Akerman: Stop virtue signallers and vandals destroying our energy sector

Be it clean coal, gas, biomass or nuclear, fire it up and put the nation back on its feet, writes Piers Akerman.

Vandals closed the Liddell Power Station on Friday, pushing NSW closer toward a future in which energy costs will rise and blackouts will inevitably ensue.

Those responsible for the closure were the former NSW energy and climate change minister Matt Kean and the current Energy and Climate Change Minister Penny Sharpe, along with AGL shareholder activist Mike Cannon-Brookes, one of the woke Atlassian billionaires.

Liddell is not only being closed senselessly; the 50-year-old plant is to be demolished.

In Germany, once the greenest of European nations, Berlin’s oldest power station, Moabit, built in 1900 and regularly updated, is still operating using coal and biomass in a co-combustion process with a fluidised bed combustion system.

Interestingly, the idle Redbank power station in the Hunter Valley has the same combustion system and used coal tailings to generate power between 2001 and 2014, when it was mothballed. The current owner, Verdant, estimates it could bring it back online within four to eight months if it could get anyone in government interested in cutting through the red tape that hobbles the bureaucratic process.

The Liddell Power Station, which closed on Friday. Picture: Saeed Khan/AFP

The Redbank Power Station, on the NSW coalfields, in 2001.

CEO Richard Poole has been driving efforts for the past four years to have the plant reopened using biomass, which would generate renewable power and transmit it through the existing network 24/7, but has so far been unsuccessful.

According to Poole, his company would also grow mallee – a great absorber of CO2. The job creation possibilities are staggering and Poole estimates that similar plants to Redbank using low-grade fuels and biomass could provide 25 per cent of Australia’s needs.

The turbine room linked to the OL3, the latest among three reactors at the nuclear power plant Olkiluoto on the island of Eurajoki, western Finland. The next-generation reactor went into regular production in October after months of delays, producing on its own about 14 per cent of the country's electricity, according to operator TVO on April 16. Picture: Olivier Morin/AFP

He points to Finland, which has the highest per capita electricity consumption in the EU, and relies on renewables for 40-45 per cent of its energy. Of that, 80 per cent comes from biomass (usually peat) and the rest is hydro, with more baseload coming from nuclear.

Nuclear has already been raised as a substitute for Liddell and for Eraring, which is due to close in the next two years.

Local federal National MP David Gillespie has long been a strong supporter of installing small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) on the sites of existing coal-fired plants.

“These plants are national assets and should never be destroyed,” he told me. He points out that the government-issued certificates don’t actually provide power but they do drive prices up as they are worth more than the energy they produce.

National MP David Gillespie. Picture: Brad Hunter, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

“We don’t have an energy market, we have an energy racket,” he said.

Labor, State and federal, doesn’t get it. Like the teals and their dopey supporters, they seem to think that batteries produce electricity when they are no more than storage facilities and capable of providing minimal power for a few hours max.

Every government in Australia bleats about energy security but no one is doing anything about it.

If we are to have a defence industry, we need reliable energy.

If we are to have any manufacturing industry, we need reliable power.

If we are to keep the lights on, we need reliable power.

The policy of selling our coal to China so they can manufacture the components for wind and solar generators we can then install across food-producing agricultural land so teals and Greens and Labor and the Matt Keans of the Liberal Party can feel virtuous – is just so dumb.

Our contribution to global warming, over-hyped by the ABC and the Bureau of Meteorology, is so minuscule that all this virtue signalling does nothing more than destroy our nation.

Be it clean coal, gas, biomass or nuclear, fire it up and put the nation back on its feet.