St Baker says there are energy failures and undermining everywhere
Queensland energy entrepreneur Trevor St Baker has backed a domestic gas reservation and said the big gas companies had scuttled the plan.
St Baker is heavily involved in energy through his Delta Electricity company and its ownership of the Vales Point power station in NSW, but previously also owned gas generation company ERM Power. His St Baker Energy Innovation Fund is an investor in electric vehicle fast-charging company Tritium as well as battery materials company Novonix.
The domestic gas policy ensures that WA’s LNG exporters also make 15 per cent of the exportable gas available for the domestic market. It has strong support in WA and has been remarkably uncontroversial.
No such demand exists for Queensland’s LNG producer however the projects have previously redirected gas into the domestic market when called on.
Queensland also has some gas leases that are only for the domestic market.
St Baker said there was strong antagonism from the gas companies over the reservation policy who had “usurped the natural extension of their existing term gas supply contracts to local customers when they up for renewal, and ramped up domestic gas prices to international pricing”.
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“Basically, as founder of ERM Power, I was a great supporter of Western Australia’s 15 per cent domestic gas policy, which had sustained bipartisan support, but which hard heads of both political parties federally would not support,” St Baker said.
“Also, Delta Electricity, which I chair, has pushed in the public consultations by the Energy Security Board over two years for establishment in the NEM for new markets for day-ahead generation reserve and for sustained ramping of such reserves as generation demand for dispatchable generation doubled and sometimes tripled every afternoon when the sun goes down and intermittent solar generation falls away.”
He said that idea had been “buried by the failed Australian Energy Market Commission and the Australian Energy Market Operator organisations, while they take on ideas of their own”.
His comments coincide with reports that the development of previous Government’s much hyped $5 billion Snowy 2.0 project is well behind.
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The AFR reported the project would not begin delivering power to the grid until 2028 because of delays and cost blowouts.
AGL also revealed today that the outage at its Loy Yang unit two would continue until September because of global supply chain issues.
The unit went offline in April and initial estimates were that it would be back on line in August.
