30 July 2015, The Conversation, Fact Check: Would Labor’s renewable energy plan cost consumers $60 billion? (It) will mean a massive bill, perhaps A$60 billion or more, that will have to be carried by the consumers of Australia. – Prime Minister Tony Abbott, speaking to reporters about Labor’s plan to source half the nation’s power from renewable energy sources by 2030, July 27, 2015. Abbott’s quote, a response to the new Labor policy to set a goal of 50% renewable energy by 2030, appears to be drawing on reported comments by Paul Hyslop, chief executive of ACIL Allen – the company used by the government’s Warburton review into the existing Renewable Energy Target (RET). The prime minister’s office sourced the A$60 billion figure to an article in The Australian last week that quoted Hyslop saying of Labor’s 50% renewables pledge that: If this were met by wind power it would require 10,000 to 11,000 additional turbines… with capital costs for the turbines alone of $65 billion. Hyslop’s ACIL Allen colleague, Owen Kelp, told Sky News this week that the A$60 billion was a “fairly simplistic, back-of-the-envelope calculation”. When asked by The Conversation for a copy of any calculations to see how the A$65 billion capital costs figure was reached, Hyslop said the internal analysis was not publicly available, but explained that: To get to the 50%, you need about another 80,000 gigawatt-hours… To build that with renewables, the current cheapest technology would be wind. We estimate between 10,000 and 11,000 additional wind turbines with a bottom end estimate of around $65 billion in capital costs… Would it have an impact on consumers? It really depends on the trade-off on the cost of funding the subsidy versus the downward pressure on electricity prices. We don’t know exactly what that would look like. That would be a significant piece of modelling. Read More here