A federal government plan to lower energy bills by capping the price of gas and coal has been attacked as a heavy-handed and “radical” move that puts at risk more investment beyond Senex Energy’s decision to pause its $1 billion expansion plan in Queensland.
The comments come the day after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese joined Mr Perrottet to announce the passage of the legislation through NSW Parliament, and a landmark $7.8 billion deal to build critical transmission infrastructure throughout the state.
The transmission projects would ensure major renewable energy projects including Snowy 2.0 are plugged in to the grid. But there has been some criticism from policy experts, who say the deal lumps NSW taxpayers with part of the cost to build vital infrastructure that should be paid for by Snowy Hydro.
“Unless Snowy Hydro carries the full cost of its own transmission needs, NSW households will be charged billions more to cover its expensive and inefficient infrastructure,” Public Interest Advocacy Centre senior energy adviser Craig Memery said.
“While we welcome this much-needed government investment in modernising our electricity system with renewable energy zones, the announced funding doesn’t address the extra grid costs consumers face to subsidise the Snowy 2 project.
“People are already facing huge increases to energy bills they can’t control and they need a fairer deal. Generation and storage projects like Snowy gets the primary benefits from these big network extensions and they should be paying their fair share of the cost.”
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