Piers Akerman: Chris Bowen’s blind faith in renewable energy beyond belief
The great Labor-Green renewables gravy train must be stopped before it derails the economy through blackouts and national bankruptcy, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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The great Labor-Green renewables gravy train must be stopped before it totally derails the Australian economy.
Running on bombastic unachievable renewable energy claims, its engineer, Climate Minister Chris Bowen, and stoker, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, have to know it can deliver only blackouts and national bankruptcy.
Bowen’s questionable ministerial record under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments should have precluded him from ever holding another senior cabinet position but presumably the dearth of talent and factional dealing saw him awarded energy and climate despite his time in the immigration, treasury, superannuation and small business portfolios.
It appeared from the get-go that Bowen struggled to understand how electricity is generated or stored, and it is now patently obvious that he has learnt nothing over the past six-and-a-half months.
His blind faith in the capacity of renewable energy from wind and solar farms, and the storage potential of yet-to-be built batteries and the yet-to-be delivered Snowy 2.0, Bowen is beyond belief.
Yet, as he remarked last week, more renewables will “firm-up our grids, providing more capacity as more and more power stations leave the power grid, as more and more coal-fired power stations innovatively close”.
How exactly he plans to “innovatively close” more coal-fired power stations is yet to be seen. Pointless destruction without any replacement power source is hardly innovative, it is outright vandalism.
With coal, gas and uranium readily available but placed out of reach by out-of-date ideologically-driven Green-Left policies, the Albanese government is setting up the nation to fail as it “innovatively closes” the coal-fired power plants which once powered our now all-but extinct manufacturing industries.
The planned batteries will not store the necessary energy to keep the lights on, and if we look at the European and North American examples, those virtue-signallers who rushed to buy electric vehicles will be keeping them in the garage or buying fossil-fuelled generators to keep them on the road.
The Swiss are already considering limiting the use of electric vehicles to essential use because of the power shortages brought on by Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, and California’s electric car users were asked in September not to charge their cars during heatwaves.
The Swiss will also be asked to reduce the temperature of their washing machines, showers, and the use of leaf blowers, and seat heaters on ski lifts will be banned while video streaming will be slowed to standard definition to cut power consumption.
The hydro the Swiss largely rely on during the warm months is naturally reduced when winter freezes lakes and they take more energy from Germany, which is reopening coal mines, and France, where nuclear keeps things moving. Germans restricted heating buildings to 19C.
Albanese has promised Australia will reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 even though there is no evidence that the less than a thousandth percentage of CO2 created by humans present in the atmosphere influences the climate, only modelling which has been shown to be serially flawed or mischievously manipulated.
Over the past fortnight, Senators Gerard Rennick, Hollie Hughes, David Fawcett and Ross Cadell have shown this is yet another Green-Labor pledge that won’t be met – just like the incessant promise to reduce power bills by $275.
“My understanding is you have to get to 82 per cent renewables on the grid to get your 43 per cent reduction in CO2,” Rennick stated at a recent committee hearing.
“Surely we must have a pretty clear plan and strategy in terms of how many transmission lines need to be built between now and 2030 to hook up enough renewables to get it into the grid, which is just eight years away. 28,000km of power lines?” he asked, to be met with obfuscation and denial from public servants and Senator Jenny McAllister, the assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy.
The government doesn’t know how much the much-vaunted renewable grid will cost, it doesn’t even know how long the new transmission lines will be, and it hasn’t put the necessary $700 million in the budget needed to refit the proposed new gas-fired power plant in the Hunter to enable it to run with 30 per cent hydrogen fuel, or said where the energy will come from to produce the hydrogen.
We need to install “about 40 wind turbines every month until 2030” and “for solar, more than 22,000 panels every day” to achieve the Labor-Green fantasy, according to Bowen.
There were more than 120 public servants in attendance on Monday, November 7, and though this number dwindled to just over 50 on Monday, November 28, McAllister could do no more than bluster otiosely.
No thought of nuclear energy either, though we are hoping to buy and build nuclear subs, and more than 30 nations rely on nuclear power for base load energy.
Meanwhile, the definitive advice from the OECD in April this year is that nuclear is in fact the cheapest form of electricity generation.
We are being taken for the most expensive and nonproductive ride of our lives.
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