Famous for its churches, pretty parks by the Torrens, and the Adelaide festival, SA’s citizens once blithely relied on the coal-fired Leigh Creek station for their base load power.

Changing their energy situation was the last thing on people’s minds in Adelaide while they sipped fine Coonawarra reds and perused the line-up for the next WOMAD festival.

How things have changed.

Some bright spark in the government decided to go full bore on renewables, without too much thought about how this would operate when they sun was not shining or the wind not blowing and whether there would be enough back-up power coming from neighbouring coal-burning states.

Last year a vicious storm caused SA to have a full-scale blackout, something unprecedented in recent memory and not something normally associated with a modern developed country like Australia. India maybe, but not Australia.  

There has been a lot of finger pointing from both sides of politics with the federal government blaming the fiasco on the state’s ambitious 50% renewables target by 2025 and the state government blaming the inability of the national market to operate effectively to back up the state.

The SA Premier Jay Weatherill’s response to this fiasco is to build a $500 million gas generator at taxpayers’ expense.

Coal did not fit into the government’s view of acceptable power energy sources.

Minerals Council of Australia executive director – coal Greg Evans said it was wrong to characterise coal as in the past and indeed if this was a genuine view SA should stop sourcing coal-based power from Victoria and abandon plans to import electricity from New South Wales.

“We of course need all forms of energy in the mix and that includes renewables and gas – but it also means high efficiency, low emission coal-fired generation,” he said

“Technology leaders including Germany and Japan have embraced next generation coal and it has much lower greenhouse emissions.

“In fact, coal generation using HELE [high efficiency low emissions] technology is expanding right across the world with 1015 supercritical or ultra-supercritical in operation and another 1231 planned or under construction.”

Evans said electricity from coal was affordable and available 24 hours a day every day of the year and now it offered a clean solution.

He said relative to other base load generation options such as gas it was affordable, had less price volatility and was readily sourced.

“To add to their suitability, HELE plants are designed to ramp up in order to meet electricity demand as required, thereby strengthening an energy network weakened by non-synchronous weather dependent renewables,” Evans said.

“The MCA has also previously warned if this wider electricity problem is not sorted out living standards will fall and prices will keep rising.”

So it is good enough for advanced economies such as Germany to go down the HELE route, not to mention newly developing economies in our region, but it is not good enough for SA.

Hogsback thinks this aversion to coal at any costs could end badly for everyone. Especially the businesses and households that are trying to keep electricity costs down in an inflationary environment.