The Public Interest Advocacy Centre welcomes the NSW government’s release of an Energy Strategy that supports the transition to renewable energy and encourages low-cost, low emissions and reliable power for NSW households.
‘The strategy complements national measures to support the long-term system planning needs required for NSW households to have affordable, reliable, sustainable energy into the future,’ said PIAC energy policy team leader, Craig Memery.
PIAC supports the Strategy’s aims to encourage investment in renewable generation, improve the security of energy supply in times of extreme weather, and make the grid more flexible by managing demand.
On the Strategy’s focus on managing consumption to meet peak demand:
‘New technologies are making it easier for households and businesses to manage their energy use so the most cost effective and rapidly deployed tools for maintaining system security are now on the demand side. New generation and transmission are more expensive and take longer to develop, so establishing markets for demand response for all energy users should be at the centre of the Energy Security Safeguard, and actions the Government will take to avoid a shortfall under the Energy Security Target,’ said Mr Memery.
On the Strategy’s plan to encourage investment in Renewable Energy Zones by reducing risk for generation investors:
‘Bringing new, clean generation into the system is critical for the energy transition and the Strategy supports leveraging the private investment needed to do this. Incentivising generators to pay their own way on new transmission is a crucial measure to ensure consumers are not left carrying more risks and costs,’ said Mr Memery.
‘We support the government ensuring adequate reliability and security, but highlight the importance of fairly sharing the costs any new investment required to meet the proposed higher reliability standard. Costs recovered from consumers should be no more than what they are willing to pay for reliability, and costs above this to meet broader social objectives should be recovered from budget revenue.’
We look forward to working with Minister Kean and the government to put the strategy into action for the benefit of NSW households.
