So three years after signing up to Net Zero, the CSIRO still can’t tell us how much it’s going to cost to reach Net Zero.
You gotta love how both major parties are more than willing to throw taxpayers and the economy under bus if it means they can be one of the cool kids at global conferences.
The fact that the Government still can’t tell us the cost of Net Zero shows they have no idea what they are doing, don’t care about the impact of their decisions and are lying to you in claiming Net Zero will lead to a better future.
It won’t.
Committee on 7/11/2024
Item: Economics Legislation Committee – 07/11/2024 – Estimates – INDUSTRY, SCIENCE AND RESOURCES PORTFOLIO – Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
Senator RENNICK: Dr Mayfield or Mr Graham, my questions might be mainly for you. I’m just trying to track where we’re going in terms of costs to get to 82 per cent renewables in the grid by 2030. What’s the latest forecast for the cost of getting the grid to 82 per cent renewables?
Dr Mayfield: Just to make sure we understand the question correctly, when you say ‘the cost of getting to 82 per cent’, are you talking about a scenario?
Senator RENNICK: Isn’t that the latest target—to get the grid to be 82 per cent renewables by 2030?
Dr Mayfield: I believe that’s a policy. In terms of the work that CSIRO has done, if you’re referring to GenCost, GenCost looks at capital costs for different technologies. It looks at levelised cost of electricity. It’s not necessarily looking at pathways to certain percentages of particular energy types or generation types.
Senator RENNICK: Sure. Mr Graham, haven’t you done a couple of estimates to get to net zero overall? One was originally a trillion, and then it came back to 500 billion, to get to net zero.
Mr Graham: We’ve done a number of modelling exercises over the years where you can calculate the total new investment to get to different emissions targets in the electricity sector. None of the numbers mean anything out of context. The context depends on how much electricity you need. For example, you could have an extremely expensive scenario which is to do with electrifying huge parts of industry—that could look like a really expensive scenario, but it’s actually not necessarily expensive on a unit-cost basis. Equally, you can have a trillion dollar scenario where you’ve electrified a lot of sectors, and then you could have one that’s only half a billion to get to net zero, but that could just be that you’ve got lower electricity demand. It doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily, on a unit-cost basis, lower costs or higher cost. None of these numbers about the investment cost over time mean anything without context.
Senator RENNICK: So the context is that both major parties have committed to getting to net zero by 2050. What does the CSIRO forecast the capital cost will be to reach that target?
Mr Graham: To answer a question like that, we’d need a lot more information about the underlying assumptions of that scenario—what’s happening globally, how else we are treating emission abatement in other sectors of the economy which might affect the amount of electricity demand—so I can’t answer that.
Senator RENNICK: That’s a fair point, but I guess the headline slogan that people get is that we’re going to get to net zero by 2050, so I would’ve thought that we owed them a detailed estimate of the cost to get there by 2050. Obviously, someone along the line advised former Prime Minister Morrison when he signed up to net zero—back in 2021, I think it was—what the implications would be of signing up to net zero. So, surely, by now—this agreement is a couple of years old—we would have sat down and worked out what is going to have to happen in order to reach net zero and someone somewhere would have had to model those costs, including the capex costs of getting the grid and whatever else.
