COALITION’S COAL FANTASY

The hard-right of the Coalition party room’s continued advocacy for new coal isn't about good policy, it's an obsession. Fresh from arguing for new coal-fired power stations to be built in the Queensland election; the Turnbull Government is now backing calls for them in New South Wales.

New coal-fired power stations don't stack up; it's bad policy, bad economics and bad for the environment.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) have estimated that “if new coal were to be built in Australia, electricity prices would be substantially higher than with a combination of wind, solar and gas.”

The unanimous view of industry and experts alike is that new coal doesn’t stack up. The Chief Scientist Alan Finkel has said “The actual cost of bringing on new coal in this country per megawatt hour is projected to be substantially more expensive than the cost of bringing on wind or solar”, while the head of the Australian Energy Council, Matthew Warren, has called new coal“uninvestable.”

While coal will remain part of our energy mix for some time, the only option for a modern, affordable, reliable and clean energy future, is an energy system with more renewables backed up by more storage, gas and other new technologies. We need a national energy policy that will deliver this future, not a policy based on the idea we can avoid it.

The “new coal” fantasy advocated by those like Resource Minister Matt Canavan, backed by the Government’s NEG, will only delay re-energising and modernising our electricity system, wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money and increasing prices along the way.

We will not get the modern, affordable and clean energy system we desperately need as long as energy policy remains a hostage to a Government dominated by right-wing anti-renewable ideologies.