A centre-right thinktank is calling for “drastically accelerated deployment” of renewable energy, batteries and electricity transmission infrastructure and acknowledged there is no prospect of nuclear energy playing a role in Australia before 2040.
The report by the Blueprint Institute, not yet released but seen in draft form by Guardian Australia, says the ban on nuclear energy should be repealed and argues small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) could play a “small but vital role” in minimising costs in reaching net zero emissions in the power grid by 2050.
The report, due to be published soon, is set to land during a polarised debate about the future of energy and the pace of decarbonisation.
The Coalition and parts of the media have attacked the Albanese government’s renewable energy policy and have called for the rollout to be slowed, a position at odds with scientific warnings that emissions cuts need to accelerate. The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has suggested SMRs could be built on the site of old coal plants.
The Blueprint Institute report says reaching the government’s target of 82% renewable energy by 2030 will be a major challenge, but does not provide support for those challenging the goal. It says the country has “no choice, at least in the short-term”, but to “double down on renewable energy” and proven “firming” technology to avoid “calamitous blackouts” as old coal plants close.
“This means a drastically accelerated deployment of batteries, solar, onshore wind, pumped hydro, and gas, along with a corresponding build out of transmission infrastructure,” the report says.
The report says the potential role of nuclear energy in Australia is “strictly limited to a decade or more from now – specifically, from 2040”. It says there is a strong argument that a “small, but significant” level of nuclear energy will be needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions completely from the power grid at lowest possible cost after that date.
More specifically, it says one or both of SMRs or fossil fuel power plants using carbon capture and storage (CCS), neither of which yet exist at a commercial scale, will be needed to achieve electricity grid decarbonisation levels greater than 90% at lowest possible cost.
It says its modelling found cutting emissions from the electricity grid by more than 98% without nuclear or CCS could result in an “extreme increase” in costs to consumers of up to $20.2bn a year.
Some energy analysts familiar with the report criticised the modelling, saying it excluded existing technology that could help provide the final 2% of energy in 2050, including demand response and hydrogen. They said it was also likely new technologies would develop in the next 25 years to help fully decarbonise the grid.
Simon Holmes à Court, convener of political fundraising body Climate 200 and a longtime clean energy commentator and advocate, said the Blueprint report reinforced the point that SMRs “will not and cannot play a meaningful role in our grid this decade or next”.
“With coal leaving the grid before then the focus must be on managing the transition to a low cost and reliable renewables and storage backed grid,” he said.
“By the middle of the century we may well have many more technologies to choose from, maybe even nuclear. But in this case the modelling has some weird assumptions leading to bizarre conclusions.”
Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre, said the report’s findings had “no great policy weight” because it was impossible to accurately predict the cost of cutting emissions from the grid in the long-term given technological change was happening so rapidly.
He said this applied not only to the Blueprint Institute’s work, but also to modelling used by the Australian Energy Market Operator in its integrated system plan. Aemo found the optimal future grid would run nearly entirely on renewable energy, with a range of technologies – including batteries, pumped hydro, demand response and fast-start gas plants – filling gaps around it.
Mountain, who backs a rapid roll out of renewable energy as making economic sense, said: “This report makes the same error that it fairly accuses Aemo of making – it assumes the future but dresses it up as an objective prediction. Electricity technology is changing incredibly quickly. Experts’ predictions for beyond 10 years ahead should be accorded the same weight as those of fortune tellers.”
He said nuclear energy was not well suited to playing a minor role in a grid already overwhelmingly running on renewable energy, and its introduction would be “likely to require the abandonment of a good deal of already existing renewable generation”.
“I wonder what customers will think of that,” Mountain said.
The Blueprint Institute’s report says its modelling should not be read as a precise prediction of the future. But it says it had consistently found a mix of all available low emissions technologies, including those that were controversial, would be needed “to reach deep decarbonisation at the lowest possible total system cost”.
The report says “both sides of the nuclear debate in Australian politics are wrong”.
“The left is blinded by its ideological opposition to nuclear power to the point that it has been unable to have a rational debate about its potential merits decades from now. Similarly, the right desperately wants to use the imagined prospect of an immediate and sensational breakthrough in nuclear power to halt the ongoing build out of renewables that is expensive, but ultimately necessary,” it says.
“Nuclear power is not a miraculous solution to our energy needs, but neither is it a technology we can afford to dismiss out of hand.”
The Blueprint Institute declined to comment beyond what was in the report.
