News: WDS Energy stocks slip as Australia nears major emissions reduction bill, page-28

AUST today (extract):
ABATEMENT COMES AT A COST
GAS WILL STILL BE NEEDED TO AVOID POWER BLACKOUTS
Robert - Gottliebsen
It might not have been the aim, but the government’s carbon abatement legislation will introduce an effective carbon tax on domestic and industrial power usage.
We discovered this from the remarkable environmental revelations delivered to at the weekend’s Australian Davos Connections’ leadership conference in Brisbane.
The chief executive of CSIRO, Larry Marshall, shocked the greens in the audience when he revealed that without gas in the mix of electricity sources, the target of zero emissions by 2050 would cause widespread power shortages.
The conference was conducted under the Chatham House rule, but Marshall agreed to be quoted.
Other senior federal government energy advisers at the conference endorsed Marshall’s conclusions, so presumably the meetings of state and federal energy ministers would have been told this politically difficult truth.
On the eastern seaboard, the new NSW energy minister will doubtlessly also be briefed that to supplement renewable projects, additional gas fields on the east coast will need to be developed to avoid blackouts.
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