Press conference with WA Minister for Mines and Petroleum, Energy; Hydrogen Bill Johnston, Perth

BILL JOHNSTON: So, look, thanks for joining us here this afternoon. I've just completed the Energy and Climate Ministers Council meeting. It's very pleasing to have interstate colleagues and the Commonwealth here in Western Australia. It's been a very productive meeting.

I particularly want to thank Chris Bowen for his leadership. I think every state minister comments about the fact that since Chris Bowen has been the Chair of the Energy and Climate Ministers Council that it's worked very effectively on behalf of Australians to move us forward as we deal with the challenges of maintaining reliable and affordable energy in Australia while decarbonising at the same time, and it's so refreshing to have a Commonwealth Government that wants to work with the states to achieve that on behalf of the people of Australia.

And of course the Commonwealth yesterday announced that it's expanding its Capacity Investment Scheme to support firmed renewables right across Australia. I share the same view as every state minister that that is a massive leap forward for Australia's decarbonisation, and it's a huge investment on behalf of the people of Australia as we transition to net zero, and I for one on behalf of the people of Western Australia am very pleased that the Commonwealth's stepping up so strongly to support the decarbonisation journey, and we're looking forward to continuing working cooperatively with the Commonwealth, as we've done on the Rewiring the Nation Agreement, $3 billion commitment to Western Australia's decarbonisation journey, that's particularly going to be assisting us in the Pilbara, and we can see that this Capacity Investment Scheme will be able to help us right across the state, but particularly here in the South West Interconnected System.

I'm so pleased that Minister Bowen carefully listens to the needs of each state and works together with the state governments to deliver these good outcomes on behalf of the people of Australia.

So very pleased to be involved in this council meeting today, they've had a very full agenda and dealt with a whole range of issues, and I'll now invite Minister Bowen to make some comments.

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, thanks very much, Bill, and thank you to you and Reece for hosting us here for this very important Energy Minister and Climate Ministers conference. My second trip to Western Australia this week and well worth it, because we've got a lot done.

And what we've done today is continued our spirit of working cooperatively on this massive transformation across our country. We've said before, we need to be all in, working together to make this transition work, and that's exactly what we were doing today and what we will continue to do.

Over today we've been briefed and talked about summer readiness, and as you know, we are in for a long, hot summer, that can't be avoided, but it can be prepared for. And the states and the Commonwealth together with AEMO are working very, very closely together to ensure we are best prepared for that long, hot summer, something which Bill and AEMO and the State Government has been dealing with just for the last 48 hours, the biggest load in Western Australia's history yesterday on the SWIS.

This is something that can be prepared for and is being prepared for, the Australian people can be assured of every possible preparation for a long, hot summer.

Today we were briefed by the National Emergency Management Agency as well as AEMO on those preparations. We know what happens in a long, hot summer. There's bushfires, there's pressure on the grid as a result of bushfires and as a result of high lows, but we are preparing for that.

Also, of course, we talked about the Capacity Investment Scheme. I thank Bill for his comments, and I thank every state and territory minister for their engagement in the lead up to yesterday's announcement, working through the issues, an also for their reassurance and commitment today that they stand ready to negotiate renewable energy transformation agreements with us. 

And again, this is about taking the goodwill and the spirit around the Energy Ministers' table and putting it to work on a transition which is faster and more orderly, faster and more orderly, and therefore more reliable.

The biggest threat to reliability in our energy system is unexpected outages from coal fired power stations, as the coal fired power fleet ages. We need to get more energy on more quickly to improve the reliability of Australian's energy grid, and that's exactly what we're all committed to doing.

Big announcement yesterday, 32 gigawatts of support, but importantly also, the Commonwealth working very, very closely with the States as we roll out those gigawatts through the Capacity Investment Scheme.

Finally, the Energy Ministers and Climate Change ministers agreed today to develop a national roadmap for customer owned energy, for distributed energy across our grid.

Now what is customer owned energy is the solar panels on our roofs, it's the batteries in our houses, it's the electric vehicles increasingly that we drive, which in due course can become batteries on wheels supporting our grid.

We lead the world in rooftop solar, but we don't lead the world in managing and regulating that rooftop solar, and the other assets, including batteries and electric vehicles. We want to. 

And so an important step forward today, we considered the work and we agreed to develop a national roadmap for a report back to Ministers in February, and we want to work very, very closely and collaboratively on that. It is a key opportunity for our country, one which can only be managed together and one which we're committed to managing together. And that was a key part of our work today.

We also received, importantly, an update from our First Nations Clean Energy Working Group working on ensuring that First Nations communities are a key part of the economic and environmental revolution and ensuring that those communities are a part of it; a very good discussion, I think, the First Nations Working Group that report to us.

Now a number of us have flights to catch, but I'm sure we're happy to take some questions.

JOURNALIST: I guess on the energy side of things, given the, you know, importance of gas and transition, so you've got, you know, the government funded Environmental Defenders Office basically causing delays in projects that have been given the green light by NOPSEMA. Is this an indication that the system is broken?

CHRIS BOWEN: I don't accept your characterisation at all, with respect. What we do say is that gas has an important role to play in the transformation going forward, I said that in my speech in Perth last week.

Gas is an essential underpinning, because it's flexible, because as we move to 82 per cent renewables, we're going to need peaking and firming, and the advantage of gas fired power stations is that it can be turned on and off, and when they're turned off, there are zero emissions from zero, and they can be turned on increasingly at two minutes' notice, and that's important, we need to ensure supply of gas to those gas fired power stations, and we are all of the same mind, that we are transitioning quickly to renewable energy, but of course we need to back up the peaking and firming, and that's what our transformation management is all about.

JOURNALIST: The International Energy Agency last night said that the oil and gas industry needs to let go of the illusion of large scale carbon capture. Is that an illusion that Australia needs to let go of as well?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, the International Energy Agency also says that carbon capture and storage is important in all the scenarios of net zero, but our position in the Federal Government on carbon capture and storage is, again, as I said in Perth last week, pragmatic and evidence based. It is not an excuse to avoid emissions reduction, it is not. Emissions reduction at source must be the key way of ensuring we reach net zero.

Carbon capture usage and storage can be an important complement to emissions reduction in particularly hard-to-abate sectors, you know, and we know what they are, and we wanted to play that supporting role. Our role, the Commonwealth, is to facilitate through regulation and legislation that work, where carbon capture usage and storage can play a role complementing, not replacing, emissions reduction at source.

JOURNALIST: Britain and the US are pushing for COP to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. Does Australia have a [indistinct]?

CHRIS BOWEN: I read that report in The Australian this morning. The Australian newspaper journalist must be in different international discussions than the ones I'm in.

It is not figuring in the international discussions, and when I talk to my international counterparts, as I do lot, including many meetings in the middle of the night, many of them say to me, "Oh, geez, if I had your renewables, I wouldn't be doing nuclear." 

It's a fantasy in the Australian context. We respect that some countries are going down that road. Every country's got a different path to net zero. With our abundant renewables nuclear power is an utter fantasy. And I see the Liberal Party federally are doing a little bit of a shuffle in recent hours, sort of saying, "Well, we still believe in nuclear except it's many, many years off.”

Well, we don't have many, many years for this transition. We've got to reduce emissions by 2030.  Nuclear power by 2030. If somebody's going to sell you a nuclear power plant for Australia by 2030, I'll throw in the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House so you can buy that.  

JOURNALIST: Minister, you've conceded Australia is not on track to meet its 82 per cent renewables target. Are other state and territory governments fully committed to supporting that goal?

CHRIS BOWEN: Absolutely, and you can see that in the communique today. What we've said is, what I've said is that we've done well, but not well enough. We need to lift our performance as a country, we need to drive that transformation to renewable energy to 82 per cent.

The announcement that I made yesterday and that we have confirmed, we support today, all of us, the country's Energy Ministers, all of us, support the announcement we made yesterday, ensures that transformation will occur. Of course it's a big lift. I've said that repeatedly, from around 33 per cent when we came to office to 82 per cent over the next seven years is a big lift.

It is not meant to be an easy target to meet. A target is meant to drive behaviour to lift activity. It's not meant to be business as usual. We are not interested in business as usual as Energy and Climate Change Ministers, we're interested in driving behaviour, and that's what this target will do and that's what the Capacity Investment Scheme is going to do as well.

JOURNALIST: On the energy reliability plan for WA, do you think that WA is going to need to build more gas fired plants given the phase out of coal?

CHRIS BOWEN: I'll let Bill to provide further comment, but you know, WA is doing a great job, the Cook Government is doing a fantastic job here in managing this transition. I've said before, the hardest state in the Commonwealth to decarbonise in my view, and that makes it even more important that we work closely to do so.

The renewable energy transformation agreement, which Bill and I will now negotiate means that we will support the transition to renewables, we will work together with the WA Government on reliability, and that transformation and ensure that the transformation policies are working hand in glove, that's the same with every state and territory, and I know that we will continue to do that, but Bill may choose to add.

BILL JOHNSTON: So there's different parts to that answer. The first part is that for the South West Interconnected System, we've made it clear that if we need to build additional gas fired infrastructure, we will do that. In fact SWIS demand assessment says that we made need to go as much as three times more gas infrastructure than we currently have.

But of course it will be used far less in the future, so the actual volume of gas used in power stations is expected to continue to be reasonable. If the amount of renewable energy goes from about one third to 82 per cent, that means 18 per cent will come from other sources, which will principally be natural gas, but if the total volume of electricity over the next 20 years goes up by 350 per cent, then the amount of gas may in fact slightly increase.

So we've always said that natural gas is going to play a very important part in our renewable energy transition. What won’t play a significant role in the future is coal, and our coal fired power stations are becoming increasingly economically unviable, and they're becoming increasingly mechanically unviable, and causing trouble in managing the system.

In June of this year we had three coal fired power stations break down at the same time, and so even though the amount of electricity needed was not very high, because of the unreliability of the coal plant, it was a challenge to manage the system.

So what we'll see in the future is high levels of firmed renewables supported by increasingly less use, but critical at the time of gas. Of course much of the gas in Western Australia is not used to make electricity, and that is much more complex for us to transition away from that, whether it's being used as part of turning lithium [indistinct] into lithium hydroxide, or as part of turning nickel to nickel sulphate. We're still going to need natural gas for those industrial purposes, and we'll need to work hard to see the transition of our gas and energy intensive Western Australian economy to a lower carbon future.

And I know that's not easy, but with the support of the Commonwealth Government, we're confident that industry can work with the State Government to achieve that.

CHRIS BOWEN: Any final questions?

JOURNALIST: Just on the 43 per cent target you took to the last election, you said at the time that that was based around the policies you had at that point in time. Yet now we've got the Capacity Investment Scheme to help reach that target, so was the modelling wrong?

CHRIS BOWEN: No. When circumstances change, you update your policies, and when we're faced with a global race for capital, a global race for supply chain, we make sure Australia is as welcoming an environment as possible for renewable energy investment, and if you are critical of a government ensuring that we meet our targets and policies, you can be critical. I will say that's what governments are meant to do; get on with the job of implementing the targets they said they would meet, and policies they said they would implement, and that includes 43 per cent emissions reduction, 82 per cent renewables, and I look forward to providing the Australian people with further updates on that when I present the National Climate Change Statement to Parliament next week and release the projections of the Climate Change Authority advice. Thanks for your time.

JOURNALIST: Peter Dutton has --

CHRIS BOWEN: Ah, you got me. I was about to walk away when you mentioned Peter Dutton. You piqued my interest.

JOURNALIST: Issues of the day. He's demanded the government provide further details about what security checks were given to the Palestinians that got the visas. What are your comments on this?

CHRIS BOWEN: Well, the security checks which go to every arrival in Australia are the same that occurred under the Government when he was Minister for Home Affairs. If he thinks those security checks aren't good enough, he's got some explaining to do about what's happening in the years that he was Home Affairs Minister.

I mean Peter Dutton will take any opportunity to play base, low politics on important national matters. I mean he never misses an opportunity to go the low road. He will take any opportunity to talk down Australia's national security, which he was, until last year, responsible for.

He can play base politics if he wishes. We are getting on with the job of ensuring our national security in a very contested geopolitical environment. It is – he needs to reflect on his comments. This is the same man who said that some of the Middle Eastern immigration in the early 1980s was to be regretted. He can explain his comments. I will leave that sort of base politics to him. Thank you.