Steve Price: Victoria’s blackouts a glimpse of future in climate-change obsessed state

As Victoria’s energy grid collapsed on Tuesday afternoon, 530,000 homes were left with no power, train lines were shut down, schools closed and we lost 550 sets of traffic lights. Welcome to the brave new world of energy transition.

This week, every Victorian got a glimpse into a future under a climate-change obsessed state government.

At lunchtime as the temperature hit a – not unusual for February – top of 36C and the northerly winds broke 100kmh, the energy grid collapsed.

By late afternoon an estimated 530,000 Victorians had no power. Major train lines were shut down, medical centres were forced onto generators, schools and kindergartens in many areas were forced to close and we lost 550 sets of traffic lights.

Welcome to the brave new world of energy transition. Imagine if you can what Tuesday would have been like if the climate crusaders had their way and our coal fired power stations didn’t exist. Tuesday’s winds were so strong the fields of wind turbines would have been turned off, rendered useless.

Victoria was covered by dark storm clouds as unseasonal hail and rain swept the state. Who knows what solar power would have been generated. The state would have presumably been totally reliant on Tasmania’s hydro-generated electricity.

Our state is being pushed down an energy road we might never recover from. Ageing coal-fired power stations like Loy Yang A and Yallourn are demonised and targets have been set for their closure.

Problem is, the rush to renewables is slow, expensive and technology still hasn’t worked out how to deliver reliable base load power.

This powerline in Anakie, along with Victoria’s energy grid, collapsed on Tuesday. Picture: Alison Wynd

Even the Australian Energy Market Operator is predicting power reliability gaps as soon as this year and more serious gaps from 2028 onwards.

We are right now hanging by a thread with the state government foolishly chasing ever earlier net zero emissions targets. They want a state that will have a population exceeding six million people to have zero emissions by 2045 – dragged forward recently by five years.

More worryingly their ambition to cut emissions by 50 per cent of what they are today by 2030.

If you need a fright, look up the Victorian government’s climate change website and read the gibberish attached to their ambitions – and remember this from a government that is broke paying more than $25m a day in interest payments on borrowed money.

The government says its ambitious net zero targets will “create new jobs in clean energy” without saying what those jobs are, plus jobs in “land restoration” and “zero emissions transport.”

Does that mean putting conductors back on solar powered trams or planting trees on the old sites where we get power from, the three coal fired power stations? Labor don’t make this very clear.

Then the website makes this remarkable claim that the zero targets will mean cleaner air, lower energy bills and greater biodiversity.

Forgive me but this expensive transition to wind and solar, with hundreds of thousands of kilometres of transmission lines needed to be built, will do the opposite to bringing down power bills. As for biodiversity, tell that to the farmers battling to keep these power lines off their farms.

Tuesday’s winds were so strong, fields of wind turbines would have been turned off.

The fairytale gets worse with a claim that the Victorian economy will be $63bn bigger than it is now by 2070. Does anyone seriously believe predictions 46 years out have any validity at all? And they then go on to suggest that this $63bn economy will attract some of the $US130 trillion of global private finance for renewables. Really!

Then after Tuesday’s hot windy day that knocked out almost 550,000 homes and businesses and the economic loss that came with that weather event, Victoria’s Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio was asked about the resilience Victoria’s power grid. She pointed to a 2021 review after similar storms smashed the Dandenong Ranges.

Her response was that the Government had accepted all the recommendations of the review but that a national solution was required for energy resilience.

“Poles and wires just don’t stop at the borders,” she said.

What she should have honestly said was that the recommendations included burying transmission lines underground, but Victoria is so broke Canberra would have to pay for it.

As for the federal government, its Climate Change Minister – the dangerous Chris Bowen – pointed to a $20bn taxpayer funded Rewiring the Nation fund created to accommodate his rush to wind and solar power that’s not even been built yet. He was dodging D’Ambrosio’s outstretched hand to fund fixing the existing network of ageing power lines.

Bowen then in typical style went on to blame climate change for Victoria’s grid collapse on Tuesday. He said: “We are experiencing more frequent and more severe extreme weather events due to the changing climate.”

It was 36C with isolated pockets of very strong wind – hardly severe or extreme unless you were in the eye of the storm.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen blamed the power outages on climate change. Picture: Martin Ollman

He then made a bizarre claim about giving network operators “multiple options for rapidly diverting electricity around different parts of the grid and between states as needed.”

Sorry, don’t we do that already as evidenced by Victoria drawing down power from Tasmania on Tuesday?

This bloke talks waffle.

The bottom line is we are charging down a road that will make energy supply less reliable and more expensive despite what the politicians are telling you.

In Victoria it’s worse with the state turning its back on coal and gas and refusing to even discuss nuclear energy. There could be no better location for a nuclear power plant than the Latrobe Valley. It would provide real, not imagined, jobs during construction and the ongoing operations.

Tuesday gave us a glimpse of what life without baseload coal generated electricity and super reliable gas will be like – expensive and unreliable!

A bit like the politicians feeding us this fantasy world of renewables.

Dislikes

— Spring St favourite Jeroen Weimar lands yet another high paying public service job.

— Whingers in South Yarra complaining about Lindsay Fox landing his helicopter at Melbourne High’s oval – he’s been doing it for years.

— New Moomba Queen Emma Watkins not even from Victoria.

— Channel Nine shock-jock Tom Elliott death riding the Ten Network on 3AW without declaring who he works for.

Likes

— The Federal Government freezing funding for Victoria’s expensive Suburban Rail Loop.

— Hidden gem of a public golf course Devil-bend at Moorooduc worth a look.

— PM Anthony Albanese getting engaged – good on him.

— SES and CFA volunteers again show their commitment and courage in the face of winds and bushfires.

Originally published as Steve Price: Victoria’s blackouts a glimpse of future in climate-change obsessed state