Queensland’s Energy Roadmap is more likely to be first steps than a completed journey

Queensland’s Energy Roadmap is more likely to be first steps than a completed journey

Queensland’s Energy Roadmap departs radically from the previous government’s strategy by basing itself around engineering rather than ideology and leaving emissions to sort themselves out as coal-fired power stations are eventually closed.

But while it will be more reliable than what was planned, it will still be more expensive than today.

Energy strategists refer to the energy trilemma which is the mostly unattainable goal of simultaneously making electricity affordable, reliable and zero emissions.

Labor ignored the first two thinking that voters would be happy to pay high prices for brownouts and blackouts as the price of saving the planet.

The Crisafulli government is putting people first by emphasising reliability.

So no blackouts, but emissions reductions are likely to be slower, despite the roadmap purportedly ending in NetZero paradise by 2050.

The Roadmap adopts a “no regrets” approach with coal-fired power stations. The best way to understand the implications of this is to reference two state government software disasters – the current Unify one and the Health payroll debacle of 2010.

In both of these cases highly-paid consultants designed systems that failed. Failing is one thing, but the biggest sin was to implement these systems while completely shutting down the legacy systems that, whilst not perfect, still did the job.

This government is not making the same mistake with electricity. Clever consultants have designed the energy transition, and clever consultants are wrong all the time, but it won’t matter so much if we retain the existing power generation system.

However, the cost is not negligible because it means running generation and storage systems side by side each doing much the same tasks - tasks that coal- and gas-fired power stations are capable of doing without backup and storage.

In 2035 Queensland is projected to have total generating capacity of approximately 50 GW to produce the same amount of power as 12 GW of thermal power does today. 15 GW will be large scale wind and solar, another 13 GW will be roof-top solar, which will need 4.3 GW of batteries and 7.6 GW of pumped hydro to back it up, and 12.6 GW of hydrocarbons, just in case.