‘Get your candles’: energy experts are ‘terrified’ about this summer

afr.com:

A summer of blackouts has emerged as a real risk of Australia’s creaking power system, increasing the likelihood of extra government intervention in a desperate bid to close the gap between the reality of the faltering energy transition and the ambition of 2030 climate targets.

The return to El Nino summer conditions, a power supply system strained by reduced and increasingly unreliable coal power generation, an overstretched transmission system and a slow build-out of renewable energy and the firming generation to support it prompted experts to warn it was time for householders to “get your candles”.

Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood (l), Pollination’s Zoe Whitton and Boardroom Energy’s Matthew Warren at the summit on Tuesday, Dion Georgopoulos

“You don’t just need your candles, you also need your air purifier for when the electricity is on and stuff is burning,” said Zoe Whitton, managing director and head of impact at climate change advisory firm Pollination.

Ms Whitton reported discussing the upcoming summer with her climate scientist colleague who looked “terrified viscerally”. And if the warnings of blackouts come true, or not, she told The Australian Financial Review Energy & Climate Summit that “more prescriptive, more interventionist policy” was on the way, given impatience with the stuttering transition and concerns the Australia’s emissions reduction targets will not be met.

Former Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad said, “the lights are going to go out” in a return to normal conditions after three mild summers and said politicians were not listening to the warnings about the risks around supply, while the industry was not speaking up enough.

“That’s our problem,” he said. “We’re not having the honest conversations and us