How this might play out for energy consumers across the nation’s south and east remains an open question,even if the clean energy the Andrews government intends to pump into the system will be cheaper to produce than the fossil power it replaces.
In simplest terms,the NEM used to work well to organise the generation and trading of power,its distribution,and the investment needed to maintain it and improve it when coal was king.
Until recently,electricity has mainly been made in a handful of vast dirty machines built mostly on our coasts and then carried across the grid.
But those machines grew old,and even if they were not helping to cook the planet would need replacing by now – or very soon.
To provide clean,affordable and reliable power in this new world,renewable generation – along with the batteries,pumped hydro and peaking plants they depend on for back-up – need to be built across the landscape and connected with a bigger and more complicated mesh of poles and wires.
The cost of this will be eye-watering – hence the federal government’s promise at the last election to spend $20 billion on new transmission lines.