Solar reincarnation
The renewable energy investments must continue until morale improves
If reincarnation does exist, I want my next life to be as a solar panel because you never get blamed for anything.
As the energy regulator revealed the other day, Australia has built four to five times more solar and wind energy than Europe, the US, Japan or China.
Perhaps Australia’s broken electricity system is due to this mad rush towards renewable energy? No, according to our energy regulator, “Recent international events and Australian market events have further strengthened the case for the shift to renewables.”
The renewable energy investments must continue until morale improves.
Energy regulators do at least acknowledge that we will need to install enormous amounts of storage in a world in which coal-fired power does not exist.
Their recent analysis shows that Victoria could experience a “renewable drought” of 1 terawatt hour of electricity over just one week in the future.
How much is 1TWh? Well, the South Australian big battery can produce 130 megawatt hours, so we would need more than 7500 of these to keep the Victorian lights on. At about $100m a pop, that is a total cost of more than $700bn, or more than Victoria’s total annual economic output.
This winter’s energy shortfalls came just after the Liddell coal-fired power station in NSW’s Hunter Valley shut a 400MW unit in April. Its other three units (a total of 1200MW) will shut next April. Then, in 2025, Australia’s largest coal-fired power station, Eraring, also in the Hunter, is due to shut.
By the end of the decade, our energy regulators warn, almost two-thirds of our coal-fired power could shut.
If we struggled to just keep the lights on this winter, how are we going to go over the next few years?
The rest of the world is waking up and is turning back to reliable coal. Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Austria are all turning coal-fired power stations back on. China and India have plans to increase their coal mining by 700 million tonnes a year. (Australia mines just over 400 million tonnes a year.)
Indeed, across the world there are 345 new coal-fired power stations being built. What is the argument against Australia building just a few to guarantee our energy supplies?
We have high-quality coal and if we build power stations near our mines we need not pay the high global prices for access to our coal. Our gas resources in eastern Australia are now relatively expensive and are not suited to supply always-on power alternatives.
Coal would be the fastest reliable energy option to market. Florida just built a world-class gas power station in three years. There is no reason we could not do the same with off-the-shelf coal technologies.
Nuclear is something we should consider long term but we cannot build them in the time needed to replace our old coal-fired power fleet.
A new ultra-supercritical coal-fired power station built in Australia would increase our emissions by about five million tonnes a year. That would mean global emissions would go up by 0.014 per cent. The world has warmed around 1C after 600 billion tonnes of emissions. So this new coal-fired power station may increase the temperature by 0.0001 of a degree over its life.
Yet we are told a new coal-fired power station would worsen climate change and create more bushfires, floods and all manner of other natural disasters. These arguments are nonsensical yet go unchallenged in polite society.
Unfortunately, our factories cannot power themselves on wishful thinking. The untold cost of this winter’s power crisis is that we kept the lights on by paying factories to turn off so households that voted teal could keep their rooms warm.
Nothing demonstrates our failed energy system more starkly than factory workers being laid off into the cold so green voters in relative warmth can watch the latest ABC report on how climate change has caused Sydney’s floods.
Remember when coronavirus had convinced us to bring back manufacturing to Australia? No one will invest in Australian manufacturing if we cannot guarantee the lights to stay on. We will just import more manufactured goods from those countries that are building reliable, coal-fired power stations, often fuelled by our coal.
Eventually people will start blaming solar panels for all of this, as you can see from the cost-of-living protests growing around the world. The best way to avoid such upheaval here is to use our natural resource of the world’s best-quality coal to deliver lower electricity prices and Australian manufacturing jobs.
This article was originally published in The Australian on 13 July 2022
When it comes to climate ideology and energy security, it seems that pragmatism and common sense simply have no place in the contemporary economic and political narrative of western nations, including Australia.
Instead, delusion and fairy tales supplant rationalism and objective reality.
The willingness of the populace to buy into a narrative that, for all intents and purposes, amounts to the self-immolation of our economy and the future prosperity of our great nation, is mind boggling to say the least.
As Mark Twain once said, “It is easier to fool the people, than to convince them they have been fooled.”
And oh, how we have been fooled.
We have been taken for complete suckers, and seemingly have no clue that we have become a limp puppet hanging from the manipulative strings of the globalist puppeteers (UN, IMF, WEF, et al.)
Western political leaders clamour for the attention of the global elites in a garish competition of climate virtue signalling and one upmanship.
The Australian people urgently need to become economically literate, and informed about the contextual reality of climate alarmism, and we need to do it now before we destroy the birthright of future generations.
Spot on Mat
You are a voice crying in the wilderness against green Marxist ideologues
Keep fighting
Bought Ian Plimer’s Green Murder
We are going down a path of national impoverishment
How do we turn this around?
At some stage there must be a point of no return - 3 more years of this climate religion is an unbearable thought- when will Aussies realise they are being dudded? Pain ahead unless there are better brains and real science data ahead.
Thanks Matt
Nev