COAL-FIRED POWER STATIONS — CLOSURE
386. Dr D.J. HONEY to the Minister for Energy:
I refer to the minister's
comments on 6PR when he stated that he has a detailed plan and detailed
financial analyses that support his decision to close the Collie and Muja power
stations completely by 2029. Will the minister table the detailed plan and
financial analyses so that everyone can see what he is proposing; and, if not,
why not?
Mr W.J. JOHNSTON
replied:
It is not common practice for
Synergy to table its forward plans in the way that the member has asked because
it is a commercial business and it operates in a commercial market. The last
thing in the world we want to do is to tell its commercial counterparties what
we think the costs will be because that would encourage the commercial counterparties to put up their prices. No sensible
person running any business does that. I have noticed this habit of
people saying, ''It's a secret.'' I have been interested
to see comments in the media about commercial organisations doing contracts and
not telling anybody about them. Those businesses do not make a public
announcement about who has tendered for the work because they are commercial
decisions. Synergy is exactly the same; it operates under the same constraints.
We have announced the plan and we
will happily provide detail on it. The plan is about retiring the coal-fired power stations in concert with a $3.8 billion
investment to provide 800 megawatts of additional wind assets and about
4 400 megawatt hours of storage. In that storage we are looking for somewhere
between 400 and 800 megawatts of pumped hydro capacity. Why that range? Because
we do not know exactly what proposals are actually practical. Clearly, the more
we get, the better it is because deep storage—pumped hydro—is a
better form of support for the network than using only lithium ion batteries,
which was the previous government's plan. Its plan was to provide only
500 megawatt hours of battery storage. That is a tiny amount of battery
storage. It is completely and utterly inadequate to provide the necessary
outcomes.
We have also said that we think we
can do this without the need to build an additional gas plant. The challenge
is, and this is something that the previous government did not seem to
understand, that we need support to match the single largest contingency. A
contingency is the single largest piece of equipment that can break down, and
we therefore need to have a reserve to match that. At the moment that is
Collie, with 310 megawatts. We do not want to have a single large contingency.
Again, I contrast that with the previous government's plan, which was
to have a single contingency of 1 500 megawatts. That would mean that a backup
of 1 500 megawatts had to be available in the system, otherwise the single
contingency outage would have left the state unable to go forward.
We have been very clear and totally
transparent. I also note that not a single question was put down to me today by the opposition in the upper house—not a
single question! I would have thought that if the opposition had technical
issues, the detail of which they wanted to delve into, they would have asked
questions in the upper house because, as members know, in the upper house the
government is told at 10 o'clock in the morning what questions need to
be answered at five o'clock in the afternoon. That allows ministers to
engage with their agency to get the technical details available to them. I want
to make it clear that not a single question of detail was asked. We only saw
posturing from a member who does not understand the questions that he is
asking.