Stampede to power disaster accelerating

The rush to close Australia’s coal-fired power stations and replace them with a hopeless grab-bag of functionally useless wind and solar plus batteries is just mindless insanity.

Origin Energy will close Eraring Power Station by 2025. Picture: Liam Driver

Mindless suicidal insanity are the only three words to describe the accelerating rush to close the coal-fired power stations that were the foundations of our economy and indeed everything in our lives through the 20th century and into the 21st.

That’s to say, without putting in place real successor power stations that, you know, actually work; as opposed to the pathetic, utterly useless so-called renewables plus batteries; true: perfectly personified in the pathetic utterly useless individual who pretends to be NSW’s energy minister.

Yes, these – indeed almost all Australia’s - coal-fired power stations are reaching the end of their productive lives. Some of them go back to when we actually had real politicians not the poseurs that seem to rise to the top like scum these days.

The first best replacement is a portfolio of new coal-fired and gas power stations. We have unlimited supplies of both coal and gas.

Tony Phillips, Group Manager Operations of Eraring Power Station in NSW, with a steam turbine at the facility. Pic Liam Driver

The coal-fired coal stations to provide the cheapest, plentiful and 24/7 reliable base-load electricity; the gas ones for sensible and effective peaking power; and critically, operationally and commercially integrated with the coal stations

The second-best replacement is a mix of coal, nuclear and gas - with the nuclear stations to be placed in the inner suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.

Just sort of not-exactly kidding: anyone and anything that could drive a Dark-Green (even more) crazy deserves at least an AC if not indeed Sainthood.

The third-best option is nuclear plus gas.

In any rational, sane world there is all-but zero room for bird-slaughtering wind and solar – outside very specific off-grid locations.

What we have embarked on – or rather, more accurately, drifted into through utter political pusillanimity on the so-called ‘right’ of politics; here’s looking at you Scott and Josh – doesn’t even get into the rankings.

We are just drifting into a future of no real power stations; just some sort of hopeless grab-bag of functionally useless wind and solar plus batteries plus ‘demand management’.

Ah, ‘demand management’ – where’s the ACCC when you actually need it?

It is turning off your lights and air-conditioning/heating from ‘climate central’, because, well, either the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining and the batteries have gone flat, or all that water has run downhill and is waiting to be pumped back up when the wind starts blowing again.

In a bizarre sort of – no thanks to Origin (and AGL) – way, the announcement on Eraring (and AGL’s announcement last week on Bayswater and Loy Yang A, and let’s not forget Liddell); actually poses the choice very cleanly if brutally.

Do we want to embrace mindless suicidal insanity or not?

Are we going to demand, right now, like-for-like replacement of closed power station with a real - coal/gas/nuclear – station in its place.

We also have to demand wind and solar guarantee a 24/7 amount of supply into the grid and not allow them to deliver more – forcing real power stations to cut back - when the wind chooses to blow and the sun shines.

I have literally seen our future in what’s happening every day in Britain.

When the wind blows it’s ‘fantastic’. They get well over 50 per cent of their power from wind.

When the wind doesn’t blow – generating as little as 1 per cent of their power –they have to very expensively turn on their gas burners and bring back coal and use their extension cords into Europe.

And their power bills are going up by 30 per cent and 40 per cent a year, precisely because of all that ‘free’ wind that’s so expensive if you want to keep the lights on with real back-up power.

Think about it: we don’t plan many gas stations and what countries could we run our extension cords to?

Originally published as Stampede to power disaster accelerating