The "Put up or Shut-up" Challenge:
If Dutton et al believe there is deep public support for Nuclear Power, then he should have no problem getting people to pledge their share of the cost.
Dutton will have to raise at least $100 billion for his 7 Nuclear Power Plants, there's roughly 10 million households, so a 'share' is $10,000.
By the election, can Dutton marshal his charisma and supporters and have $100 Billion pledged? If even only half comes from individuals & households, the Liberal Party with its deep connections to Business, should easily be able to garner $50 Billion in pledges.
One of the public misconceptions about Electricity generation & consumption is that households (i.e. taxpayers) are a significant consumer of electricity. Households are a minor energy consumer.
Households comprise under 25% of current electricity demand and only 8.6% of total Australian Energy Consumption. The proportion of Residential electricity demand declines significantly as the whole economy is electrified.
Who is Dutton building his Nuclear Power Stations for:
Voters/Taxpayers, Australian Business & Industry or Foreign Corporations?
Is Dutton going to sign subsidised long-term base load contracts for big industrial consumers, like Alcoa's NSW Aluminium smelters?
Is the plan for taxpayers to directly subsidise big, foreign firms, who are already making a motza from Australia?
If so, it’s a terrible deal for Australian Taxpayers.
The nameplate capacity of just the NEM is 40,000MW - 55,000MW, with large scale solar already at 11,000MW, adding 6,000MW of Nuclear does what exactly?
[ 6 x 1GW AP1000 plants on East Coast: approx 12.5% current capacity ]
If we’re to get to Carbon Neutral by 2050, we’ve got to double total electric power generation, just to cover demands of transport. Which again makes the contribution of Nuclear much less significant.
Dutton's Big Plan is to add 5%-6% of total future capacity with Nuclear, while over 50% will have to be entirely new.
This is a marginal change to future supply, with half the output large scale solar PV [11GW] already installed, which itself is only 2/3 the size of the installed rooftop solar PV.
Growth in large & small scale solar PV continues to accelerate, already multiples of Dutton's proposed Nuclear capacity.
Rooftop Solar, especially with a in-home, EV or community battery, significantly eases Peak Demand and, being deep within the distribution network helps with stability, reliability and avoids blackouts.
Dutton can't seriously be proposing adding additional capacity that is a fraction of existing rooftop solar, but located a huge distance away, on an expensive, fragile distribution system, decreasing, not increasing Network resilience and limiting the impact of failures.
A more pressing issue than Nuclear Power is upgrading the East Coast NEM to high-voltage DC interconnects. Having one of the world's largest single AC electricity networks, 5,000km long, reduces the Network's stability, resilience and reliability.
The NEM operates on one of the world's longest interconnected power systems - from Port Douglas in Queensland to Port Lincoln in South Australia - a distance of around 5,000 kilometres. The NEM generates around 200 terawatt hours of electricity annually, supplying around 80% of Australia's electricity consumption.
The solution is to do what Europe and the USA are already doing: reducing the size of each AC network, which reduces the "Distribution Loss Factors", in particular the "Power Factor".
AC power, unlike DC, has three components: voltage, current and their alignment ("Power Factor"). Because AC voltage & current are constantly changing, they aren't necessarily aligned. Even if the generator is pushing out 1GW, the power-factor prevents 100% of it being available to customers. This is a major contributor to network losses and needs careful, constant management and adjustment.
GigaWatt AC-DC & DC-AC converters at each of transmission lines solves this problem and much more.
The economy grows roughly with population, so we might expert more energy will be needed in Australia in 2050 than now. Over time, technology & investment improves our "Energy Productivity", so total energy demand, outside residential where we know increasing rooftop solar & batteries will reduce demand significantly, will decrease per dollar of GDP.
In 1990, the most cost-effective, highest Return on Investment, form of Power Generation was developed: the Negawatt. It's many times cheaper to reduce wasted electricity, of 'negative watts', than to build a watt of new capacity, of any type. The notional 'generation' cost is zero, forever. There are local firms already specialising in this.
If Dutton's goal was to shore up the Grid, reduce (household) power prices and increase Grid reliability & stability, then he'd be investing in the simplest, most effective, highest return and lowest delay proven technologies and approaches - in which 'Negawatts' lead by very large margin, even over Solar & Wind.
In 2010 the Queensland Government under Anna Blight received a report on the states' Energy Future.
This plan for future needs was killed by the One Term Wonder, Campbell Newman.
Unsurprisingly, the same Qld Liberal National Party that Dutton hails from, showing the same disregard and disdain for the Future and Planning.
The QLD Smart Energy Future made the point there were a lot of very under-utilised assets, do nothing, waiting around for the 1% Peak Demand. 99% of time, those assets are idle, unable to earn income.
A pretty terrible return on investment, unless you’re making 80x-100x the average yearly revenue for that 1%, then merely ‘average’.
For Dutton's Power Co (DPC) to really provide "base load", it’s got to win supply contracts, stay near full capacity, 24hrs a day, always equalling the cheapest bidder, or undercutting.
Even if DPC sells power for 8,765 hrs / year, the revenue will be capped by the lowest bidder (Solar, Wind moslty) & negative during supply surpluses. They cannot come near a break-even averaged price.
So a “base load” DPC is designed to lose money, a lot of it.
Who pays? The taxpayer, by raising taxes or cutting services.
Which will the Liberal Party plump for? In the past, it's always been cuts to Services & Infrastructure.
So is Dutton’s plan to “Lower Power Prices, with Higher Taxes to cover huge losses”?
Not an election winner.
What will the DPC actually do in practice?
The same as the large, inflexible, expensive coal-fired power stations. running now at the margins:
sell nearly no base load, operate as “peakers”, cherry picking contracts during high demand, the $5,000 - $10,000 MW-hr range, hoping the Price x Utilisation total revenue will cover their high expenses.
Even a $500/MW-hr baseline needs 10% utilisation to break even, or ‘peak’ pricing for over 10% of the time, while the 2010 Smart Energy Future report suggests this is only 1%.
The economic test for viability of a Nuclear plant project is it versus storage, each providing the same PetaJoules per year to the grid, not acting as base load, but as intermittent "peakers".
I have not seen that calculation.
Burying storage deep in the grid, near consumers, increases Grid reliability & stability, lessens distribution network costs & losses and protects communities - taxpayer households - from blackouts, more so as more EV’s are charged at home and supplying power back to the grid.
"Vehicle to the Grid" is likely to become a major 'generator' for Residential Peak Demand as adoption of EV's, and their massive batteries (50kW-hr - 100kW-hr), increases.
From the South Australian 100MW-hr Tesla battery, we know the “peaker” profile and performance needed for grid firming [ sub-millisecond response ]. Nuclear, as a steam driven generator, performs very badly as a “peaker” - they want a sports car but have bought a massive, slow, expensive Dump Truck, completely unsuited for our needs.
It’s possible that Nuclear Plants will be able, for a time, to break-even with 1%-2% utilisation - but only if there is perennial under-supply of power, routinely causing very high 30-min contract prices…
This is an unlikely scenario as Australian Super Funds have a mountain ($3.7 trillion currently) in savings looking for low-risk, high-return long-term investment opportunities, whilst right now and over the next 25 years, Australia has to double it's Electricity Generation capacity, to replace fossil fuel use.
For long-running Energy Market Stability & financial sustainability, Supply has to comfortably exceed Demand for >99%, probably 99.9% of the time.
The AEMO might have a model for long-term financial sustainability: it won’t be pretty for operators with a $500/MW-hr cost.
Which will increase the average price earned, borne by consumers: higher, not lower, costs.
For expensive Nuclear Plants to be profitable, consumers will have to pay higher electricity costs either directly or via higher taxes. The opposite of Dutton's claim of "lower prices".
The most likely scenario is for Dutton's Nuclear Power Co to be the most extraordinary White Elephant Australia has ever seen, while we can guarantee Dutton and the Liberal Party won't compensate taxpayers with the $100 Billion wasted.
Something that has to be included in large projects, especially for Nuclear Power, is the "Whole of Life" costs - not just building and operating, but shutting down, decommissioning, full remediation of the site and building 1,000 year safe 'repositories' for the high-level waste of spent fuel rods.
Presumably, this more than doubles the cost of already obscenely expensive power plants.
This is why Dutton can find no private investors willing to build his Nuclear Power Co, it's financially unsound and extremely high risk - all downside and no upside.
If his seven vanity reactors are built in 25 years, they'll end up as millstones around the taxpayers neck, and 'Stranded Assets' that multiple future generations of taxpayers will have to fund.
Compared to the alternative of large storage batteries deployed throughout the community, storing power when the Sun Shines and Wind blows for when it doesn't and times of Peak Demand, Nuclear isn't in the race... It's Storage and daylight.
Dutton cannot offer both “Lower Power Prices” and “No tax increase” without seriously cutting government services & tax transfers and knows it. This could be the most mendacious part of his plan...
An EnergySmart Plan. Positioning Queensland for a Diversified Energy Future 2010 - 2050
Nov 2010, Queensland Government report
Ergon and ENERGEX will each spend $6 billion (that is $12B combined) in capital expenditure over the next five years to cope with extraordinary consumption during a fraction of the year, rather than the average consumption over the course of the year.
To put this into perspective, ENERGEX has over $900M in assets that are only used for approximately 3.5 days per year. (Mark Paterson, ENERGEX, The SPRA Standard).
Seismic Probabilistic Risk Assessment Possibly the SPRA acronym above.
AER: Review of Energex's maximum demand forecasts for the 2010 to 2015 price review
Modelling of Queenslands' power demand, including Spatial Reconciliation.
Australian energy intensity and energy productivity: generating more $ of GDP per PJ
Australian Energy Flows & Interactive HTML
Energy Flows: where’s nuclear going to sit when heavy haulage goes Electric and network demand doubles?
Australian energy consumption, by sector 2021-22 [ PDF, Pg 11]
AEMO / NEM Market statistics: All charts
https://www.aer.gov.au/industry/registers/charts
Annual generation capacity and peak demand - NEM
This figure compares total generation capacity with peak demand (as at 1 April 2024) in the NEM since its commencement. It shows actual NEM peak demand and AEMO’s NEM peak demand forecasts.
Australian Energy Update 2023 September 2023
Figure 19 Cumulative capacity of accredited large-scale solar power stations [PDF, pg 32]
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