An energy expert says the Labor government’s ambitious net zero plan lacks certain details including who will be providing the billions of dollars of investment needed.
During a recent inquiry hearing, Michael Brear, professor at the University of Melbourne and director of the Melbourne Energy Institute, said the plan was “a work in progress.”
“The plan hasn’t yet stated how it will address the need for hundreds to thousands of billions of additional investment,” he told the parliamentary committee.
The professor also noted that the plan did not explain how Australia would identify the technologies and innovations needed to carry out the net zero transition.
“That includes how we rigorously determine whether we do or don’t need technologies that are controversial for some or not permitted by current policy, determination of how many people will need by skill and location, and determination of who will undertake this planning, how its scope will be reviewed by governments, the community and industry,” he said.
Brear said to cope with the immense challenge of the energy transition in the coming decades, Australia would need to excel at the planning and implementation of an integrated energy system on a national scale.
Current Energy System Not Compatible with Renewables
Brear explained that the current system was a product of competition reforms of the 90s and was not compatible with today’s development.“They [existing institutional and governance arrangements] were based on a very highly prescriptive set of rules for a market system with a fairly slow and steady process for reforming those rules,” he said.
“And that process was perhaps suitable for the time, or suitable for incremental change or slow and steady change.”
The professor also stated that when these settings were established, climate change and emissions reductions were not as significant a priority as they were today.
“We largely had a coal, gas, and hydro-dominated system, and the proliferation of rooftop solar that we see today was certainly not imagined by the original designers of the system,” he said.
“As a result, the substantial changes we have seen in technology costs and the increased emphasis on emissions reductions have put a lot of strain on this particular governance settings and arrangements.”
Brear said the challenges that emerged from the incompatible energy system had resulted in increased interventions in the energy market from state and federal governments.
“Since 2016 and the black system event in South Australia, we’ve seen a large expansion of state intervention into this system that was predicated on market-led investment decisions rather than state-based activities,” he said.
Consequently, the professor said there had been a loss of faith in the current energy settings, which required updates to governance arrangements to reflect the current realities of the energy system.
