NSW Premier Chris Minns
NSW Premier Chris Minns (Image: AAP/Dan Himbrechts)

The battle against CoalKeeper, it seems, is never over. Apparently dead after the states — led by the Andrews government in Victoria and the Perrottet government in NSW — rejected a Commonwealth push for a “capacity mechanism” to include fossil fuels last year, it has now re-emerged under NSW Labor, in an even sillier form than that proposed by federal Coalition village idiot Angus Taylor.

Claiming it was “rescuing the Energy Roadmap“, yesterday NSW Labor announced its response to a Labor-connected consultant’s energy transition review. It included a commitment to:

streamline renewables approvals in the planning system as well as enhance and coordinate community benefit sharing. It will unlock opportunities to connect new renewables to the existing grid outside Renewable Energy Zones. A Consumer Energy Strategy will be developed to unleash the potential of households and businesses to further embrace small-scale renewables like solar in the short-term, without shifting focus and momentum from the delivery of large-scale projects.

Notice the lack of any detail around what form the “streamlining” would take. And what is “enhancing and coordinating community benefit sharing”? By the time we get to “unlocking opportunities” and “unleashing potential of households and businesses” we’re deep into cliché territory.

But the real point was the revival of CoalKeeper, dressed up of course in bureaucratic language. “The government will engage with Origin on its plans for Eraring, at the same time as pursuing all alternative solutions to deliver the renewable generation, transmission and storage solutions that NSW needs.”

As has been repeatedly detailed, there is no case for propping up the Eraring coal-fired power station beyond its scheduled closure date of 2025 — unless, of course, you’re in the NSW division of the CFMMEU, which gave $330,000 to NSW Labor in 2021-22, or the NSW Electrical Trades Union, which gave over $100,000. Or you’re Origin Energy, which has given over $35,000 to NSW Labor since 2008, and over $180,000 to federal Labor.

What Chris Minns and energy minister Penny Sharpe failed to explain yesterday was exactly how much “engagement” Origin was going to get to keep Eraring running past the end of its life. We know this relic, built in the early Wran years (that’s 12 premiers ago, for those counting) costs several hundred millions in maintenance to keep ticking over now. If NSW Labor has discussed what those life support maintenance costs will be in 2025 and beyond with Origin, it’s refusing to say. Nor is it estimating what it will cost to supply it with more coal.

At least with Angus Taylor’s CoalKeeper we would have known the size of the tax impost on households to prop up his party’s fossil fuel donors, because households were going to have to pay for it through their power bills. But the NSW plan is, apparently, simply to gift Origin taxpayer funding directly. What costing rigour, what verification, what accountability Origin will face for this free money is also a mystery. It’s all about “engagement” at the moment.

Former NSW Treasurer and energy minister Matt Kean, one of the few genuine climate action leaders on either side of politics anywhere in the country, has a good idea of the cost. He dropped a bomb on Minns and Sharpe on Monday when he revealed one expert had informed him there wouldn’t be much change from $3 billion to keep Eraring going for a couple of years.

Sharpe was furious and accused Kean of being responsible for “delays and blowouts” when minister, and said his observations were “not helpful”. Certainly they weren’t helpful for a government trying to revive CoalKeeper under the pretence of keeping the lights on, rather than find a better use for a couple of billion dollars.

And just to repeat a point that the mainstream media seems determined to ignore: it’s not just about CO2 emissions — coal-fired power stations kill people. Eraring is responsible for up to 90 deaths a year, with no one being particularly fussed. NSW taxpayers will be spending billions to help kill a couple hundred people as part of CoalKeeper.

At least federally Labor has the excuse that it inherited a lost decade on climate policy. NSW Labor, however, is trailing badly in the wake of a government committed to real action. And with CoalKeeper, it will go backwards.