Vikki Campion: Renewables modelling will leave voters paying the price
The fruits of the Labor-Green-Teal government’s net-zero crusade will be a massive renewables footprint in regional areas, a spike in power prices and jobs going overseas, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Once people believed net-zero was vital because both sides of politics said so, it was only rational to vote for whoever gets there quickest.
Voters saw soaring fuel costs and heard taxpayer-subsidised electric cars were the answer. Voters heard renewables would provide cheap power.
Voters heard Australia’s domestic policy could change the earth’s temperature.
Voters heard there would be 600,000 new jobs in this green revolution - and that we could get there with no new taxes.
Voters will get bill shock.
Labor’s renewables modelling promised power bills to drop by $275 a year, but we’re about to get an 18 per cent increase now and more when Liddell power station closes based on the experience of Victoria when La Trobe shut down in Gippsland.
Labor backed its policies with extensive modelling projecting eight years into the future, which promises power bills will fall 18 per cent by 2025 from $62/MWh and 26 per cent by 2030. This month it is running at more than $300/MWh.
They haven’t even sworn in their cabinet yet, and the reality is more than 400 per cent out from the modelling they used to win.
The problem with modelling, polling, and projections is it’s not so different from a guess.
After all the breathless reporting and thousands of dollars spent on polling, it was an astrologist psychic online that predicted the rise of four lower house Greens, six Teals, the demise of the moderate Liberals and a tight Labor majority, which after the election of a Speaker, gives Labor a tight 74 seats.
Do you think people whose business model is based on predicting the future, not that different from the psychic on the trashy website, have any chance of guessing what life will be like in eight years?
Let’s go back to projections made eight years ago, where energy consumption was forecast to decline and only get cheaper with subsidised renewables. Anyone who looked at that sceptically back then was dubbed a climate denier.
Eight years ago, the Australian Energy Market Operator’s electricity forecasts predicted: “No new capacity would be required to maintain supply-demand adequacy for the next ten years”.
Seven years ago, AEMO modelling found closing down coal-fired power would cost us less than $5/MWh.
Six years ago, the NEM said the uptake in a distributed solar generation would keep grid-supplied electricity consumption stable for the next 20 years.
Yet here we are with more renewables than ever, an apparent excess in the energy market, coal fired-power is closing, and prices are surging, with NSW households paying another $200 a year, even though the predictions told us the opposite would happen.
AEMO-funded modelling released in 2017 predicted Australia would have about 1 million electric vehicles by now as the oil price exceeded the cost of electricity.
We are nowhere near that, even with record-high fuel prices; with about 40,000 EVs registered in NSW, QLD, ACT, the Northern Territory and Victoria. We’re only about 950,000 short of the projections.
Australia may have voted for cheap power and subsidised electric cars, but I’d trust a psychic over the modelling these promises have been cooked on.
The fruits of the Labor-Green-Teal Government will be a massive footprint of renewables in regional areas, power prices going through the roof and jobs going overseas as the safeguard mechanism lowers on emitting industries.
The bush will get an industrial overhaul, with planning laws to be relaxed to push more renewables infrastructure such as wind farms through and thousands of kilometres of transmission lines.
There will be no wind towers at Manly Beach in Warringah, around harbourside mansions in Wentworth, or anywhere else in any Green or Teal seat.
Regional Australia cops those.
Power doesn’t magically fly to the grid. It has to be taken by big, buzzing transmission lines, which are about as popular in regional towns as wind factories - but we’ll cop those too.
Planned is $20 billion high voltage power lines to solve the logistical dilemma that hydro, wind and solar are concentrated in regional Australia - while the greatest energy demand is the air-conditioned, heavily urbanised areas.
The people whose places these massive transmission lines will be on overwhelmingly did not vote Labor or Green and wholly rejected the Teals.
For example, in the NSW seat of Calare, the Teals vacuumed Labor and Green votes, allowing the Nationals to return a swing towards the incumbent.
Labor has developed Stockholm Syndrome to its Green captors and now has lost seats to them and in the next term of government, will need their vote on everything in the Senate and possibly in the lower house.
With 74 seats after the election of the Speaker, Labor will need to be incredibly disciplined or require strong relations with its Teal and Green coalition partners in the House of Representatives.
Labor was aided into government by the Teals, who took the extreme edge off the climate hysteria narrative and made Labor look sensible by comparison - but depending on how the next three years go, it could be the Teal Green partnership helping them out of it.
Only time and - not modelling or polling - will tell.
More Coverage
What the heck is JOMO? The new trend you’ll want to miss
Sometimes it’s nice to have the luxury of a big fat no, writes Robyn Ingerson.
Albo learns the wrong lesson from Kamala’s defeat
In the wake of Donald Trump’s return to power, Anthony Albanese offered a surprising criticism of Kamala Harris. Tom Minear argues he misunderstood her biggest mistake.