The government has labelled the opposition's nuclear costings released yesterday as full of holes and lies, ABC's political reporter Isobel Roe has the latest from Parliament House in Canberra.
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00:00Well, they've chosen rooftop solar and its massive uptake in Australia as one of their
00:07main arguments, it seems, against Peter Dutton's nuclear plan. Labor is saying that rooftop
00:13solar or two-thirds of it would have to be switched off or wouldn't be able to be used
00:18if Peter Dutton's plan to introduce nuclear by 2050 came to fruition. This is on the back
00:25of the costings that the opposition released yesterday. So that was Frontier Economics
00:30modelling which they claim shows that there is a $263 billion gap or a cheaper option
00:38to go with a nuclear and renewables mix than with what Labor is intending, which is almost
00:4580% renewables. The opposition is saying that by 2050 they would like to see 38% of Australia's
00:54energy make-up nuclear. Labor says that that is completely unrealistic. The modelling has
01:00been criticised by them and other experts as flawed. They say it doesn't actually address
01:05where the power bills will go down. But Labor is also saying that it means if nuclear is
01:12introduced at that 30% amount, it's going to mean that solar panels already on people's
01:18roofs or solar panels that people are planning to put in in the future won't actually be
01:23able to feed into the grid during the day. Here's Chris Bowen explaining that.
01:28You've got to have the right amount of energy in the grid. You've got to have enough. But
01:33you can't have too much or the grid won't cope. If you're feeding power from nuclear
01:37power stations and solar rooftop into the grid, the grid won't cope. That's just the
01:43reality. It takes very careful management by IEMO to do this. And that works. You've
01:48got to have days of minimum demand, days of maximum demand. You've got to have days where
01:53you ask generators to put more in. You've got to have days where you ask generators
01:56to put less in. But with nuclear, it is not a flexible source of energy which can complement
02:01a heavy rooftop solar penetration like we do in Australia.
02:05The Smart Energy Council also stood up with Chris Bowen in Sydney there this morning and
02:10backed him in, saying that the Coalition, by introducing nuclear as an option, was essentially
02:16setting a ceiling on how much renewables we could have and that we would have to start
02:21knocking back projects and turning off planned renewable energy and essentially not giving
02:27Australians a choice. If you wanted to have a solar panel on your rooftop, perhaps it
02:32wouldn't be as useful under this plan. Obviously, the opposition will say that that's incorrect.
02:38We're expecting to hear from Ted O'Brien from the Coalition a little bit later today.