Piers Akerman: Lots of wind but no power in greenie South Australia

SOUTH Australia was forced to close this week — no jokes, please — because of its government’s failure to ensure a guaranteed power supply, Piers Akerman writes.

SOUTH Australia was forced to close this week — no jokes, please — because of its government’s failure to ensure a guaranteed power supply.

Sure, a weather event — a huge storm — knocked out the mendicant state’s power connection to the reliable national grid, but the connector would not have been an absolutely ­essential piece of kit if South Australia had its own reliable power source.

Which it doesn’t because it’s Green-hued Labor government is enraptured by the siren song of so-called alternate ­energies like wind and solar.

Unfortunately, as most of the Western world has learnt from the failed experiences of alternate lifestylers, when the crunch comes they all want to scramble back to the conventional world where power supplies are more stable, and children get vaccinated, and babies not born in swimming pools while crystals are swung over their emerging heads have a greater viability than those born in wigwams by the light of scented candles.

Power was cut off in the entire state of South Australia after a bad storm. Picture: AFP/Debbie Prosser

If South Australia had kept its conventional power stations operating instead of closing them in a grand fit of moral virtue, it would not have ­mattered that Nature had pulled the plug on its interstate power supply.

Piers Akerman.

Furthermore, despite the usual frauds claiming that the weather event was in some way connected to global warming — oops, they prefer the more neutral term ‘climate change’ these days — there is zero evidence to support that assertion.

When a once-in-50-years severe weather event occurs, it does not provide confirmation of anything more than appallingly bad weather conditions.

The power went out in South Australia because the state embraced unreliable alternate energy sources and had to fall back on the national grid because its alternate ­energy plan is not sustainable as was demonstrated when the link to the grid was cut.

Nonetheless, the propagandists for alternate energy at the national broadcaster rushed to air warning listeners that their experts said we should not “blame renewables” for the profound failure.

Their experts, who were quoted later in the broadcast after the news of the blackout had been dealt with, were from the renewable energy industry.

While it is true that any system would have been placed under pressure by the severity of the conditions, only a system reliant on an interstate connection would have failed so dramatically when the connection was severed.

The phony situation created by South Australians to enable them to believe they are reliant on renewables is as fraudulent as that which occurred in 2011 when German Chancellor Angela Merkel shut down eight nuclear plants in the wake of the tsunami which smashed the Fukushima power plant.

Police had to direct traffic around the CBD in Adelaide after the power network stopped working. Picture: AAP/David Mariuz

Her decision meant that Germany relied more heavily on the French for their power supply. France is heavily ­reliant on nuclear with 75 per cent coming from the fission process the Germans don’t want to know about.

In a November 28, 2015, Special Report The Economist, having pointed out that French households pay about half as much as German ones for ­electricity, commented: “Germany has made unusually big mistakes.

Handing out enormous long-term subsidies to solar farms was unwise; abolishing nuclear power so quickly is crazy. It has also been unlucky.

The price of globally traded hard coal has dropped in the past few years, partly because shale-gas-rich America is ­exporting so much.

The wild weather in South Australia wreaked havoc around the state. Picture: Andrew Brooks

But Germany’s biggest error is one commonly committed by countries that are trying to move away from fossil fuels and towards renewables.

It is to ignore the fact that wind and solar power ­impose costs on the entire energy ­system, which go up more than proportionately as they add more.”

Could it be that South Australia, with its historically high percentage of German migrants, has fallen into the same trap of self-deception on ­energy as those who never left the Fatherland?

Last July, South Australians were warned that their energy policy was a disaster.

With more than 40 per cent of its power supply reliant on wind power, which just wasn’t meeting needs, the South Australian energy minister and treasurer Tom Koutsantonis was forced to take “extraordinary step” of asking ENGIE, the French-owned company which owns the mothballed Pelican Point gas-fired power station to crank up the old ­generators.

Isn’t it ironic that the French are bailing out failed Green-tinged governments both in Germany and here?

National Electricity Market prices in SA frequently surged above $1000 a megawatt hour in July, hitting a high of $14,000MWh, when normal prices are below $100.

The state’s commitment to Green energy has truly stuffed the state’s power supply, forcing the remaining baseload suppliers to keep their generators in operation to meet the needs when the wind doesn’t blow, while at the same time trying to force them out of the market with subsidised power prices for wind and solar energy.

“This is a crisis of the South Australian government’s own making,” said Brett Hogan, Director of Energy and Innovation Policy at the Institute of Public Affairs.

“If you don’t have affordable electricity, you don’t have sustainable jobs.”

South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill has committed to making Adelaide a “carbon neutral city” by 2050 admitting that South Australia was ­conducting “a big international experiment.” This is an experiment that has already failed and should have its plug pulled ­immediately.

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