Peta Credlin: The truth is hard to find in a blackout
AS the power went out across South Australia last week, I was sparing a thought for those thrust into a night of chaos, Peta Credlin writes.
AS the power went out across South Australia last week, I was sparing a thought for those thrust into a night of chaos.
I am old enough to remember a childhood in rural Victoria with intermittent power and candles stashed throughout the house (a brave move by Mum considering she had four kids in a weatherboard, but I guess the ’70s wasn’t the nanny state it is now).
It can be easy to forget how essential power is to modern living until it is turned off.
It also beggars belief that in a country as rich as Australia, an entire state can lose power, businesses lose millions, households left stranded yet most of our political leaders prefer the pointless game of “who can dodge responsibility the fastest”.
At least Josh Frydenberg is trying to talk some sense. As federal energy minister, he’s right to say that South Australia’s “50-year” storms caused this immediate outage by triggering a shutdown of the pipeline that brings power from Victoria’s brown coal-driven La Trobe Valley across the border into South Australia.
The fact that South Australia gets more than 40 per cent of its power from renewables didn’t cause Wednesday night’s calamity.
Because renewables can’t deliver base load power, South Australia has to import a huge amount of energy from Victoria. That’s the critical point.
And because they have to import it across a complex network of ageing transmission towers, this makes the state vulnerable to “code black” failure.
Despite what the green lobby says, renewables are not the “energy messiah” because they lack base load reliability (as well as being expensive due to heavy consumer subsidy).
Base load is the minimum power load necessary to run the grid. Renewables such as wind and solar can’t provide base load because the wind doesn’t always blow and night follows day.
They’re rightly part of the mix but their inherent vulnerability means we must continue to have a commonsense attitude to coal and gas which does provide reliable base load energy.
Be as Kumbaya as you like, but give me the security of lights on at night, and industry running its machines any time. With the nation’s highest household electricity prices, a network needing repairs worth millions and a state Labor government saying “nothing to do with us” (when they’ve been in power since 2002), South Australians deserve better.
But before the rest of us get smug, unrealistically high renewable targets pose risks to our energy security right across the country.
Worse still is the imminent shut down of the Hazelwood coal-fired plant knocking out 25 per cent of Victoria’s power supply (and, as we now know after this week, potentially impacting SA too) with no clear plan from Premier Daniel Andrews about replacement capacity.
Our premiers need to get their act together; the green lobby needs to tell the truth about renewables; and everyone else who values being able to turn on a switch should be demanding some leadership.
In 2016, blackouts should be a matter of history in a First World nation like Australia.
* Watch Peta on SKY NEWS: The Bolt Report, Monday at 7pm; Paul Murray LIVE, Tuesday at 9pm; and David Speers’ PM Agenda, Thursday at 4pm
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Originally published as Peta Credlin: The truth is hard to find in a blackout
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