Ted spoke with 2GB’s Ben Fordham on 17 April 2023 regarding the closure of Liddell and Eraring power stations and what that means for baseload power availability in Australia. Listen below.
Read the transcript of the interview below.
Ben Fordham: …Ted O’Brien, the shadow energy minister, because he’s on the ground in the Hunter Valley this morning. AGL is closing the Liddell power plant on Wednesday. And Ted O’Brien is with us. Ted, good morning.
Ted O’Brien: Good morning Ben.
Ben Fordham: I’m guessing the mood would be pretty dark on the ground at the moment. Lots of workers they’re still unsure about their future.
Ted O’Brien: Yeah, look, some are. I think the bigger picture issue is the fact that the closure of Liddell marks the start of a pretty turbulent new era for Australia’s energy market. We’re gonna have 80% of our baseload power prematurely ripped out of the grid by 2035 Ben and there’s absolutely zero guarantee of a replacement and Liddell is the start of that. process. So we’ve got tough times ahead.
Ben Fordham: The energy market operator and the Energy Council say there will be no impact on prices or reliability. But there are plenty of other energy experts saying we’re not convinced about that.
Ted O’Brien: I think everybody agrees Australia has a supply problem when it comes to energy here we have supply being ripped out of the market. I don’t know how logic can point you to anything but a question mark unreliability and prices going up.
Ben Fordham: We’ve got a question mark over Eraring then, because it’s to close in two years’ time and the new New South Wales Premier Chris Minns has left the door open to keeping it going.
Ted O’Brien: He has and that would mean that with Liddell and Eraring and you’d have 35% taken out of New South Wales in terms of total energy generation capacity. And good to see that the new government is talking about that, but we’ve had radio silence from Albanese radio silence from Chris Bowen. That’s the problem. Federal government has absolutely no plan whatsoever. They’ve gone into hiding.