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John Kaye Foresees A Bright Future For Publicly Owned Electricity

Last night at a meeting in Brunswick Heads (near Byron Bay), John Kaye Greens MLC outlined the reasons why electricity privatisation is a bad idea in New South Wales. John started by saying that we now stand at a significant point in Australia's history, where we decide whether to privatise the power generators, thus encouraging the building of another coal fired power station, or move to renewable energy, and energy efficiency, reducing our greenhouse emissions. He went on to outline his hope that on the 3rd of May, the NSW State Labor Council would reject the proposal to sell off the NSW State's electricity generators and retailers.

John talked of the division in the Labor party between the membership and the leadership. He said most of the rank and file members and the unions are dead against selling off the electricity system, it is the leadership such as Morris Iemma and Michael Costa who are pushing hard for the sell off. The Labor State council meets Saturday the 3rd of May to discuss this issue. If the Council rejects the privatisation proposal it would put the Party leaders in a difficult position.  John was asked by an audience member what would happen next, John said "Watch this Space!, we are in unchartered waters, the next two weeks will be very interesting."  Many readers of this website will have seen that  Morris Iemma has stated in the media that the selloff will go ahead regardless of the State Council decision.[Ed]

Retail Jobs Under Threat

John went on to say that privatising the power generators and retailers would result in job losses in the retail industry. Especially call centres which would very likely be outsourced to Bangalore India. When a member of the audience commented that call centre jobs are boring, John replied that he has met with many people in these call centres and they like their jobs and take pride in the service they provide. Also service to country areas could be affected, and the incentive to introduce power saving efficiencies and buy-back schemes, where customers can sell back power they generate to the grid. This is because private ownership is about making profits, and that means selling more electricity and/or higher prices.

Privatisation Threatens Carbon Trading Schemes

Privatising the generators would take approximately 1.2billion dollars a year from the State Government's income. Privatised power generators would result in enormous pressure to excuse the operators from the carbon trading scheme due to be introduced in the next 2 years. John mentioned that the Garnout Report into climate change stated that removing the power generators from a carbon trading scheme would nullify any such scheme. Public ownership of the generators would make it much easier to include the power industry in a carbon trading scheme.

The Myth of Carbon Capture and Storage

John said, " We cannot continue burning coal as if there is no tomorrow. Every time we burn a ton of coal we produce 2.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide. You can talk about burying CO2 but there has never been a successful implementation of carbon capture and storage. Even the most outrageously pro-coal people are saying it will be at least 15 years before this technology will work, some of us say it will be twenty years, others say it will never work. Clean coal is a myth at the moment."

"The largest clean coal project called "Zerogen" in Illinois, USA has just gone bankrupt. The US department of energy has just pulled the plug. Our own Zerogen project here in Queensland has so far spent its entire budget on drilling two holes. And so it must find more money to continue with the rest of the process. The idea of burying something like 200 million tonnes a year of hot gas, gas which reacts with water to become highly acidic is a very difficult thing to do and is going to be very expensive."

The reality is that so far no-one has found suitable rock strata in New South Wales for burying CO2. So the most likely scenario is piping it in stainless steel pipes to either South Australia or Queensland for burial. The annual output of stainless steel is not sufficient to make such a pipeline, and imagine the cost. Stainless steel is very expensive." "You can't use normal steel because of the acidity of the gas."

A Vision for Publicly Owned Electricity in NSW

John summed up, "This is about more than just winning the public ownership debate, it is what we can do with public ownership. We have a big challenge to move our electricity industry away from being the world's largest per-capita  emitters of CO2 to being world leaders in the new clean technologies, and in energy efficiencies and energy savings. Public ownership gives us an opportunity to make this transformation, we can turn this business of retailing electricity into an energy saving partnership between retailers and householders, helping to save the planet. This will take a lot of political leadership, and I am confident we can do it."