{"id":27428,"date":"2019-02-07T15:06:24","date_gmt":"2019-02-07T04:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/?p=27428"},"modified":"2024-07-03T13:33:00","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T04:03:00","slug":"arena-consultant-reports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/arena-consultant-reports\/","title":{"rendered":"Is ARENA Wasting Your Money On Useless Consultant Reports?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If you are in a hurry, the summary of this post is: ‘In my humble opinion: Yes’.<\/p><\/div>\n

I recently wrote about Labor’s Hydrogen Plan announcement<\/a> where they referred to a report by ACIL Allen Consultants saying Australia’s hydrogen exports could be over $3 billion a year by 2030.\u00a0 In my previous article I explained why this is extremely unlikely.<\/p>\n

This article is going to be 2,000 words dedicated to me complaining. Specifically about why I consider the consultant report titled “Opportunites For Australia From Hydrogen Exports<\/a>” worse than useless and why I think ARENA — Australia’s Renewable Energy Agency<\/a> — wasted your money paying for it.<\/p>\n

I am the exact opposite of impressed with the report and ARENA for the following 5 reasons:<\/p>\n

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  1. The ACIL Allen report isn’t a feasibility study that could help ARENA decide what projects to invest in.\u00a0 Instead it’s an unrealistically optimistic report on opportunities.\u00a0 This is useless for helping ARENA because they need cold, hard facts to do their job of deciding what hydrogen projects deserve finance and are likely to pay off.\u00a0 Over-optimistic speculation is not helpful.<\/li>\n
  2. It’s not ARENA’s job to drum up support for hydrogen or any particular type of energy storage.\u00a0 Private companies can pay for non-rigorous reports if they want, but public funds should not be used.<\/li>\n
  3. Because it was an optimistic report on opportunities rather than a realistic look at feasibility it ignores obstacles to large scale hydrogen exports that are very obvious. \u00a0In my opinion this makes the report misleading and therefore worse than useless.<\/li>\n
  4. The report gives three scenarios and uses carbon prices, taken from from another report, but the prices are unrealistically high.<\/li>\n
  5. ARENA spent $16,094,000 on consultants in 2018.\u00a0 This was a 25% increase from 2017.\u00a0 If this hydrogen opportunities report is indicative of what ARENA is paying for then I think they are wasting money that instead could be spent cleaning up Australia’s energy sector.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The ACIL Allen report’s conclusions disagree with my own but that’s fine.\u00a0 I’m not worried about it.\u00a0 I’ve already written an article about that<\/a>. \u00a0This article is about how I disagree with the methods used to produce and pay for the report.<\/p>\n