Terry McCrann: NBN and electricity journeys in lunacy
When it comes to the NBN, policy dictates we have to totally embrace the technology of the 21st century. Yet with electricity we are told we must go back to windmills or the sun. It’s time for some reality, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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The bizarre insanity of the state of policy and what passes for public policy ‘debate’ downunder is exactly captured by the exactly opposite attitudes of the so-called elites to the NBN and to electricity.
With the NBN the frenzied demand is that only total fibre will do: that we have to totally embrace the technology of the 21st century, abandoning anything as primitive as late-20th century technology around copper, as the foundation for the cutting-edge all-but total digital economy of the future.
Yet it is the exact opposite with electricity: here the demand is that we go back to the ‘technology’ not even of the 19th century but of the 18th and earlier centuries – windmills, the sun, and most primitively of all, burning wood dressed up with the fancy greenish-sounding name of biomass.
It’s not just the absolutist demand that we abandon the 20th century technology on which our prosperity, our living standards, even our health and better environment were built – hydrocarbon energy and in particular coal.
But also the parallel absolute refusal to contemplate the late-20th century technology that could allow us to have our energy-rich prosperity without CO2 emissions, whether the CO2 emissions are bad or indifferent and indeed arguably actually good: nuclear.
The idea that we can close all our coal-fired power stations and replace them with windmills, solar panels and batteries just doesn’t pass even the most basic reality test. It gets even more ludicrous when you expect to plug more and more devices into that grid, from smartphones and tablets downloading and watching gigabytes of data down all that fibre, to electric cars.
Everyone promoting the all-renewables future should be required to power their smartphone with its own direct renewable energy source – a tiny windmill, a solar panel, plus a second battery to recharge the device’s battery.
In that place called reality, the first-best electricity future is a programmed replacement over the next 10 to 30 years of our existing generation fleet with something like eight new major coal-fired plants and two gas-fired plants.
You need the gas-fired plants to provide peaking energy. It makes zero sense to think of gas as a baseload replacement for coal.
The second-best electricity future would be something like four nuclear, four coal and those two gas generators. Either network would deliver the 21st century version of the cheap, reliable and plentiful power that built the Australia of today that we seem so intent on throwing away.
In this same alternative reality of sanity, we would be adding fibre to the NBN pre-emptively as required – off a functioning pervasive revenue-generating network.
That is actually, exactly what is being done by this government (and this NBN): sanity by default.
ENERGY CHIEF’S HIDDEN MESSAGE
On one level it was a simple no-brainer: stay in Australia and try to keep the lights on, or head back to your hometown, downtown USA, to a top job in a trillion-dollar – and them’s real dollars – company that is increasingly at the centre of just about everything and most especially of all our futures.
And that’s before you introduce the subject of stock options.
Even if an Aussie regulator was able to issue them to its top people, it’s doubtful they would be going up in value.
You only need to say it to see it: would you prefer options in Google or the regulator tasked with trying to manage our electricity and gas networks?
So, it must have taken all of – I dunno? One second? Three seconds? Five minutes? – for Audrey Zibelman to decide.
Hunker down for more years as CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator and other tiresome – pointlessly endless, or endlessly pointless – roles at the plethora of other energy bodies that have sprouted in recent years like greenhouse plants fed a diet of enriched CO2.
Or grab a job offer to run a touchy-feely, sort of tomorrow-ish, feel-good Google business that will be fed enriched greenbacks as if they were printed by a central bank and it, the business, was literally a greenhouse plant.
Basic logic and clear-cut self-advancement and indeed enhancement as Zibelman’s decision was, it’s impossible to avoid the message she was also sending about how difficult it is going to get to keep our downunder lights on.
So why stick around to cop the blame when they go out, and have to then try to pick up the unpickable-up pieces?
Despite her soothing words in her departure announcement about Australia embracing a rapid transformation of the (electricity) generation mix and how the whole world was watching what we were, ahem, “accomplishing”, the truth is far less assuring.
Apart from the lunacy in SA – and frankly, SA’s lunacy only matters to and hurts South Australians; it’s just too small to matter to anyone else – we have only had to absorb one major generation trauma to date: the closure of Hazelwood.
We are of course headed inexorably to a second – Liddell. That’s when it will start to get really ‘interesting’. And then they’ll come one after the other.
When Liddell goes, Queensland’s generators will be asked to pump all they can into the grid, to keep the lights on in NSW, and on to Victoria and with a final dribble into SA.
When of course the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine, the big battery is flat and all the water in Snowy 2.0 is at the bottom rather than the top of the hill.
No doubt Zibelman will be Googling it all from afar.
Originally published as Terry McCrann: NBN and electricity journeys in lunacy