The coalition has unveiled the costings of its nuclear energy plan six months after naming the seven locations for the nuclear power sites. The opposition claims its policy will cost about 330-billion-dollars over the next 25 years, but it only provided its modelling to the ABC after the start of today’s press conference.
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00:00Peter Dutton has outlined this nuclear plan as something, he says, will be cheaper and
00:07cleaner and consistent power for Australia if the Coalition were elected to government.
00:13They've got modelling done by a group called Frontier Economics, which is comparing the
00:18scenarios of what the Coalition is proposing and what Labor is proposing, and says that
00:23what the Coalition is proposing will be $263 billion cheaper.
00:29So they have looked at the comparison of what the Coalition is suggesting, which is 54%
00:36renewable energy and 38% nuclear energy, so a mix of those two, with what Labor is suggesting
00:43it will do, which is a much more renewables-heavy plan, about 82% of renewables Labor is planning
00:51to have.
00:52The central feature of this plan is also that coal-fired power stations, some of which are
00:58already being shuttered, will need to stay open much longer to help with that transition
01:04to nuclear energy, and this is despite, as I said, a lot of power companies already saying
01:11that their power stations need to start moving on.
01:15So here is how Peter Dutton sold his policy just a short time ago.
01:22This is a plan which will underpin the economic success of our country for the next century.
01:28This will make electricity reliable, it will make it more consistent, it will make it cheaper
01:33for Australians, and it will help us decarbonise as a trading economy as we must.
01:40And the fact is that we can deliver a plan which is going to keep the lights on, and
01:45we have a plan and a vision for our country which will help grow businesses, not close
01:48them down.
01:52Interestingly, one of their big pitches is that their plan will be cheaper than Labor's,
01:58but the modelling didn't actually look at the cost of power bills.
02:01The Coalition says they're not able to say whether people's actual power bills will go
02:06down, just that their plan, they say, will be 44% cheaper than Labor's.
02:12One of the other assumptions that the modelling makes is that Australia will actually need
02:17less electricity than what Labor is saying.
02:21The Coalition says that they think that we'll be using a lot fewer EVs than what the government
02:27is modelling, and therefore there will be not as much need for power.
02:32And that's how some of their numbers around nuclear and renewables have worked out.
02:36Here's Ted O'Brien explaining that.
02:42They are basically assuming that the Australian people will be forced to behave in the way
02:48that the Labor Party want them to behave.
02:51We have a very different approach to that.
02:52We can still reach net zero by respecting the choices of the Australian people.
02:59At this time there's about 46 pages, but what we've been able to glean so far is that the
03:04proposal relies on what Peter Dutton thinks is going to be a smaller economy, less energy
03:10usage, and would cost taxpayers more than $300 million.
03:16The costings, which have been prepared by Frontier Economics, have found that the system
03:21with nuclear would be cheaper over a 25-year period than a system without it.
03:28That does contradict the findings of the CSIRO, which you might remember modelled what it
03:33thought nuclear power would cost in comparison with renewables, and it maintains that the
03:38cost of nuclear would be double what a renewable energy only energy mix would be.
03:47The lower result is also because the Coalition's costing spreads out the cost of nuclear over
03:5650 years, which is an accounting measure essentially that means the bulk of the costs of what this
04:02plan really will mean are coming after the 25-year mark.
04:08The costing is only for 25 years.
04:11So there are a huge amount of costs and a large number that isn't being counted in this
04:17and of course trying to predict any sort of costing 20 and 30 years out given the changes
04:24in global economics is incredibly difficult anyway.