VALUES TO VALUE: The government needs a strong inclusive narrative on how consumers are critical to meeting our energy needs through homes and businesses, with solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, electric vehicles, controllable loads, EVs, and smart home appliances and also on electrification and degasification, and the always neglected yet powerful discipline of energy efficiency.
Nearly everyone who votes uses electricity, and vice versa.
Which is why electricity consumers are such a potent political demographic, and a political hot potato when it comes to high energy prices as part of a nationwide cost-of-living crisis.
As things stand, the Australian government is missing the mark when it comes to talking to these voting electricity consumers, and their communities, about the clean energy transition; and, to put it bluntly, “What’s in it for them?”
Before the last election in 2022, the then Labor Opposition led by now Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised Australians average savings of $275 off their energy bills.
This promise has since been ripped to shreds by the global energy cost fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine; but more recently, now in government, Labor also has promised a $300 rebate off energy bills, a new promise made in last month’s federal budget, to be delivered after July 1.
Frankly, it’s all a bit insulting to the electorate’s intelligence.
The role of consumers is critical – and neglected
The government needs a better, more inclusive energy transition narrative, focused laser-like on the vital role to be played by consumers. Their homes and businesses, and their stuff – like solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, electric vehicles, controllable loads, EVs, and smart home appliances – and also on electrification and degasification, and the always neglected yet powerful discipline of energy efficiency.
For over two decades, for example, successive Australian governments have never established a national energy efficiency scheme underpinned by tradable certificates for saving energy, as happens in states like NSW and Victoria. At least so far, this federal government has ducked this key opportunity.
Unlocking action on a national energy saving scheme would be great. Even more importantly, however, the government needs a dedicated salesperson – a genuine “retail politician” – to build its consumer and community energy narrative and deliver the key messages, as a crucial component of the societal infrastructure required to accompany the physical infrastructure of the energy transition.
Consumer participation isn’t just a nice-to-have bit of the energy transition. It’s the vital ingredient that decides whether we succeed or fail, and right now it’s profoundly undersupported.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, and even his junior Minister Senator Jenny McAllister, already have too much on their plates. As do Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek, and Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic too.
They’ve been doing the vital big set pieces of the future energy puzzle.
This includes the Safeguard Mechanism, the Capacity Investment Scheme, the Climate Change Authority and its net zero target-setting, fuel efficiency standards, offshore wind policy and exploration licensing, the Net Zero Economy Agency, the Future Made in Australia model, the National Reconstruction Fund, strategic environmental approvals (though not yet an updated Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act), and more.
Highly important as they are, these big-ticket reforms are mainly outside of the daily experience and awareness of consumers and their communities. People who are getting on with their ever more expensive daily lives, and looking for energy solutions, including clean ones as well as cost-saving opportunities, at home and street levels.
The government, and the nation, need a Minister for Consumer and Community Energy.
There’s a perfect opportunity to choose and appoint one in July-August, when the federal parliament will be taking its extended winter break.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese already has a ministerial reshuffle on his pre-election political agenda, either in the winter recess or over the Christmas-New Year break. But unfolding events around the politics of energy and climate make a compelling case for moving sooner rather than later.
Meanwhile, the Liberal-National coalition Opposition has seen weak engagement with consumers and communities, and signs of a backlash against large-scale renewables in particular, which it is orchestrating and provoking, as an opportunity to pounce politically.
Hence its nuclear power play as a major election policy for the next national poll, which must be held by May 2025, less than a year off.
The Albanese government can’t rely on half-clever Simpsons-esque memes like “Blinky the three-eyed koala” and “Snow White and the seven reactors” to kill off the Opposition’s nuclear power push, no matter how fantastical it is revealed to be when scrutiny is applied.
With just two more sitting weeks in this spell, the federal parliament is set to go nuclear this week as energy and climate policy move back to centre stage, and we count down to an election that will be decisive for what kind of energy transition Australia moves on with.
There’ll be fiery debate and fury aplenty in the parliament, as the battle is joined on alternative visions for the clean energy transition and net zero by 2050: the Labor government’s renewables-led pathway v the Opposition’s keep coal for longer, add more gas, and introduce nuclear power prescription.
Greens, Teals, One Nation, and assorted Independents will all have plenty to say too, and the balance of power in the Senate will potentially be a crucial factor in the next parliament, post May 2025, especially if the Liberal-National coalition can pull off a shock win.
Of course, we are a long way from that yet, and the politically risky nuclear push may well blow up the coalition’s prospects altogether. Unfortunately, however, this still may mean a lot of collateral damage to investor confidence in renewables, which further delays progress, and voter-consumer confidence that the energy transition is “good for them”.
Just appointing a Minister for Consumer and Community Energy isn’t enough in itself.
The government also needs a great big grab bag of incentives and other goodies to draw more consumers into the equation, with their own home and business and community investments; and including a lot of new support for lower-income and marginalised groups, especially renters and social housing occupants.
It almost certainly has this in its pre-election kitty, but should seriously consider bringing it forward rather than waiting too long.
The NSW Labor government has just revealed a $238 million allocation for a consumer energy strategy in its 2024 state budget. The long-lived but now endangered Queensland Labor government, which is looking like losing at its next election later this year, mainly because it’s been around for too long and has gone stale, is throwing money at energy consumers (that is, everyone).
The Australian Energy Market Operator, in its crucial Integrated System Plan for the renewables led energy transition, envisages that fully half of all energy generation will come from consumers’ rooftops and other customer-side energy assets by 2050, which dwarfs any contribution nuclear generation could make by then.
Late last year, state and federal energy ministers, sitting as the Energy and Climate Change Ministerial Council, agreed to develop a national roadmap for customer?owned energy resources, and will consider taking a national approach to the rules governing assets like rooftop solar, home battery storage and electric vehicles.
The stage is set. The government needs to secure votes and defend a renewables-led energy transition. Voter consumers need to see that the energy transition is good for them, not just in the medium to long term, but also right here and now.
Now all we need is a switched-on new ministerial salesperson, armed with a great set of products and services, for them to sell hard to what I suspect is still a more willing than not, but currently vastly underwhelmed electorate.
Be bold and flick the switch, Labor, before you lose the faith of consumers/voters and run out of time, policies, and incentives to win it back.