EPRA Inquiry

The National Electricity Market, the electricity grid that serves our country by delivering energy to both our homes and industry, is enormous and incredibly complex. It is also arguably one of the greatest contributors to GDP if taken as a single entity. It is also one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases in the economy. But, even though it's one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gases, it also presents probably the easiest industry to largely decarbonise. There are roughly 20-odd gigawatts of coal fired generation that we need to be able to take out of the system as quickly, efficiently and cheaply as we can without impacting on our economy.

I was very, very thankful to get support from across the chamber to stand up a Senate select committee looking at energy planning and governance in Australia. So far we've had four days of hearings and the committee has received, I think, nearly 75 submissions from various bodies. I'm incredibly thankful for those who have contributed to the inquiry. While I'm not here to pre-empt any of the findings, I think it's important just to put on the record what the committee is looking at and why the inquiry is so important. The National Electricity Market, the NEM, was created in 1998. Back then, the energy system was very different to what it is and what we're trying to bring it towards, and that is a decarbonised electricity system with generation that supplies reliable, affordable energy to both households and industry.

There is a risk, however, that we may miss some of the goals that we're striving to achieve. The inquiry has been hearing evidence about what that might be and how that might come about and will hopefully be putting forward some recommendations that might help fix that. It's really apparent at this point in time that there's a huge amount of passion to see this project succeed. I and my fellow committee members, such as Senator David Pocock here, have been heavily invested in taking the evidence that's before us. As we saw from the Clean Energy Council's announcement overnight, we're making a lot of progress towards decarbonising the electricity system, but if we don't make more progress and make it quickly then we do risk missing the goals that we're trying to achieve.

The priorities that are being planned into the system are important now, and how we plan for the system for tomorrow is going to affect the outcome more than what we plan to do in 10 years time. The important upshot of this is ensuring that we see regulation for what it is. There have been numerous previous inquiries into our electricity system, all of which have presented very important contributions to the development of the system. The Vertigan review in 2015 and the Finkel review in 2017 made incredible contributions to this. However, the system has changed, and what we're trying to achieve has changed so rapidly that I think reviews such as the select committee is looking into now are going to need to be done quite regularly to enable our energy market bodies to keep track and keep up with the changes that are coming in order to achieve our objectives.