David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

GILLESPIE () (): There is a an enormous challenge confronting Australian households and businesses—that is, the skyrocketing cost of electricity. Households are really feeling the pinch of direct electricity price increases, despite the Prime Minister's outrageous promise that he has broken many times, that prices would go down by $275. Local businesses in my electorate, whether it has four or 20 or 53 employees, they are all the same—their businesses run on electricity and it is a major business cost. Cafe's, coffee shops, mechanics, panel shops, local manufacturers, steel fabricators, retail, medical services, big abattoirs, transport companies are all under pressure, as are supermarkets and the whole refrigerated supply chain because electricity delivers refrigeration. Just as running your fridges, your air-conditioners, your TVs and your computers use electricity, so too do the big energy users in a modern digital world. The cloud runs on oodles and oodles of energy. The expansion of the cloud is being limited because cloud centres need oodles energy. Whether you look at Ireland or England or Australia, it is the same. Many of them are turning to installing diesel generators so they can expand the capacity of their data centres.

Solar and wind will be part of our energy mix, like they are, but we need to realise the costs associated with integrating renewables in the grid. The short lifespan and all the extra grid and ancillary services are what makes the price of electricity at your power plug. Yes, it is cheaper at the top of a mountain but the energy from that wind turbine or that solar farm has to go through the grid. The grid is being eaten away in a technical sense because there's too much variable renewable energy. The grid can't cope. That's why the costs are going up. What used to be cheap baseload is now being told to turn off under the national electricity market rules and regulations, so their cheap efficiency is vanishing.

What we can do is educate Australia about the economics, the viability and the plug-and-play nature of nuclear power plants. Australia has all these bans at state and federal level based on fear and misconceptions. It's up to us—because we have to deliver the energy and the availability and the affordability for the nation—to educate people. Many of your union members have worked out what we've worked out, which is—(Time expired)