[ad_1]
Australians have been promised cheaper electricity bills under a $330 billion nuclear power plan unveiled by the federal coalition.
Wind and solar power will make up 49 percent of Australia’s energy grid by 2050, with nuclear power accounting for 38 percent.
“It will make electricity reliable, make it more consistent (and) cheaper for Australians and help us decarbonise as a trading economy as we should,” Opposition Leader Peter Dutton told reporters in Brisbane on Friday.
Coal and gas-fired power plants will stay open longer under the plan, a move criticized by Labor as bad for Australia’s carbon emissions and unreliable for the energy grid.
Aging coal plants already face daily outages and extending them is a “recipe for blackouts”, Energy Secretary Chris Bowen said.
The first of seven public nuclear plants will be operational by the mid-2030s, Dutton said, but that timeline has been confused by some experts.
Labour’s plan is to boost the grid with just over 80 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
This will increase to more than 90 percent by 2050, with the rest made up of storage and gas.
An overreliance on renewables “is going to cause the country a lot of grief,” Dutton said.
Nuclear power would provide “always on” power to back up renewables and lead to cheaper electricity bills in the long term, he argued.
But nuclear power does not offer a good deal for Australia, according to a report published before Dutton revealed his costs, while delaying the closure of coal power stations would increase Australia’s carbon emissions in the medium term.
For the seventh consecutive year, the GenCost 2024-25 report found that renewables are the least expensive of all new-build power generation technologies.
Nuclear power generation would be 1.5 to twice as expensive as large-scale solar power, according to analysis by national science agency CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator.
Energy market operators will also need to create new connection points to safely supply the national electricity grid, experts said.
The Coalition’s plan was modeled by private sector consultancy Frontier Economics, which also put Labor’s transition at around $600 billion.
Bowen dismissed that figure, saying the government’s plan would cost $122 billion, citing an estimate made by the National Energy Grid Operator.
The coalition is pushing for an end to Australia’s nuclear ban, but has faced opposition from states.
[ad_2]
