PRIME MINISTER:
Welcome to the Energy Committee of the Cabinet and welcome, Cath Tanna, CEO of Energy Australia.
We know that there is nothing more important than ensuring that Australian households can afford to pay their bills and Australian businesses can employ and invest than having affordable and reliable energy.
We’ve seen in South Australia what happens when you have unaffordable and unreliable energy –the most expensive and least reliable electricity in Australia.
We are focused on ensuring that we achieve that - affordable, reliable electricity and we meet our emissions reduction targets.
One of the key elements that is needed in our electricity market, in our system is more storage as we have more and more renewable energy – wind and solar.
Of course the wind doesn’t blow all the time, the sun doesn’t shine all the time. How do we back it up? We’ve seen the consequences of not having that backup in South Australia.
The key element is storage. Batteries are developing but the big opportunity is in pumped hydro.
EnergyAustralia is here, led by its CEO Cath Tanna and with Mark Collette as Head of Energy Systems to talk about an opportunity, a project in South Australia which would see sea water being pumped up on top of a plateau and then when at off-peak times, when energy is cheap at the middle of the night and the wind farms are blowing, in the middle of the night there isn’t much demand, and then be available for backup at peak periods of high demand.
Almost all of the world’s stored electricity is stored in pumped hydro but there isn’t very much of it here in Australia so this is a very exciting opportunity.
We’ve made it a priority for ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Cooperation.
It is a very important part of putting together the security that Australians need - affordable, reliable energy and meeting our emissions reductions targets.
Cath, do you want to say a little bit about this project?
CATHERINE TANNA:
Thank you Prime Minister. We very much appreciate the interest and the support of the Government on this idea.
We agree that the great advantage of pumped hydro as a store of electricity is that it compliments a shift to renewable energy and it provides customers with a reliable store of energy that can then been dispatched at an affordable price.
PRIME MINISTER:
So Cath, if this project and I know it’s early days and we’re looking at, we’re providing support for the study – but if a project of this scale, pumped hydro project of this scale had been available recently in South Australia, there wouldn’t have been the need to have the load shedding that occurred there?
CATHERINE TANNA:
So we are in the feasibility phase and we’re looking at a range of between 100 and 200 megawatts depending on particular circumstances but what we’ve seen in South Australia, that sort of availability certainly could have alleviated the load shedding in South Australia which is of course what the objective is - to make the system more reliable.
PRIME MINISTER:
That’s the objective.
Affordable, reliable, energy security and taking an innovate approach so we look forward to having a further discussion with you about it this morning.
[ENDS]