Tory Shepherd: Federal Government using SA blackout to prod debate over renewable energy
USING the political art of unapologetic conflation, our Canberran leaders will be able to use the super South Australian storms to reinvigorate a debate over renewable energy.
USING the political art of unapologetic conflation, the Federal Government has kicked off a national conversation.
Happily for our Canberran leaders, they will be able to use the super South Australian storms to reinvigorate a debate over renewable energy (even though experts say the only wind power that contributed to the collapse of the network was the actual tornado-style gusts of wind that knocked out transmission towers).
Conflation is the practice of fusing together two distinct items to form one; it’s a neat trick that seems to infiltrate much climate change debate. Weather is conflated with climate change; dodgy statistics are conflated to draw false conclusions, and so on.
Apt, then, that the word comes from the Latin “conflare”, meaning to blow on or to blow together, to ignite or to stir up.
From Wednesday night’s darkness, when no one really had much idea what had happened, politicians were eager to point the finger at the state’s high use of wind power.
One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts was the most flagrant.
“I call on South Australia and the country to urgently exit all climate change policies that are the direct cause of this huge mess in SA,” he said from his fact-free zone.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce made the facile statement that windpower wasn’t working “because they had a blackout”.
South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon — who supports renewable energy but is dubious about wind farms — said the state’s transition was “reckless”.
In the morning, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg were clear that a barrage of lightning, cyclonic winds, and the built-in safety switch were to blame for the blackout. But that didn’t stop them swiftly steering the conversation to renewables.
The blackout was a “wake-up call”, Mr Turnbull said.
So this is how the Federal Government will continue its push for a national renewables target and try to bring rogue states like us to heel.
It will work, too — even if the review of the incident categorically confirms that wind power was not to blame, renewables will be indelibly linked in voters’ minds with the night they drove home in the dark rain and had cold sandwiches for dinner and missed out on watching their favourite show.
It is true that SA doesn’t have baseload power — we no longer have coal, we don’t have hydro, and nuclear is a glow-in-the-dark dream — and renewables are a more unreliable source.
But the political chatter around ‘baseload’ is too often constricted to a narrow range of options. It is a code word for slowing the switch to renewables and keeping faithful ol’ coal on the go.
There are still plenty of questions to be answered. Why such a critical piece of infrastructure failed and what we have to do to stop it happening again. Why the whole state became a national joke, languishing in the darkness. Why someone I know had to desperately find a generator for a woman on a ventilator; why phones failed.
Once we know all those answers, though, we need a solution and that solution is not to step backwards from renewables, but to work out how to make them work better. Because it is possible to get baseload from renewables; or it will be one day once the storage technology catches up.
By mashing the storm together with renewables, the impression is that renewables are bad. They’re not; they’re the key to slowing climate change which will in turn reduce the likelihood of such storms in the future.
Without them, the last one to leave won’t even need to turn out the lights.
