Labor hits back at Coalitions newly announced nuclear costings

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The government has labelled the opposition's nuclear costings released yesterday as full of holes and lies, ABC's political reporter Isobel Roe has the latest from Parliament House in Canberra.

Transcript

00:00Well, they've chosen rooftop solar and its massive uptake in Australia as one of their

00:07main arguments, it seems, against Peter Dutton's nuclear plan. Labor is saying that rooftop

00:13solar or two-thirds of it would have to be switched off or wouldn't be able to be used

00:18if Peter Dutton's plan to introduce nuclear by 2050 came to fruition. This is on the back

00:25of the costings that the opposition released yesterday. So that was Frontier Economics

00:30modelling which they claim shows that there is a $263 billion gap or a cheaper option

00:38to go with a nuclear and renewables mix than with what Labor is intending, which is almost

00:4580% renewables. The opposition is saying that by 2050 they would like to see 38% of Australia's

00:54energy make-up nuclear. Labor says that that is completely unrealistic. The modelling has

01:00been criticised by them and other experts as flawed. They say it doesn't actually address

01:05where the power bills will go down. But Labor is also saying that it means if nuclear is

01:12introduced at that 30% amount, it's going to mean that solar panels already on people's

01:18roofs or solar panels that people are planning to put in in the future won't actually be

01:23able to feed into the grid during the day. Here's Chris Bowen explaining that.

01:28You've got to have the right amount of energy in the grid. You've got to have enough. But

01:33you can't have too much or the grid won't cope. If you're feeding power from nuclear

01:37power stations and solar rooftop into the grid, the grid won't cope. That's just the

01:43reality. It takes very careful management by IEMO to do this. And that works. You've

01:48got to have days of minimum demand, days of maximum demand. You've got to have days where

01:53you ask generators to put more in. You've got to have days where you ask generators

01:56to put less in. But with nuclear, it is not a flexible source of energy which can complement

02:01a heavy rooftop solar penetration like we do in Australia.

02:05The Smart Energy Council also stood up with Chris Bowen in Sydney there this morning and

02:10backed him in, saying that the Coalition, by introducing nuclear as an option, was essentially

02:16setting a ceiling on how much renewables we could have and that we would have to start

02:21knocking back projects and turning off planned renewable energy and essentially not giving

02:27Australians a choice. If you wanted to have a solar panel on your rooftop, perhaps it

02:32wouldn't be as useful under this plan. Obviously, the opposition will say that that's incorrect.

02:38We're expecting to hear from Ted O'Brien from the Coalition a little bit later today.

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