C2N reviews the perspective of Tony Ferguson in his article “Nuclear power could destabilise the market”, The Australian, 15th Jan 2025
Tony Ferguson’s claims that introducing nuclear threatens to destabilise our electricity market, fails to acknowledge that the National Electricity Market (NEM) is seriously flawed. It suffers from extremely high price volatility, fails to differentiate between intermittent renewable energy, quickly dispatchable energy and secure baseload energy, and has helped solar farms undermine baseload providers. There is also a power imbalance that could blow out our energy bills according to the Australian Energy Regulator, (AFR 20 Dec 2024).
To scare homeowners, Ferguson explains that rooftop solar won’t work with nuclear. This is clearly untrue, as rooftop solar is currently working with coal baseload electricity, and the Coalition is planning to replace coal with nuclear energy. The key problem for households, is utility scale solar and rooftop solar provide peak output at the same time, as the sun shines on both, but there isn’t enough storage to absorb peak solar inputs from households and utilities, so the public are slugged with negative feed-in tariffs.
AEMO Integrated System Plan 2024 forecast 47GWh of storage is required at a cost of $30 billion, but Ferguson fails to point out that this needs to be replaced every 10 years, at a massive cost to Australians. This same problem was investigated in the USA and found to be impractical, as explained in “The $2.5 trillion reason we can’t rely on batteries to clean up the grid” (MIT Technology Review by James Temple, in 2018).
A further criticism by Tony Fergurson, is the Coalition proposal to have governmentownership. This is addressed in a detailed study by Aidan Morrison “How to Build Low Cost Nuclear, Lessons from the world”. It also doesn’t preclude private sector investment through funding models such as the Regulated Asset Base (RAB) model, developed in the UK, for the upcoming Sizewell C nuclear project.
The critical flaw in Tony Fergurson’s vision, is batteries and pumped hydro can’t do the heavy lifting in Australia, and the NEM needs to evolve to support more reliable sources of electricity. This needs to include nuclear in the mix, if we hope to honour our net-zero by 2050 obligations.