A day after Anthony Albanese walked away from Labor’s failed 2022 promise to cut $275 off electricity prices by this year, Energy Minister Chris Bowen offered a swath of western Sydney suburbs a $400 cut in electricity prices.
The Prime Minister has had to defend his dumping of the RepuTex modelling that was the basis for the repeated promise in the past three years to cut power prices by $275 but also the basis for carbon emission reductions and expansion of renewable energy.
Bowen backed the PM’s position on Monday that “circumstances” had changed and said the RepuTex modelling was “done in 2021 and we’re now in 2025” and Labor was achieving the emission reduction targets.
On Tuesday, he announced a series of “community batteries” in western and southwestern Sydney to store unused rooftop solar energy and feed energy into more than 1000 homes that “could save households up to $400 a year”.
The community batteries, Bowen said, would boost reliability by absorbing excess rooftop solar and help “avoid costly upgrades to the electricity network’s poles and wires”.
The “bill-busting batteries” are in the Labor-held electorates of Industry Minister Ed Husic’s Chifley and Macquarie as well as the ALP-targeted seat of Fowler held by independent Dai Le.
But there are few problems for the community-battery policy as a microcosm of Labor’s macro energy and climate change policy apart from, once again, raising the prospect of a nominated price cut for consumers $400.
For a start, only 21 of the 400 taxpayer-subsidised community batteries promised at the last election at a cost of $200m to “support 100,000 households” are in operation and only one of those is from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency $171m plan. Community batteries were a key plank in cutting the cost of energy and reducing carbon emissions. Bowen said in 2021: “Power to the People will unlock the full potential of rooftop solar for Australian households: lower power bills, cut emissions, help to stabilise the grid.”
Now in cookie-cutter media r eleases where the suburbs are changed, Bowen admits that one advantage of the community batteries is they will “help to avoid the costly upgrades to the electricity network’s poles and wires”.
This is one day after Bowen rejected the Coalition’s major argument about the need for at least 10,000km of “poles and wires” to connect renewables and said it had to be done anyway.
What’s more, Fowler MP Dai Le, who wasn’t invited to share the news of the community batteries in her electorate, called out the whole plan on the most basic of all grounds cost.
“The Albanese Labor government has misled our Cabramatta community with claims of lowering electricity costs with their community batteries announcement! Instead of seeing bills decrease, we’re being charged to use a tiny battery system that benefits energy retailers, not local residents,” she said.
“It won’t even provide enough power to cook a few dozen spring rolls at a few restaurants on John Street! Yet we’ll all be paying higher electricity prices to fund this small system, which will run out quickly.
“The government should focus on a battery support program for residents who’ve invested in solar systems, not continue to make empty promises.
” Bowen’s initiative was low key and small but it has managed to raise the same questions about the principles and promises upon which Labor’s renewables energy policy is based.
Source: ‘Bill-busting batteries’ spotlight what’s wrong with ALP’s energy policy | The Australian