Terry McCrann: PM’s power station plan all hot air
There’s a whole raft of reasons Scott Morrison’s ‘commitment’ to a new major gas-fired power station is laughable, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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The Prime Minister’s ‘commitment’ to a new major gas-fired power station is highly commendable, extremely depressing and utterly laughable all at the same time.
The explanation is in the quotation marks around the word commitment — he’s actually committed to four-fifths of five-eighths of copulating all.
Of course, we need a new major baseload power station. Indeed, over the next 10-20 years we need at least six and more sensibly something like 10 of them.
Ideally, in a sane Australia, whether or not in a sane world, they would be a mix of coal-fired, gas-fired — at most, two of those — and nuclear-powered.
But there is zero prospect of getting even a single one of the first or the third — coal-fired or nuclear-powered — and only slightly less chance of getting a (major) gas-fired one.
The PM has said the federal government will build the gas-fired one if the private sector doesn’t when AGL closes its Liddell station in NSW in the early 2020s. There are — at least — three problems with that ‘commitment’.
The ‘government’ can’t just go and build a power station. It would have to pass legislation through the Senate. Good luck on that — even if the Coalition government is still on the right (as in, the left) side of parliament by then.
Then there’s the question of what is known as the ‘feedstock’ — more simply, the gas to go into it. The PM seems to think that by ‘announcing’ the power station he will ‘force’ the NSW government to allow development of fracked coal seam gas to supply it.
Right. Just like you can sweet talk states to lift their border closures, PM.
And even that highly dubious prospect is before we contemplate the protesters and the ‘lawfare’ that would be unleashed through green, red and black tape to stop it all.
The central problem with both the PM’s promise and the whole issue of baseload power in Australia is the refusal to confront head-on the utter stupidity of the belief that the answer to our future energy needs is ‘blowing in the wind’ and — similarly, only occasionally — ‘shining from on high’.
So we are locked into a future of watching the great coal-fired stations that have powered our prosperity, our health and all our social advances since the 1960s, progressively close as they reach the end of their — extended — lifespans.
While we apply an ever less effective and ever more costly series of patch-ups to try to keep the lights on and to offset the total unworkability of so-called renewable energy.
Liddell takes us right to the point of no return. When it is closed, the entire eastern seaboard will be tipped into a future of continued ‘brown’ and ‘ black’ outs, escalating as successive further baseload stations close without replacement.
First stop is a Venezuelan-Cuban future on the way to a full-on North Korean one.
In that future, we might just as well have a permanent early-to-bed, early-to-rise curfew, because we sure as hell won’t — literally — be able to keep the lights on at night.
Originally published as Terry McCrann: PM’s power station plan all hot air