Terry McCrann: The power stations we must have
Our denial of coal as the first-best solution to Australia’s energy troubles is madness, when it provides cheap, reliable and plentiful electricity, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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A modern coal-fired power station remains the most effective way of generating the baseload power without which no electricity system can function or even survive.
Given Australia’s unlimited supply of quality energy coal, it is utter madness for us to deny ourselves what should be cheap, reliable and plentiful electricity, when dozens of countries — led off by China — are building hundreds of new such stations.
We are doing so on the basis of the utterly spurious belief that our denial can make a measurable difference to global carbon dioxide emissions — and so, to the world’s temperature — even to decimal points in both cases.
Neither gas-fired stations nor nuclear — the only other baseload options — are sensible full substitutes.
We do need one or two new major gas-fired stations to provide ‘peaking power’ when demand ratchets up suddenly — unless we can force the wind to blow to order or can ‘turn’ the sun on when we want.
And, ‘no’, batteries do not do that in effect, at least not for more than a totally ineffective too short a time. Batteries go flat; all the water in Malcolm Turnbull’s Snow 2.0 fantasy ends up at the bottom of the hill.
So, the first-best choice is more coal stations. Nuclear would be more costly, even if we managed to surmount the ludicrous ‘not-in-my-backyard’ red and green tape that makes it take decades to build one and loads it up with way-over-the-top, totally unnecessary capital costs.
Then there’s the problem that nuclear power is actually illegal in Australia, on a thoroughly, idiotically, bipartisan basis.
First-best is, say, eight new coal-fired stations and two gas ones over the next 10 to 20 years.
A sensible second-best would be, say, four nuclear, four coal and those two gas ones. That should be able to be agreed on a bipartisan basis between the two parties of government — the Coalition and Labor. But only if the green, red and black tape that would cripple the coal and nuclear builds was to be all swept away.
A liveable third-best would be eight nuclear and two gas. Yes, it would mean more expensive power, but we would still get the reliable power and the plentiful power we need.
A side benefit would be that we might also see sanity on the submarines front — ditching our $100bn-plus order for early 20th century subs and moving instead to buy and build 21st century ones.
Originally published as Terry McCrann: The power stations we must have