Peter Dutton’s promise that his party will deliver “reliability, not blackouts” under a Liberal-National Coalition government may be a slick slogan, but history tells a different story.

From January to March in 2021 and 2022, periods when the Liberal government was in power, there was a higher amount of outages by average minutes than compared to the same time in 2023 and 2024 under the Albanese Labor government.

The New Daily found that not only were their fewer outages based on total minutes under the Albanese government in 2022 and 2023, but fewer people were affected by a loss of power.

All of the data was sourced from publicly available information provided by AusGrid.

Australia-wide data from the Australian Energy Regulator collaborated this trend across the country from 2004 to 2022 under Labor and Coalition governments.

Roger Dargaville, director of the Monash Energy Institute, said the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) has the system operating at “99.999 per cent reliability”.

“If you do happen to lose power at your home, it’s (usually) because of something local, like a truck running through a power pole or a small failure in the last kilometre of energy delivery,” he said.

“It is completely recognised and accepted that to run a reliable energy system using renewables, you need to have ancillary services such as batteries that store power and maintain the high levels of reliability that we’ve come to expect.”

The vast majority of the outages in the Ausnet and AER data fall into this category.

Blackouts?

Ted O’Brien, the opposition’s energy spokesperson, was asked about the Ausgrid data and its implications for the Liberal Party’s promise of “reliability, not blackouts”.

His office did not comment, but pointed to AEMO’s reports that reveal potential energy shortages in the future, allegedly because of the renewables rollout.

Each year, AEMO releases a Statement of Opportunities that Dargavill said is simply “a look into the future”.

“What the market operator is telling the market isn’t that there won’t be enough electricity, but they say if no one does anything, then there may be shortfalls in the future,” Dargaville said.

“It’s a call to action that the market needs to build more batteries, for example, build more transmission networks and in the case of the gas statement of opportunities, build more gas storage.”

AEMO doesn’t warn of blackouts and brownouts because of renewables, as Dutton claims, in either its Statement of Opportunities or the May 2024 update.

“These reports are not predictions, and they are not forecasts of blackouts,” Daniel Westerman, chief executive of AEMO, said in June.

“As an industry, we’re absolutely capable of dealing with the challenges of this energy transition.”

Instead, as Westerman and Dargaville point out, it highlights that delays for under-construction transmission lines are a challenge for Australia’s energy system and calls for more investment in particular areas.

One of those delayed projects is Project EnergyConnect, a transmission line that will allow South Australia to export excess wind and solar energy to New South Wales when the state produces more renewable energy than it requires.

War on science

Last week, Dutton again misrepresented the findings of a different report from the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) by falsely claiming ATSE’s report stated “that wind, in particular, is not reliable”.

ATSE’s report found that small modular reactors, a centrepiece of Dutton’s nuclear energy policy, wouldn’t start supplying energy to Australia before the mid to late 2040s, beyond the Coalition’s claim they can be built in Australia by 2035.

In response to the report’s findings, Dutton attempted to discredit scientists again.

“I’m not interested in the fanatics from both sides of the argument,” Dutton said.

Senior members of the party have, on record, made false claims about the speed at which nuclear energy could be adopted earlier this year.

“Ted O’Brien raised the UAE, for instance, that had a nuclear reactor up within three years,” Senator Jane Hume said during an interview on Sky News in March.

“There’s an awful lot of hurdles to jump in hoops to go through before that period of time, but the first one surely would be lifting the moratorium on nuclear energy in this country that would at least allow the market to make those decisions.”

According to Ken Baldwin, an emeritus professor of physics at the Australian National University and a fellow at the AATSE, it took the United Arab Emirates nine years to build its reactors, not three.

Since Hume’s interview, the Liberal Party has also conceded that Australian taxpayers, not the free market, will pay for Australia’s nuclear reactors.