Dutton’s nuclear plan contains a fib, but there’s also a fact in its favour

The car park at Murray’s Beach, on the southern head of Jervis Bay, is a monument to Australian visions about nuclear energy. The clearing in the coastal scrub, about three hours’ drive from Sydney, was meant to house a nuclear power plant in the 1970s, when Liberals in Canberra wanted to match the big projects of America and Europe.

Dutton, however, has one big fact that works in his favour. The energy grid needs new sources of reliable power to make up for the end of coal. If the country cannot build enough renewable power with storage, something else must be added to the grid. Those who oppose nuclear have to show that other energy sources can fill the gap.How big is the gap? The Clean Energy Regulator, one of the federal authorities managing the changes, said last month that Australia added about 5.

Those numbers seem plucked out of the air. Tony Wood, an energy industry expert at the Grattan Institute, is not sure what the $1.5 trillion could possibly include. “Just throwing a number out there is pretty ordinary policy, let alone politics,” he says. The number also sets up an utterly false comparison.

Right now, renewable projects supply almost 40 per cent of electricity across the grid on an annualised basis, and much more than this at peak times for wind and solar. Wood says it is possible to increase the annual figure beyond 70 per cent, or even higher, with the help of pumped hydro and batteries, but gas-fired power will be needed as well. He says it is totally wrong for Dutton to claim that renewables are responsible for higher electricity bills.

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