by Sophie Vorrath |
There's a lot of discussion and political jostling around energy options, decarbonisation, low-carbon or zero-carbon transition.
Looking at the options, let's begin with today's dominant player, conventional coal. It's fate is easy to summarise, we burn it now in old, outdated power stations, but it no longer has a social licence and banks aren't lining up to finance it.
Conventional gas is mooted by energy industry pundits and their bosses as the clean green option for our energy future, all the while ignoring fugitive emissions and not actually installing anything significant due to lower than forecast demand increases on the national electricity grid and the huge price uncertainty and volatility that comes with the fuel. This uncertainty is underpinned by the imminent linking of Australia to world markets and resultant export price parity. Will gas be cheap as in the US where the shale gas revolution has dropped prices, or will it be expensive like the Asian spot price or UK price, and will it trend towards parity with oil which itself is steaming towards $200 a barrel? (We don't run our current electricity sector on diesel so why would we run it on gas at diesel prices?)
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