Who mentioned this?
“An offshore electrical energy trade in Australia will additional strengthen our financial system … Offshore era and transmission can ship important advantages to all Australians by means of a safer and dependable electrical energy system, and create hundreds of recent jobs and enterprise alternatives in regional Australia.”
In case you answered the federal power minster, you’d be half proper.
Present Vitality Minister Chris Bowen mentioned a whole lot of these types of issues final week, what with the declaration of the Illawarra offshore wind power zone adopted by the awarding of a feasibility licence to what stands to be Australia’s first floating wind venture off the coast of the New South Wales Hunter area.
However the quote above comes from the previous federal power minister, the Coalition’s Angus Taylor, who uttered it in September 2021 when he introduced the profitable passage by means of Parliament of the Offshore Electrical energy Infrastructure Invoice.
It’s price remembering in final week’s mind-bending chapter of Australian power politics that it was the Liberal Nationwide Occasion — the identical LNP that’s at present threatening to tear up multibillion-dollar offshore wind contracts and undeclare improvement zones — that launched the invoice paving the best way for improvement in Australian waters.
Simply as it’s the Liberal Nationwide Occasion — the identical LNP that final Wednesday promised to make use of public cash to construct seven nuclear energy crops — that beneath the management of John Howard reduce a cope with the Greens that banned the long run improvement of nuclear energy crops in Australia.
Complicated, isn’t it? Think about being a developer of offshore wind that has spent the higher a part of a decade working up a venture that, this time subsequent yr, could possibly be rendered out of date if there’s a change of presidency.
Andy Evans, the CEO and co-founder of Australian offshore wind developer Oceanex Vitality wouldn’t be drawn on politics when he spoke to me.
He solely famous that Oceanex — whose 2GW Novocastrian Offshore Wind Farm, co-developed with Equinor, was this week awarded a feasibility licence by federal Labor — has had many optimistic dealings with the three totally different federal power ministers who occupied the position in the course of the federal Coalition’s time in energy.
However two and a half years is a very long time in politics, and who can predict the place the wind will blow?
Who would have thought that the identical occasion that opened the door to offshore wind in 2021 would slam it shut in 2024, with Nationwide Occasion chief David Littleproud telling the Illawarra, in particular person, that his occasion will ban any offshore wind tasks from being developed within the newly declared zone.
Littleproud claims to have a selected beef with floating wind, the type that will likely be constructed off the coast of NSW, versus the fixed-bottom wind farms that will likely be inbuilt waters off the coast of Victoria.
Definitely, floating offshore wind is costlier than fixed-bottom wind for the time being, however as Oceanex’s Evans advised me, the economics of wind is altering on a regular basis, as an increasing number of tasks are rolled out across the globe and as applied sciences evolve.
“It’s been a bit costlier, however we’ve got the profit, in Australia, of getting all these different jurisdictions all over the world going by means of processes and refining … prices.
“Eight years in the past, we might have been speaking about 8 megawatt generators and being actually hopeful that we’ll get to eight megawatts. Now we’re speaking 15 megawatts as the bottom case.
“So we’ve actually obtained the advantages, right here, of those tasks happening all over the world — significantly floating — so we’ll get the advantages in Australia.”
As a aspect notice, Evans says floating wind generators even have much less of an influence on the ocean mattress than their mounted backside cousins.
“So if you’re searching for the surroundings, that’s what you need.”
However then if the LNP was searching for the surroundings. we wouldn’t be speaking about nuclear.
This piece was initially printed in RenewEconomy.
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