Piers Akerman: Loony energy policy is testing our patience

WE ARE are being asked to pay more and do with less to meet the demands of the lunatic Left’s insane anti-coal campaign, which can do no more than make inner-urban residents of electorates in major cities feel good about their imagined green credentials, Piers Akerman writes.

WELL within the span of living memory, Australians cheered when the miracle of electricity reached their homes.

Now across the nation, we are being asked to pay more and do with less to meet the demands of the lunatic Left’s insane anti-coal campaign, which can do no more than make inner-urban residents of electorates in major cities feel good about their imagined green credentials.

The international hedge fund spivs who own Australia’s power generators and now the poles and wires, too, are cheering all the way to the bank as they make greater profits from fewer customers.

Electricity was once hailed as the prerequisite for modern living. The first recorded ­increase in Australian labour productivity linked to electricity occurred in 1879 at the Garden Palace in the Sydney Botanic Gardens when premier Henry Parkes urged the ­installation of electric lighting to enable construction to continue at night.

In 1888, Tamworth was the first town in NSW and the Southern Hemisphere to get electric lighting.

More needs to be done to bring down electricity prices, Piers Akerman writes. Picture: iStock

This was historic stuff. Two years later the first electric trams ran in Melbourne and every state capital had its own tram service by 1900.

What’s more, as our power consumption increased, the less we paid. Power prices were on a downward curve in real terms until the green hysteria kicked in and politicians thought it would be a vote winner to force consumers to pay subsidies for inefficient wind and solar power.

Between the Greens, the Labor Left and unthinking politicians from affluent suburbs, a series of policy responses to the highly questionable global warming scam now pose the greatest threat to our standard of living and the standard of living of those in Third World nations clamouring for cheap efficient electricity.

The pixies of the world think that condemning coal and refusing to contemplate nuclear energy will miraculously produce a solution to the global energy dilemma.

They are insane. Sticking pins in a voodoo doll marked coal will not make it disappear.

Indeed, modelling by the AME research group points to an increase in seaborne thermal coal supply of 44 per cent by 2030 with the bulk of the growth coming from Australia.

Our main competitor in this market as an exporter is Indonesia but while we ship a more expensive coal, it is also higher value. Those who decry coal while driving their Teslas ­ignore the fact that coal power produced the silica for their solar panels, and the steel for their turbines. They can’t understand that wind and solar won’t be able to provide the grunt needed to charge their virtuous automobiles.

Electricity prices continues to rise in Australia.

The failure of the education system to provide students with the most basic knowledge of mathematics, science and physics has given us a generation lacking in technical ­appreciation.

They don’t know their volts from their amps, they are ­unaware that steel is an alloy of iron and carbon or that stainless steel is an alloy of nickel, chromium and steel.

They can’t fall back on science in their argument, they only fall back on emotive feel-good sentiment.

In my own neighbourhood, the poles and wires company Ausgrid claims it cannot provide greater energy security through an extra submarine cable because of an environmental concern about sea grass and it also makes the ­extraordinary claim that the electricity cables cannot ­efficiently deliver power if they have to turn sharp corners.

The engineering reports supporting these ludicrous claims have not been supplied to consumers.

Nor has the state government addressed the fact that it promised to install an extra cable three years ago and claimed through the local member Rob Stokes and then energy minister Anthony Roberts to have earmarked the funding in the state budget. Of course, nothing happened. Nor has the fate of the allocated money been disclosed.

Now Ausgrid is proposing that residents purchase their own solar panels and batteries to provide back-up power should there be another power outage. Oh, and maybe they’ll throw in a bio-diesel generator as well, which would cut in when the power cuts out — ­except that it took their engineers almost a week to work out during both power failures that their generators kept tripping out because of the amount of electricity needed to safely maintain offshore homes.

The existing old technology cable required one overhaul in 50 years. The lengthy outages in 2015 and again in 2017 were not due to submarine cable failure, but Ausgrid doesn’t want to know.

South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill. Picture: AAP Image/Lukas Coch

It wants residents to pay for a second-rate solution and feel virtuous at the same time. Solar, batteries, bio-diesel, ­hybrid, all the buzzwords that point to a failure in service. The abject failure of South Australia’s virtue-signalling embrace of alternative energy should be an object lesson.

SA Premier Jay Weatherill should have his feet put to the fire for the problems his policies have caused, the latest being the blackout at his farcical energy efficient hospital, which opened in September, 17 months late and $640 million over budget.

To say that lives were put at risk when the lights went out in operating theatres during surgery at Royal Adelaide Hospital is putting it in the best possible shade.

The total blackout of a section of the hospital left surgeons fumbling and it’s fortunate that the highly skilled staff didn’t lose anyone — not that the green Left would have cared.

Greenpeace demonstrations at Lucas Heights have previously halted the production of nuclear isotopes ­essential for many modern medical procedures and left ­patients at risk.

I bet the pati­ents who were under the knife and those who couldn’t get their radiation therapy weren’t feeling good about the anti-coal and anti-nuclear protesters who drive our energy policy.

Telling modern Australians they must reduce their energy consumption while we sit on large energy resources is about as dumb as it gets and those ­inside  the  Canberra ­bubble better start getting the message.