Electricity and Energy Sector Plan Discussion Paper

The government should consider that many Australians do not have the power of choice when it comes to electrification, enshrining electrification as a right for renters and low-income households and subsidising household electrification when doing so provides health benefits allows the disadvantaged to be a part of electrification while improving their health outcomes. An example of this would be penalising landlords for resource waste due to inefficient home appliances in their rentals, or providing grants for low income earners to replace their gas stoves with electrical ones. The construction of EV charging infrastructure for business employees and residential tenants must be incentivised and maintenance of infrastructure required of businesses and landlords. Restrictions preventing the development of Nuclear power should also be repealed across the nation. Currently if Fusion power were to be an available option for powering Australia, facilities could not be built due to the ARPANS Act and the EPBC Act. To open the gates to private investment in Uranium mining, nuclear technology, fission and fusion power which could replace the grid-forming and baseload power capabilities of coal, would help WA in particular to secure our baseload generation which currently hangs in an uncertain balance. We also need to legislate stricter and higher energy efficiency standards for new builds of all uses nationwide and better enforce existing energy efficiency codes, particularly for medium to low density builds. Finally, Western Australia's Wholesale Electricity Market (WEM) must be reviewed to assess whether the current market design aligns well with the goals of, as fast as possible, increasing capacity and stability while reducing emissions. In summary, Nuclear power legalisation, crackdowns on landlord under-investment, electrification grants, higher density development, stricter energy codes and WEM market redesign will help to increase electrification and maintain a secure and reliable grid.

The lowest hanging fruits are the legalisation of Nuclear power and the rapid adoption of the EV charging strategy I have outlined which will help enormously with combatting the duck curve effect that distributed pv has on energy production. It will allow employees of businesses (who generally park their vehicles at said businesses during daylight hours) to charge their EVs when there is a dangerous excess of almost free solar energy being fed into the grid. Next, raise the requirements of property developers, large to medium businesses and residential and commercial landlords/land owners (those who have control over the parking lots that tenants use) as these parties can easily accommodate the costs of electrification.

Transmission lines to new renewable energy resource zones should be built by the state government initially to unlock convenient investment opportunities from both public and private parties. It's all well and good for new REZs to be legislated and declared by the federal government, but if necessary transmission infrastructure is not already in place for investors to build capacity connected to it, this capacity won't be built, and will actually be delayed by longer FID times. Everything else can at least get far into implementation in a single election term.

Policy is prone to change and therefore isn't as important to industrial investors as core industrial infrastructure such as: sea ports, freight rail, transmission lines and pipelines. The more core infrastructure that is built during a term in government, the harder it is to backflip on policy or make breaking changes when government changes, and industrial investors know this all too well. To drive more long-term investment into new industry, innovate and achieve real results, more core industrial infrastructure needs to be built, and this should be prioritised.

Both supply and demand of new low carbon industries must be cultivated in parallel for both sectors to succeed, for example, neither a green ammonia producing facility or an ammonia-powered tanker should be developed in isolation, but rather, they should be developed in a stable partnership in order to serve each other. This allows a solid business base upon which to continue innovation and cultivate more value-add, domestication and export benefits.

My only recommendation would be that the government focus its own investment and incentives on industries with stronger potential and more established technologies and be wary about losing funds to dead-end investments. There are plenty of hypothetical new industries and solutions surrounding decarbonisation, but not every one is as proven. There is a real danger for the government to lose money getting stuck in costly dead-end investments, which could be destructive to taxpayer support and the funding pool for decarbonisation.

Government-supported TAFE positions with pathways into subsidised University degrees where required should become an ongoing program that lasts as long as there are major skill shortages in areas relevant to the energy transformation. Also, skilled foreign migration should be significantly opened-up in place of the existing massive low or no skill migration. The closing of migration loopholes through ghost colleges already helps to achieve this.

The government must acknowledge and respect that Australian citizens are the owners of the resources that mining companies extract and sell for profit domestically and internationally. Australians deserve, generally, a far greater cut of our own pie through royalties. The resource rent tax must be greatly increased. We should increase domestic control over resource extraction by supporting Australian upstarts in the mining and energy sectors and hold to account foreign corporations who exploit Australian resources while offering little to Australia in return. The energy transition is REQUIRED to bring increased reliability and significantly reduced pricing of energy supply to households and small businesses. If by 2030 Australian citizens are not feeling immense benefits from the energy transformation, then the transformation will fail. The sooner real benefits can be delivered to the engine of this country: its working class and industry, the better.

Recycling is an industry that is energy intensive and shares supply chains with new resource mining. Due to the plentiful energy resources in WA in particular but also Australia generally, we are uniquely positioned to establish a successful recycling sector, mainly in metals, but also potentially in the area of consumer electronics down the line. Consideration should be made to develop a recycling industry alongside metals.

There is not enough ambition and real committent to value-add industry. The government must look at low-hanging opportunities to establish value-adding industries. WA already produces iron ore in swathes, but why aren't our first green steel recycling mill or our first DRI steel mill being fast-tracked and built as a priority? Why are their operational dates set for 2026 and 2028 respectively and not sooner? The government must stand-in to help guarantor keystone projects such as these.