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Question:
With power prices skyrocketing, what will you do to bring them down?
Debate:
Ian Ellis (Liberal)
What’s been proposed is to build a 500 megawatt power station. It will be tendered out, and part of the tender process will be whoever is tendering will need to show how much it will cost and what saving there will be in that tender process.
It may be solar, it may be hydro, it may be wind power, it could be coal, it could gas or it could be a combination of any or all.
Whatever the successful tenderer proposes, provided it shows savings to Victorians, that’s the tender that will be accepted.
Nakita Thomson (Greens)
Privatisation is a large key problem, and our reliance on coal is a large key problem too as to why power prices are so high.
Since power was privatised in 1996, energy bills have increased by 170 per cent.
We believe that we should put energy back into public hands and make a public energy retailer to bring prices down.
We want 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030 which is achievable and we have a plan to do it, I can go through all the points.
We’re going to invest $500 million in big batteries. We’re going to upgrade the grid so we can unlock more energy across north and west Victoria and invest in solar farms in those areas, which will be good for regional jobs.
We also want to help workers in the La Trobe Valley who are transitioning from coal jobs into renewable jobs eventually, to be retrained into new jobs to work in renewable industries.
Jacinta Allan (Labor)
There are some areas that we clearly disagree with all of our colleague candidates around the table.
We are in a national energy market. Many of the levers around this sit at a national level.
Since the privatisation of our power industry back in the 90s - it came with a promise that it would deliver cheaper energy and greater competition in the marketplace. We saw the complete opposite.
That’s why what we’re looking at - the Labor Party - is giving power back to the people by looking to subsidise the installation of solar panels on people’s roofs.
It puts more renewable energy into the grid, and brings down household power prices, and helping to offset that upfront cost of the solar panels.
We want to lift the Victorian RET to 50 per cent by 2030.
What also comes with that VRET is investment in regional jobs.
Gaelle Broad (Nationals)
Renewable energy is a really important part of the mix, but I think we’ve got to get the balance right.
I’ve been talking to businesses and to people in our region and they are really struggling to pay their power bills at the minute. We’ve got 40,000 disconnections that have happened across the state of Victoria, Bendigo in particular, the Ombudsman found had a very high amount of people that cannot afford to pay their electricity bills.
That is a real concern. We’ve got businesses that can’t continue doing business, or they’re struggling as they look ahead into how they’re going to pay that.
We’ve seen the price increase the equivalent of 10 years, in one year. That is astounding.
That to me signals an energy crisis that we’ve got in Victoria at the moment, and affordability of energy prices is contributing to the skyrocketing cost of living.
We had Hazelwood close. That was due in part to the tripling of the coal royalty rate under the Labor government. That supplied 22 per cent of Victoria’s electricity, so we’re now relying on other states to supply our power.
We are now facing a summer where there’s a one-in-three chance of blackouts.
We’ve got to say, we can do better than that. We are a state that’s rich in resources, and that also provides jobs, but what we’ve seen is struggling businesses and we’re going to lose jobs if this continues.
Michael Belardinelli (Independent)
We need to put power back in public hands, because privatisation is for the shareholders.
When it comes to power prices, I was paying 24 cents, my provider put it up to 38 cents. I went to a different mob, 22 cents. I’m saving 16 cents a kilowatt - shop around.
When it comes to coal - I don’t like it. It kills. I think something like 50 million people per year die from breathing in coal.
The world is leading in renewables - Australia, we want to go along with it.
Helen Leach (DLP)
The DLP supports coal power because that is the most reliable. We have a huge amount of coal in Australia.
Unfortunately we’re not allowed to have nuclear and if Labor and the Greens had their way we wouldn’t have any coal either.
As Gaelle said, prices have doubled in the past 12 months. And they’ve certainly risen 85 per cent since Hazelwood closed.
You could say that the Premier of Victoria took a leaf from SA and it was working so well in SA wasn’t it? They’ve got blackouts, they’ve got the highest prices in the Southern Hemisphere.
Daniel Andrews thought ‘well that’s a good idea, I’ll do that’ and everybody’s paying so much more for their power and pensioners have had their electricity cut off.
Let’s double down and put more renewables into the system which doesn’t work because they still have to have baseload reliable power, which, at the moment, only comes from coal and gas.
The moratorium on gas exploration in Victoria, also by Daniel Andrews, caused a shortage of gas which puts up the price to 14,000 megawatt hours for gas, when they’re required to come online quickly when the sun goes down.
We need more coal. We need to be real about this. You might say ‘I don’t like coal’, well nobody loves coal, black stuff, but need it because otherwise all the jobs are going to be going offshore.
Jacinta Allan
What we’ve seen - and this is the fundamental flaw in the Liberal proposal that was released yesterday - is that every major bank here and overseas has said they’re not interested in investing in coal as a source of energy.
They won’t fund new coal power stations.
I’ll happily see you produce some evidence to back up any one of your claims tonight, but there are some facts here. They won’t fund new coal powered power stations.
So for a Liberal plan to involve coal, it’s actually bringing Victorian taxpayers on the hook for more funding if they want to pursue this coal-based agenda.
What we’re seeing from the work we’re doing so far, through a combination of having a target and having a fund that backs in renewable energy, and being positive and proactive around this, we’ve actually seen what has been constructed or is in the process of being constructed, almost 2.5x the capacity of the former Hazelwood power station in renewable energy.
It’s making a big difference, that’s why we want to push on further.
You get more renewable energy and you get regional jobs, that’s a pretty good double-whammy for our regional communities.
Nakita Thomson
There is a study that fossil fuels are expected to be exhausted within 50 years and as a young person that concerns me.
If we do burn all of that fuel, climate change of course is going to be exacerbated and that’s going to lead to worse consequences across every aspect of our lives.
Shifting to free energy from the sun is a lot better than digging up coal and burning it all.
Ian Ellis
Jacinta made the point that banks won’t fund coal. I don’t think she heard what’s proposed.
The tender was to call for multitudes of power generation methods including coal. Coal was just one, there was also solar, hydro, whatever, wind power if need be, gas.
As far as when Hazelwood closed, we were missing baseload. Can I just ask Jacinta: Diesel power generators? Are we running, or are we installing those, just in case we have blackouts this year?
Jacinta Allan
It’s hard to respond to wild allegations, including that it was our government that closed Hazelwood. It wasn’t.
Engee, the owners of Hazelwood, said very very clearly, that it wasn’t policy decisions made by the Victorian government, it was their own decisions based on what they’re seeing internationally happening in this space.
That’s why we got ahead of this and have been working for the last four years on our renewable energy target and driving up investment in renewable energy.
