Bowen warns nuclear policy and renewables not compatible

A move to nuclear energy would “wreck the renewables rollout” and leave Australia with more expensive and unreliable power for longer, Energy Minister Chris Bowen has warned.

In an address to the National Press Club on Wednesday, Mr Bowen will say the country has lost four gigawatts of dispatchable energy over the past decade, replaced by just one gigawatt.

Mr Bowen will say the Coalition’s election promise to switch to nuclear energy also risked the loss of investment in renewables, adding ageing coal-fired power plants which needed replacing have resulted in daily unplanned outages in eastern Australia/.

“We don’t have the luxury of delaying investment in new generation for another 15 or 20 years while we wait for a new form of generation that Australia has never had,” Mr Bowen will say.

“Far and away the biggest threat to reliability in our grid is over reliance on aging coal fired power stations.”

In June, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton unveiled plans to build seven nuclear power plants by 2050, with the first reactor slated to be operational in just over a decade in a move designed to deliver more reliable, and cheaper zero-emissions power supply.

The large-scale and small modular generators would be Commonwealth-owned, similar to arrangements governing the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme, requiring a multibillion-dollar funding commitment from taxpayers.

The plants are planned to be located in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, and would add to the energy mix alongside renewable sources.

But Mr Bowen will say nuclear power is “incompatible” with renewables, which now provided almost 40 per cent of energy to the grid, and would be more expensive.

“A baseload nuclear power plant will need to keep generating even when there are ample renewables, losing money for every watt of energy produced,” Mr Bowen will say.

“Baseload nuclear plants simply don’t stack up economically in a grid with significant renewable generation.

“From the perspective of our energy system, the biggest problem of all is that in Australia, nuclear and renewables are simply incompatible.

“While the Opposition purports to support an ‘all of the above’ energy mix, their ideological pursuit of nuclear reactors in two decades’ time would wreck the renewables rollout now.”

Mr Bowen will say current and future investments in the energy transition would be “at risk because of the policy uncertainty caused by an ill-informed nuclear frolic.”

“Is the Coalition’s plan to curtail zero cost renewable energy to make room for expensive nuclear energy when renewables drive wholesale prices to very low levels, or is their plan to bankroll these baseload plants to bid into the system at prices where they’ll bleed money?” he will say.

“Either one is a recipe for Australians to pay much more.

“For those reasons, Australians can choose reliable renewables or risky reactors – but not both.

“I’ve said before and I’ll say again that I’m not ideological about nuclear.

“But the simple reality is that we can’t have them both, and so we face a critical choice in this critical decade.”