 24/7 the fact that the sun sets every night is not a problem if I have 5% of my energy from solar it is a significant issue if I get 100% of my energy from solar Now The Winds of Change are turning the construction of wind farms is a very brutal industry on the land skape they didn't consult with the the traditional people it all comes as the demand for Reliable electricity is set to explode

if we were to Electrify everything that would mean we would have to quintuple the size of the electric grit I just don't see that happening so is the plan for Net Zero now on a road to nowhere well M Tyson said you know everyone has a great plan until they get punched in the face I worry that we may get punched in the face with a Interruption of our energy [Music] [Laughter] Supply mastering fire changed the course of evolution our distant ancestors captured heat and light they learned to to cook that fed their energy hungry

brains they grew to become human then one day a big brain human learned to do [Music] this and this changed everything the fire at the heart of Victoria's electricity generation we've been producing energy from coal here from the the 1920s and uh your loyang B is the last in a line of coal plants about 1,000° inside the boiler here in the latro valley coal is burn to boil water and superheated steam turns a turbine at an astounding 3 ,000 Revolutions a minute that turbine is connected to a generator and the the generator is 570 to

580 megaw of electricity that big load of electrons is delivered in a half bit through towering transmission lines connected to the Familiar streetcape of poles and wires that link businesses and homes to instant reliable power electricity is measured in watts and it takes about 10 watts to run this light if it stays on for an hour it will use 10 wat hours of power 1,000 wat hours is a kilowatt hour you'll find that number written in your electricity bill as kwh that's the price your retailer is charging for the number of kilowatts you use by

the hours that you use them 1,000 KW is a megawatt and that's the measure your retailer deals in when buying electricity in the wholesale Market you can say the current pricing Victoria is around is at $235 which yes because of the the cold weather essentially as long as you have the fuel you can pretty much guarantee electricity on demand every minute 24 hours a day 7 days a week we use about uh 1,200 tons of coal per hour and that enables us to to send out around 1100 40 megaw which is about 20% of Victoria's

um generation Supply needs this is brown coal it's not export quality so it's cheap it gave Australia a competitive advantage in the 20th century we were in the the zone of the the lowest most competitive power prices in the world at that time Steven Wilson has worked in energy in 30 countries for over 30 years you know you was seeing wholesale prices around the sort of 20 to4 per megawatt hour level 2 to 4 cents a kilowatt [Music] hour down there is a brown coal seam it's been powering Victoria for the last 100 years and

it could go on powering Victoria for another 800 but we've decided we're not using it anymore it's delivered the cheapest reliable energy that we've ever [Music] had we were around about the fourth lowest oecd country in the world in terms of our power generation 10 Australian cold fired power stations closed in the last decade there are 15 still running but most are slated to close in the next 10 years ly Yang B is scheduled to put out its furnace in 2047 you see the black Flex y That's the coal that hasn't burnt yet we we'll

will'll likely become um close to being the last Power Station that's running ala energy owns L Yang B and in April 2024 its chief executive sounded a warning you came here for truths and straight talking about the transition so here's a doozy Australians will have to pay more for energy in the future which collides with this often repeated slogan renewable energy is incredibly cheap because its fuel is free because it's the sunshine and the wind it's a line that Rings Hollow for people like Belinda Jones who lives just a short drive from Parliament House she

dreads the arrival of every electricity [Music] bill this is what I call a Payday killer it's come in at $1,733 my pay which is the pay of most age pensioners is around $1,144 this leaves me after I pay this bill [Music] $719 business is also under pressure as energy bills Mount our Energy prices uh in the last 5 years have gone up by more than a third our gas prices in the last 12 months [Music] doubled I know talking to all of my peers across the manufacturing sector energy is probably one of the key topics

that they will talk to First and pledges of cheap green power are a distant dream it will see electricity prices fall from the current level by $275 for households by 2025 at the end of our first term it was a promise so wide at the Mark that the federal government is now subsidizing everyone's electricity bill Belinda's latest includes $75 of government relief $75 now buys you next to nothing so that's why we are forced to shop at the food [Music] bank to understand why increasing wind and solar generation on the grid won't add up to

Falling power prices let's break down the different parts of a bill first there are the retail charges of about 10% we'll push them to one side and concentrate on four other costs the wholesale charge 35% of your bill what you pay for the electricity itself then you have to pay to transport it through the network costs now the transmission lines are about 8 to 10% of your bill and then the distribution network of poles and w that's 35% of your bill and finally the green schemes which are now a bigger part of everyone's Bill Mak

you up around about 10% and we'll focus on Australia's East Coast What's called the national electricity Market the chief executive of the Australian energy Market operator is Daniel Westerman so this is the NM um it is one of the longest interconnected Power Systems in the world the grid stretches from cooktown in Far North Queensland as 40,000 km of transmission lines link generators to towns and cities in New South Wales and Victoria it crosses bass straight into Tasmania and runs West all the way to Port Lincoln in South Australia connecting about 85% of Australia's population to

power 62% of generation on the grid comes from coal and gas while the wind so Sol and hydro share is 38% to hit the government Target that number must more than double in the next 6 years Australia's electricity Market will be 82% renewable under the policies of an albanesi labor [Music] government by their nature wind and solar generators cannot deliver power on demand because the sun doesn't shine all the time and the wind doesn't blow all the time no power plant operates 100% of the time but those running coal or gas have predictable sources of

fuel so that means that you know 98.5% of the time or greater um our plants available on average across a year the best performing onshore wind farms will deliver about 40% of their maximum capacity and between April and June this year across the national electricity Market that number fell to 26% capacity factor is important availability factor is even more important so you might say oh well the coal plants aren't running at 90% capacity Factor true but their availability is around that level and that's what's important whereas we're replacing that almost always available generation with generation

that's only available for a very small fraction of the time Australia also gets loads of power from the Sun Australia has more Roi up solar per capita than any other country in the world this solar farm sits on 50 hectares it has 82,000 solar panels and at Peak generation will deliver 24 megaw and that would be on a day like today a bright sunny day in the middle of the day but tonight the sun will go down and it will deliver zero and across the course of a year you'll get 30% of its plated capacity

or a little over 7 megaw and that's the issue with this kind of Generation by its nature it is off more often than it's on we're reducing the energy energ security that we have as a nation Richard Mendo ran energy Australia for a decade and has been in the energy industry for 35 years we're moving from that very reliable fuel fuel that we have in the ground to a to a less secure and less reliable source for Renewables we're creating artificial scarcity all over the place and when you create scarcity you drive up the price

energy scarcity emerges everywhere wind and solar become the dominant form of [Music] generation Jim Rob and I'm the president and CEO of the North American Electric reliability Corporation he has one of the biggest jobs in the world of electricity regulation we oversee the entire interconnected Grid in North America and his focus is keeping the lights on as those grids change the way they generate power the big issue has been wildfires which you guys have as well the grid we inherited from our grandfathers you know with largely a firm fuel supply uh you you knew within

a high degree of confidence that a particular asset would be available to serve load at any point in time now that we've moved towards a A system that has much more uh uncertainty in the fuel supply and in this case fuel is sunlight and wind um and those are both difficult to uh difficult to forecast at the level of precision that we need for the electric grid Precision is essential in a bulk electricity system think of it as balance Supply must always match demand to keep the systems frequency stable if that balance is [Music] lost

the system collapses in a power system you've got to match the generation output with the customer load basically almost exactly every second of every day continuously and that's not a choice that's just a result of physics and Engineering if you can't achieve that perfect balance then you are at risk of collapsing the whole system within less than a minute the frequency will fall and then the system can can go into blackout [Music] yeah well frequency here um is the balance between supply and demand to maintain that frequency you need generators with big spinning wheels like

lyang B they keep the network stable and the lights on when there's a shock to the system such as a large generator tripping off the stability that used to come from those big rotating turbines at cified Power stations doesn't come from a solar p panel it's a bit like uh riding a bike really slowly when you don't have those big rotating uh turbines on the system the power system can get a bit wobbly that's the magic of the old system that we had was that yeah as we produced kilowatt hours we also produced all of

these things we call Essential reliability services that keep the grid operating um stably as we lose that we've got to recreate them through other assets and we're going to have to pay for that capability so wind and solid generators can't be relied on to deliver power on demand and at the moment can't set the electrical systems frequency or maintain its stability we built our electricity systems around the world with essentially dispatchable Technologies for matching that frequency mik nice to meet Michael Caravaggio is a director of research and development at the Electric Power Research Institute you

use more electricity I can give you more electricity you use less I can turn those down with wind and solar it's not like that right so the sun rises that's when we have the electricity the wind blows that's when we have the electricity doesn't care what you or I do in terms of use of that electricity that's a small problem when we build some wind and some solar but that becomes a bigger and bigger problem as these Technologies scale turning unreliable generation into instantly available power means weather dependent generators have to be hooked up to

a complex and expensive life support system the old grid didn't need it's what the boffins call firming so powered by the sun and the wind firmed up with batteries and pumped hydro and each of these steps adds costs to the system achieving all of that requires a larger more more complex more expensive system than the system we grew up with and the Inconvenient Truth is the new system can't deliver reliable power without gas look gas is the ultimate back stop for reliability for a net zero power system and not just a little bit of gas

15 gaw enough power to run 15 million homes through 2050 and Beyond SO gas is not the backup it's the backbone of a weather dependent grid which simply will not function as a reliable electricity system without it gas will be essential to cover the daily fluctuations in wind and solar generation the morning and evening hours of pig demand and the longer still dark nights the the more problematic issues are cloud cover that persists for multiple days uh wind droughts that persist for multiple days in June of Last Summer so June of 2023 June 6th across

the backbone of North America we have about 60 gaw or 60,000 megawatts of wind capacity installed one of the best wind areas in the world they call it the Saudi Arabia of wind um on June 6th 300 megaw showed up um so uh you know that's that's a pretty big hole to have to dig yourself out of that's the kind of hole the national electricity Market found itself in between April and June this year when under gray skies wind generation repeatedly dropped below 15% of its maximum capacity for up to a week at a time

we will have batteries we will have pumped Hydro but we'll have times like we've seen earlier this year where there's not much wind and there's not much sun um and the gasf fired power stations are really required to back up the reliability of the so what we've seen is that you need to manage those zero those near zero output hours from wind and soar they happen uh Unfortunately they always happen so you need essentially a 100% backup for different periods to cover that need now that is that is an evolving uh challenge uh to figure

out the economics and and how to make that uh affordable right now what we typically see is a significant gas build out if we look at Germany uh and California Germany's probably about 50 or 60% uh wind and solar uh energy right now and they have 100% over 100% uh coal and gas and biomass dispatchable technology uh to back that up uh if you look at the case of California they also have near 100% but California also has the ability to import quite a bit of power from its neighbors uh to bridge that that final

Gap so all of our lead or Fleet leaders essentially have 100% [Music] backup some claim grid scale batteries can cover the energy gaps the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow it's all too hot well the rain doesn't always fall either we all drink water it can be done and the key the key is storing that renewable energy you can store rain in a bucket storing Electric is a lot harder and a lot more expensive in a helicopter you know there's no speed limit there's if you're wealthy you can try the experiment

of storing solar energy at home Adventurer Dick Smith was an early adopter of the electric car I'm Pro Renewables and I drove in the First Solar vehicle race from Darwin to Adelaide I've got an electric car which is powered completely from the roof except it isn't today because we had three days of cloud cover I had to plug the car back into the power line which is connected to a Coal Power Station it's down to about 40% capacity after 10 years so I'm going to have to replace it I'll use lithium battery now but it's

going to cost even more than $18,000 dick solar cells and $18,000 worth of batteries don't come close to powering his car and his house even on their best days you don't need two or three hours you could need three or four days or even longer that becomes prohibitively expensive no Australian residential house has gone off the grid without having a diesel backup generator it's not possible because the storage cost is just so incredibly high now let's scale that up to running an electricity grid Elliot mser I'm the president and CEO of the California independent system

operator he is a grid that now boasts over 11 gaw of big batteries focused right now commission the batteries are able to take the excess energy during the day store it and then reinjected for that 4 to 900 p.m. period in the evening when our grid gets stressed batteries can't supply high power for long periods right now almost all of the batteries on our grid are 4-Hour lithium ion batteries and in dark still winter months there might be little wind or sunshine to charge them so at this stage there is no grid scale battery that

could run a city like San Francisco for four or five days I no there there there's there's nothing so the the most significant storage we have is of course pumped hydro and that's an old technology but when we're talking about Battery Technology we're really looking at four maybe 10hour Technologies and they're nowhere near size to to run large Metropolitan or regions uh for days on end the physical constraints and huge economic costs of grid scale storage explains why all operators of systems with high levels of wind and solar generation are coming to the same conclusion

my personal view is that natural gas is going to play a very key role in the electric sector for a very long period of time um at least until we have a viable technology for long duration energy storage um that can be scaled to the level of terawatts of uh capacity right now we don't have a technology that can do that in any sort of an affordable way at that kind of scale and that's a big problem because Australia's East Coast is running out of gas just go to the report of the energy Market operator

who said that uh energy shortfalls are likely as early as next year so the Scarboro energy project is a 12 us billion dollar investment me O'Neal is the chief executive of Woodside the company that began liquefied natural gas exports from Western Australia um there was a warning earlier this winter saying uh we're approaching the crisis Point um so I think we're we're dangerously close to that point already when an essential good becomes rare the price skyrockets to understand why the gas price matters so much in determining the wholesale price of power we need to know

one more thing about the way the electricity Market works because it's also a financial Market most people probably don't know that energy in Australia is bought and sold every 5 minutes uh and we manage the buying and selling and settle the trades just like the ASX Peak Demand on the national electricity Market is 35 gaw or 35,000 megawatt in this high stakes game the lowest cost generator bids first to meet demand other generators follow in cost order as the stack FS but if the last megawatt needed for Supply to match demand is $300 then that's

what every single player in this game gets paid let's underline this fact it's the highest cost of generation that sets the price of power which is why this slogan is so deeply misleading renewable energy is incredibly cheap because its fuel is free because it's the sunshine and the wind but plugging the generation gaps they leave to build a reliable electricity system is proving remarkably expensive the fact that the sun sets every night is not a problem if I have 5% of my energy from solar it is a significant issue if I get want to get

100% of my energy from solar in the 3 months to the end of June wind and solar only set the wholesale price of electricity for around about 7% of the quarter and it was very cheap when Brown coal stepped in the price stepped up to $12 a megawatt hour and then came black coal and the price went to $110 but look at the cost of everything that will be essential to keep the lights on in a weather dependent grid when Hydro came into the marketplace it was at $145 a megawatt hour when gas set the

price it was at $184 and batteries it set the wholesale price at $245 a mega hour and as coal retires from the marketplace it will be this end of The Ledger which drives the price of power higher the same story is emerging everywhere wind and solar are deployed at scale we're often told that the lowest kind of electricity generation is wind and solar but that's not what's setting the price in the wholesale Market is it no I mean typically you know in in an environment like we're in today when you know we're very very high

load I would say probably it's it's natural gas generation California is the US state that's most like Australia's national electricity Market it has gone hard on Renewables shut down its oil and gas Industries and begun decommissioning nuclear plants the result it has the highest residential business and industry power prices in Continental USA that crushing cost Drew this admission from the California public utilities commissioner in September we're in a transition and it's really hard and right now we are dealing with an affordability crisis for energy in California for consumers Australian consumers face the same crisis for

the same reason and every future option is expensive as we get to a net zero system it's really expensive if we don't have a dispatchable Source like [Music] gas Australia has loads of gas vividly shown in a flight over gladston this is a Chinese flagged liquefied natural gas ship and it's off the port of gladston waiting to load in fact that Port supplies the world with 5% of its liquefied natural gas [Music] the gas Story begins over 400 km Inland near Roma so what's it like for you hosting those wheels on your property oh it's

pretty lucrative you they pay you pretty good upfront payment and pay you yearly to have them here so it's um like having an off Farm job farmer Dave juel has 20 Wills on his property it's been pretty good for the region though given that it brings in in job money a lot of producers the ones with the co seam income seem to do more improvements than the ones without the gas from, 1400 Wells flows to a central Hub at Roma it increases the pressure of the gas to be able to get to the pipeline pressure

requirements that pipeline runs to one of three export terminals at gladston when it hits here it's cleaned and then it's cooled and they get it down to- 161° C at that point it becomes a liquid it's put into those two storage tanks that you can see behind me and then exported overseas there it's turned back into a gas and it Powers well just about anything these projects are high-risk multi-year multi-billion dollar Investments by the time you get there you've spent around $8 billion and you've got many years of drilling ahead to maintain that gas supply

the Queensland gas Fields like those in Western Australia would never have been opened without foreign investment so you couldn't afford to develop this gas if you didn't have the export Market Gas exports create jobs taxes and royalties but they hit a political storm when the domestic price soared after Russia invaded Ukraine our gas that comes out of our seabed and our ground should be for our businesses and our households first Victoria's demand for queensland's gas was profoundly ironic given the southern state banned gas exploration and demonized the fuel is there gas in Victoria lots of

gas in Victoria in New South Wales things were little better as landh holders locked the gates against gas developments we will never accept the northern Rivers being turned into a gas field and gas has been caught up in the demonization of all fossil fuel if we are to keep 1.5° alive fossil fuels has no ongoing role to play in our Energy Systems this ignores two critical points swapping coal for gas cuts the carbon footprint of electricity generation gas is is 50% cleaner from a greenhouse gas uh perspective uh than coal Coal is cheaper but gas

is cleaner and the weather dependent grid under construction won't work without gas well our report outlines the criticality of gas both on the electricity system um and uh for industrial commercial consumers as well as heating for homes and businesses energy producers warn the recent state and federal government conversion to gas has come too light it's hard to make a long-term investment decision when you have 10 years of History saying you're not welcome that that demonization has put the the the the economy into a a precarious position right now because we're not getting new Supply coming

in at a rate at which we need it Woodside owns half of the bass straight joint venture which supplies domestic gas to New South WS in Victoria but it's running dry so there's things that we're doing you know trying to just squeeze as much gas out of the fields as we possibly can to maximize recovery you know that's good for us as a business it's good for the state as our customers um but to do do anything more material you know it's a five plus year lead time Santos has spent more than a decade and

billions of dollars trying to develop a gas project near narab in New South Wales it's just hit another legal hurdle given the history of narab I would certainly not want to be a betting person on timelines but I think the best way to think of it is from the point of getting the pipeline license I think we could be flowing gas within 2 years or so [Music] the shortage is so acute that energy-rich Australia is building liquefied natural gas import hubs like this one in wenong and it doesn't seem logical to me that we' support

using gas as the energy source just not from Australia yes that's a bit of a heads scratcher if we want to cut the cost of electricity generation we need more gas and the answer should be simple but Chris the easiest solution is just to develop the gas beneath your feet but it's not just gas that's hit Community [Music] opposition in Far North Queensland wildlife photographer Steven nowakowski has devoted his life to protecting the environment yeah I've spent three decades as an activist really and as a volunteer working to try to keep trees in the ground

the former greens candidate never imagined his love of nature would collide with the push to save the planet from rising carbon emissions but that changed as he filmed the environmental destruction caused by building a wind farm the end game here is to achieve Net Zero pushing roads and clearing forest and fragmenting forests just is an oxymoron towards that goal of trying to achieve Net Zero because the first thing we need to be doing is keeping trees in the ground Steven rallied the aen table lands Community to stand against another project known as the Chalan wind

farm so effectively every Ridge you see here would have had turbines on them it meant clearing 509 hectares of vegetation next to a wet Tropics world heritage area indigenous leader Tom gz was one of many who joined the fight yeah I was very very shattered um when the government wanted to come in and um and put these big windmills in um they didn't consult with the the traditional people and the community won the wind farm was rejected by the federal government which deemed the risk to the environment was too high everybody got to understand you

never come going to come in here and desecrate my country but Steven was just getting started and is determined to sound in the line on the damage industrial wind farms do to the land well Chris Bowen has publicly said that we need one of these turbines erected every 14 hours and 22,000 solar panels a day by 2030 to reach our Targets in order to hit the government's renewable energy Target Australia has to build more than one wind turbine larger than this every single day for the next 6 years they will march across the landscape from

sea to shining sea in their thousands transforming it forever and making it look like this so I've calculated how many turbines are in the pipeline for Queensland mostly on the Great Dividing Range and at the moment there's around 3,127 turbines in the pipeline for Queensland but that number is changing every week Steven has used his training as a cartographer to map the number of wind and solar Farms that will need to be built on the national electricity Market to hit the government targets stretching from Far North Queensland through New South Wales Victoria West to Port

Lincoln in South Australia and across the best straight to Tasmania the Australian public have got no idea I've got to laugh they've got no idea what's in store and all of this widely scattered generation will be strung together with a web of transmission [Music] lines we have identified an additional around 10,000 km of transmission that needs to get built uh by 2050 by 2050 about half of that in the next um decade make it happen with transgrid in New South W transgrid knows it has a big job ahead of it we have 13,000 km of

line today and we're building another 1,300 km more that's a lot then that's like a 10% build on the network that you already have that is correct and we haven't built large projects in a very long time transmission lines are another flash point like the hum link project in New South Wales Australia's Clean Energy Future depends on critical transmission projects like hum link hum link is really critical in our infrastructure being able to support both Sydney as well as the communities along the path of hum [Music] link the line cuts through southern New South Wales

where Michael Katz marks one of the 300 trees that will be fed on his property it's very old probably 3 400 years old and I just want people to realize the sort of environmental damage which is done when we build these kind of pieces of infrastructure the new towers will stride alongside the old about 100 m uh this way from that line they will bu build a new 500 KV line which will have a different form and which which is basically twice as high and with twice as many wires as this one the community wants

the line to go underground but transgrid says that's too expensive it's at least five times more than what an overhead line would be when you're looking at a 500 KV voltage that estimate is hotly disputed but one thing is not in doubt the cost of this project has almost tripled from just over $1 billion to nearly 5 billion I think there's no chance that it will come in on time on budget are you confident that that the numbers that we're seeing now that it'll be around about $4.6 billion and delivered by 2027 that that is

where it's going to land we're getting to the point where we're actually going in for regulatory approval on the pricing and at that point you're locked in the transmission line will connect Sydney to the new Snowy Mountains pumped Hydro project it's snowy Hydro 2.0 it's going to be the biggest battery if you like in the southern hemisphere announced in March 2017 it was to be built in 4 years and cost $2 billion strategically located between Sydney and Melbourne snowy 2.0 will link two existing dams through underground tunnels and a power station will be built almost

one 1 km underneath the the cost has gone up five times it's now $12 billion Ted Woodley is a former managing director of China Light and Power but it's really about twice that if you include all the cost for the project particularly financing and transmission the government has kicked in $4 billion and a $4.5 billion loan and vast areas of kosa National Park have been destroyed over a distance of 35 km the bill for snowy will be picked up by taxpayers and consumers should worry about spiraling transmission costs because once a project is approved by

the Australian energy regulator the cost is written into your electricity bill forever can you just tell us how much on someone's bill would be the cost of transmission it's about 8 to 9% is what we expect with these projects to be the portion of the bill and there could be an even bigger hit to the distribution charge which makes up 35% of your power bill that network of distribution is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of kilometers across Australia connecting all the homes and businesses across this enormous country we've got the old distribution system was built

for a one-way flow of Power with rooftop solar exports it now runs in both directions that adds stress to the system as does the growing Fleet of electric vehicles I love I've got the Tesla as well for every new EV that comes onto a street it's like adding a whole another homes load right to that street that means parts of the distribution system might also need to be rebuilt it could get massively expensive to take the days you know grid that was designed 100 years ago and actually make it prepared and robust and reliable and

resilient to take on this energy transition that we're marching to you know marching towards the regulator responsible for approving Network charges refused repeated requests to be interviewed but on the regulator's website clar Savage has warned of a wall of capital expenditure coming at consumers these Network Capital costs will be baked in not just for today but for many years to come the need for more capacity and more infrastructure on the poles and wires along our streets is going to add to the cost of our bills so let's add this up as coal exits wholesale prices

are going up transmission costs must rise and the distribution charges well that could be the biggest hit of all I actually worry about the Australians who are battling it out every day um those are the ones who are going to feel the greatest impact from Power price price rises from blackouts you know those are going to be the households that are struggling when their energy prices are rising and more bills now include time of use charges with a higher cost charged at times of peak demand that's the mornings and the evenings when most people need

electricity so energy rationing is already a reality for people like blinda we turn off every second light Globe we use $2 came out light globe to light the house we have one small bar heater going in the family room one bar heater going in the hallway and then it's blankets hot water bottles and basically using the dog to keep warm that's where it's at and what about that last line in your bill for environmental charges well that subsidizes large and small renewable energy schemes since 2013 Australian electricity customers have contributed $14 billion to subsidize large

scale wind and solar developers and another 112 billion to pay for rooftop solar for households and businesses is there any likelihood we will see people's power bills coming down and what why what I can't answer is is my bill going to go up or down I wish I had the answer to that but our remit is to design the lowest cost pathway through the transition and I can tell you that by following the integrated system plan it is the lowest cost pathway for Australian homes and businesses remember the old electricity system delivered power for between

20 and $40 a mega hour Steven Wilson has tried to calculate the cost of the new system you're up around the $200 per megawatt hour level and that's just to get the the electrons onto the system that's before you've put it into the transmission system recovered the cost of the transmission system which is now more expensive than it was you know you're talking at least two times maybe three times maybe more and then finally into the local distribution wise and to the customers so you're just talking about multiples of cost increase there's a line that

a lot of people will latch on to that as we move toward more renewable sources of energy that costs will decline because we don't have to pay for fuel but we do have to pay for the capital uh required to convert free wind and free Sunshine into uh electricity we were going to have to pay for the capital to distribut it to customers and uh we're going to have to pay for the creation of these reliability Services as wind and solar generation grows the reliability of electricity grids is weakening so we're seeing the reserve margin

excess that we used to have in this country uh has gone away and more and more areas are susceptible to uh energy Interruption and nowhere in the National electricity Market is is more unstable than South Australia which has one of the highest penetrations of wind and solar generation on the planet yes we have to intervene in the South Australian Market very often um to make sure that there's enough system strength by directing on some some gas plants to make sure that we have that heartbeat of the system it all comes at a cost and South

Australia has the highest retail power prices in Australia Old Reliable generators also face the stress on equipment of having to ramp up and down to match a constantly shifting power source which means that we have to continue to find um ways to come down lower in generation and move our generation around in response to that so with reliability risks growing energy Reserve margins falling and delays in building new generation the possibility of blackouts is rising [Music] so this is essentially the fastest charger that you can get at the moment we are going at to 400

Kow as well the first thing that it does is allow two-way power flow protection driver can run here when he finishes he can see how well he did against Max V staffen Energy week is the yearly Jamber for everybody involved in running the electricity system generators Regulators retailers and a host of others it's part tfest and part Trade Fair and the atmosphere here is unashamedly optimistic but the undercurrent here this year is a deep fear that the energy transition might be running off the rails we're now moving to a system of much smaller disaggregated sources

of energy and so the the engineering of a Renewables grid is completely different so it's not just a likeforlike replacement it's not just that the wind and Sun are intermittent it's that we have to completely replace all the ways in which electricity works the system rebuild is now running at half the pace needed to meet the 2030 deadline what are your concerns about what might happen look right now we are at a critical phase where we do need to see a step up in investment and that's both in generation and in transmission as delays grow

and cost cost s rise red lights are flashing everywhere on an energy transition that's not going to plan state governments are now paying calf fired power plants like aring in New South Wales to extend their lives now they may stay on 2 years or four or even six years they'll stay on until we can get all the kid in place to replace aaring and aaring is the biggest power station in the country so that's going to be like that but harder with every cold fire generator that closes from here on in the risk that the

lights will go out is growing and few understand what that means electricity is the life support system for civilization without it everything will collapse well Mike Tyson said you know everyone has a great plan until they get punched in the face I worry that we may get punched in the face with a interruption in our energy Supply [Music] I don't mind it I I like them on the road in the United States where some of the fights Echo what's happening in Australia so it has made a huge impact on the local community in the aggregate

just the payments to the Ranchers have total about $2 million a year so that money is coming into the local economy in addition to the uh taxes but here as everywhere the turbines are seen as a mixed blessing on the whole has there been an economic benefit for the town out of it economically yes I would say so and but has it caused any division within the town uh absolutely I mean it 100% ruins a Skyline you know if you're used to a good Hill Country View uh that's gone you know cuz you're looking at

a big giant windmill in your view but there are big differences near Houston is the Petron NOA carbon capture and storage project so Dave how important is this technology this technology is very very important because we have taken carbon capture technology boosted it up to commercial scale and attached it to an existing coal plant so that we can get the affordability and the reliability of coal but making it increasingly cleaner by removing 90% of the carbon dioxide and virtually all the sulfur from it carbon capture is written into other countries plans for hitting net zero

the body of research and the technical studies that support how the world might get to Net Zero by 2050 CCS has got to be part of the solution and in increasing amounts so the US is embracing it wholeheartedly Europe is embracing it wholeheartedly the story is different in Australia essentially the support for carbon capture and storage from most federal and state governments is really really low another zero emission power source has sparked an even bigger brawl electricity is cheaper where there is a presence of nuclear energy we're not planning to introduce the most expensive form

of energy available which is nuclear energy uh just about every continent has uh has nuclear power plants except for Australia actually not far from the Lush greens of austa in Georgia is the Bal nuclear power plant this year it opened the second of two new reactors it's the largest generator of clean carbon-free electricity in the United States the reactors had a difficult birth Westinghouse went bankrupt as the timelines and the budget blew out now that it's running John Williams says it was worth it it's $21.5 billion for an asset that could last 60 to 80

years we plan to operate them 60 we have potential to operate them 80 to 100 years actually so a very very long time and the benefit of nuclear power is its fuel cost it has a very very low fuel cost if we only had Renewables and the sun wasn't shining or the wind wasn't blowing then how would we provide the light so we have to have other sources that we can dispatch when we need the energy well you can be Basel load and I'll be solar okay well that means I'm going to run all the

time get back to you in the morning okay one uranium fuel pellet is about this size it's equivalent in energy to three barrels of oil or one ton of coal or 177,000 cubic feet of natural gas in each of the reactors in the nuclear power plant behind me there are 18 million of these all up delivering enough power to run more than 4 million homes 7 days a week 24 hours a day this is only the second Nuclear Plant to be built in the United States in the last 30 years the industry was already stalling

before the 3M Island meltdown in 1979 hammered the last nail into its coffin an unexpected releasee of more radiation today from the 3M Island nuclear power planted when a valve open releasing radioactive Steam Plant vogle has multiple layers of safety built into its design in the event of an accident here at the site we have 750,000 gallons of water sitting on top of our power plants that will drain down without the use of any pumps there's no electric power required we're just going to use gravity there are also defenses against acts of Terror when you

look here what you actually see is The Shield building is the cylindrical building and The Shield building was designed this is designed after our September 11th events here in the United States so it's designed specifically for aircraft impact both major parties in America are now all in on nuclear energy the Biden Administration Energy Secretary opened the final unit at plant BOGO to reach our goal of getting to Net Zero by 2050 we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country that means we've got to add 200 more GW by 2050 okay

two down 198 to go California had intended to shut down all nuclear generation it's now hit paes extending the life of its last nuclear plant I think the sense was that we were not ready uh to retire that 2100 megawatt nuclear plant before we had sufficient capacity to replace it California is watching nuclear developments elsewhere with interests I do think you're going to see uh significant expansion of nuclear in other parts of the world and maybe even the country in the next 10 15 20 years and I think California will have to watch that uh

very carefully because the growth of artificial intelligence is driving a demand for staggering amounts of power one of the characteristics of these data center loads that we're seeing is that they're extremely large we've heard reports of 1 to 1 and A2 gwatt uh data centers um that's you know a gigawatt is a nuclear unit or another way to think about a gwatt it's the entire load of San Francisco um in a single undiversified load we've never dealt with a problem like that the greatest Testament to the nuclear Renaissance in the United States is that Microsoft

has now signed a deal to reopen 3 m Island it's $1.6 billion to revive it agreeing to sell all the output to Microsoft but now with money from Microsoft which has a v voracious appetite for power because of artificial intelligence in Australia it's illegal to build a nuclear power plant the dire state of the energy debate in this country makes experts like Jeff bongers despair no nuclear no carbon capture and storage or limited no transmission harder to get wind farms and solar farms in agricultural land all of that complexity is going to mean that our

prices of Power are going to go up or the lights are going to go out and almost all of the debate so far has been focused on decarbonizing electricity but that's the easy part just a fraction of the real cost of Net Zero Net Zero means we're decarbonizing steel production and cement and and all these industrial processes that's it's not just electricity fossil fuel is embedded in our lifestyle it's essential to the production of Steel cement and plastic even the fertilizer that grows our food and the world runs on oil so the world today consumes

100 million barrels of oil every single day that didn't happen overnights that happened over about 120 years oil and gas are not just fuels they're part of the chemical structure of a long list of everyday items it's in our clothing it's in the furniture we're in it's in our cars it's it's in our cell phones um it's a feed stock to so many products and I I think most people just don't understand uh how oil and gas is part of everything we do in our Modern Life and what's being proposed is to ramp that back

dramatically in the upcoming 25 years as Farmers like sha Nolan will tell you gas is also used in the chemical process of making fertilizer we make youra by obviously extracting nitrogen out of the atmosphere and using natural gas in order to go through a process in which we produce Ura which um is what we use as the main nutrient source for our [Music] crops we need fossil fuels in this environment to be able to farm sustainably otherwise food prices will double most of us never stop to consider how the world actually works how things are

made how fossil fuel is so deeply embedded in our built environment that we never actually see it take these Fredo frogs made it this iconic Cadbury Factory here in Hobart the boilers and the ovens that made them run on [Music] gas yeah it's not something that logically comes to mind but certainly in a lot of food Manu manufacturing environments um Steam and hot water are critical requirements and to be able to do that you normally have boilers because you need to get to 90° or more and boilers are most efficiently run and in most environments

these days are run on gas industrial heat is an elemental part of manufacturing both gas and coal Supply it and replacing them is not as easy as it sounds you might need it for chemical processing for mining processing for cement for steel production all of those sorts of processes need High industrial [Music] heat a renewable energy by itself cannot provide the high levels of heat that is needed for all of those different processes it's even true in the production of chocolate electrification is certainly an attractive option but it hasn't been perfected the technology it's certainly

not as efficient it doesn't have the speed so there's still advances required to be able to Electrify you boilers which are an important component in this business would have to bear the costs of electrification and they will be high look I know when we look at the boilers we start talking numbers in the tens of millions of dollars and that's just at the one site down in Claremont but the cost costs go well Beyond business the government plan demands that individuals replace gas and petrol and Diesel with electricity buying electric cars electric heating and stoves

putting in solar panels and connecting them to batteries so one of the things that I think has been challenging is we're not using data to have the conversation we're using aspiration we're using goals um but the fundamental data that will help us understand what's required to get to the place want to be um that's not been laid out for the Australian people and how would grids cope with the demand to Electrify everything if we were to Electrify everything that would mean we would have to quintuple the size of the electric grit in North America I

just don't see that happening in order to understand the size of the decarbonization task you need to look at the amount of oil coal and gas in the world's total energy consumption what's called primary energy and in the last 25 years the amount of fossil fuel in primary energy has dropped from 85% to 81% and the task is to get that number near zero in the next 25 years B I think it's going to be incredibly difficult uh and the costs I don't know that anybody really has their arms around the costs to make this

kind of change the point is to cut carbon emissions so how is the world doing since the world began its carbon cutting Journey at the Rio Earth Summit in 19 92 Global carbon emissions have risen every single year except for the financial crisis and when Co shut down the planet the only thing that's changed is where the fossil fuel is burned Global coal production hit its highest ever level last year and China now Burns 56% of it and now look what happened is this crazy The Once and Future president has been resurrected America has given

us an unprecedented and Powerful mandate Donald Trump will shake the world upend the international climate consensus and might encourage other nations to follow his lead and we will drill baby drill we're going to drill baby drill the lessons on this energy Journey are that the grid we are building is expensive and unreliable we clearly have been putting a very significant priority around carbon and the environmental footprint of those assets entirely appropriate given the implications of carbon in the atmosphere but we're now realizing that hey we're creating reliability issues for ourselves and we're creating affordability issues

as well so we're going to have to get those back I believe we're going to have to get those Back in Balance to restore that balance we need to keep every option open yes I believe in Net Zero we need to make a transition I now believe nuclear is going to be part of that solution we are yet to invent the technologies that could deliver the political Promises of Net Zero anyone who who indicates that our Pathway to Net Zero is easy is has hasn't done the work and that the primary purpose of an electricity

system is to deliver affordable reliable power it's not just about me it's not just about the budget it's about my family I see this as a political issue I consider that when mothers are dumpster diving to feat their families that's not okay no matter what Australia does from here the cost of electricity is going to go up and that will hurt individuals and Industry and the cost will fall hardest on the poor and no one can tell you the real cost of Net Zero but it will be measured in the trillions and no country will

hit that Target without some very Creative Accounting but one thing is certain the fires of Industry will keep burning if not here then somewhere else [Music] [Applause]