Vikki Campion: Wind and solar is not the answer to our energy problems

The Greens’ devotion to wind and solar as the cornerstone of our energy grid is ludicrous but they will not listen to an alternative view as they proved in the Senate this week.

Love is blind for the Greens. This must explain their cultish approach in the Senate environment committee, where only the loving blades of 240m wind towers and the reflective gaze of solar panels soothed, amid the endless line-up of advocates, unions and businesses warning their new beau may not be all they have hyped them up to be.

Like the infatuated teenager talking to a parent about their new love, the parent at the inquiry gave sobering insights on the transition to net-zero – to an eye-rolling, scoffing, belligerent room. There are many types of love, maternal love, romantic love, and then there is the love that the Greens have for renewables, which demands they scratch out and shout down any competitor.

Unions and businesses united in backing nuclear, as the Greens yelled solar panels were better neighbours than nuclear power stations.

Labor senators claimed there was no social licence for nuclear.

Even emissions-free small modular nuclear will eventually become ubiquitous across the globe as they are factory-made and delivered on trucks.

Wind farms are not the solution the Greens are making them out to be, writes Vikki Campion.

Evidence at the inquiry that nuclear waste could be re-used as fuel was met with the furious derision that comes with infatuated love.

It’s the sort of blind love you have before massive disappointment, as in time what everyone else saw as evident becomes your horrific epiphany. This will end in tears, as lobbyists of all stripes proudly stood for net zero, then insisted that they require tax breaks, subsidies and incentives to get it done, all the while the Albanese Government’s net zero plans remain scarily scant on details.

At the inquiry, unions expressed fears that the new jobs under transition, which were once well-paid enough to raise a family, will not be the same quality. How do they tell their members that their $140,000 mine jobs will become $60,000 screwing in solar panels?

Unions pointed to examples where 200 temporary visa workers were brought in to build transmission lines instead of the local workforce.

It is going to be too late when we realise the solar panel wind farm lover cannot keep our electric vehicles charged.

The Greens want to believe electric cars, trucks, and renewables are cheaper, cleaner, and better – as if the economy chooses to use more expensive alternatives.

If they were, there would be no Climate Bill, and no standing committee examining its impact.

Vikki Campion. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

At the same time as groups were begging for “incentives” in the Senate committee rooms, the Albanese government revived its plan for carbon emission rules to force electric car take up.

Again, there are no details. But look at the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads Inquiry into Transport Technology tabled by Flynn MP Colin Boyce which warns fast EV take-up, and charging EVs at peak, “will be ultimately reflected in increased electricity prices for everyone”.

The glossy safeguard mechanism discussion paper, released to minimal fanfare this week, reveals how little the policy has been thought out beyond targets.

The impact of how we meet them and who pays for it, is just starting to unfold with perverse consequences for domestic output and jobs. It demands the concrete factory makes the same number of bags of concrete but emits less, with requirements they cannot meet targets by reducing their output.

It’s like asking us to cook the same dinner with less heat.

Like the fable in the country of the farmer who trained his horse to stop eating, and when he nearly had him there he died, of starvation – what superannuation fund will invest in a business that is losing money and has no prospect of improving it?

You can’t legislate for someone to stay in Australia and go broke, with lofty idealism peppered throughout the discussion paper of “developing new technologies” to keep them here.

Sarah Hanson-Young should have questioned those with science degrees, says Vikki Campion. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

It also flags limiting Australian businesses’ buying international offsets “so they do not become a mechanism to avoid transforming our domestic economy”.

The only way these businesses will be able to meet these targets is through buying carbon credits, a carbon tax by stealth – at current prices it will be an extra $6 billion.

Our competitors, meanwhile, chuckle under their breath about Australia’s new boyfriend. This is our great Green leap, but time will tell whether it is forward or backward. Transition to net zero means major transmission lines, giant lithium mines and sweeping industrialisation.

But if we can’t even explore for gas out in the ocean, how will we go building the 240m wind towers off Newcastle? Nowhere is it more evident than at the Environment Legislation Committee what parlous scientific and economic knowledge our Greens Senators have and how reluctant they are to consider an educated alternate view.

Even as business groups, scientists and unions call for nuclear, energy experts warned of monumental costs of more than 10,000km of transmission lines across Australia for electricity distribution to cope with the lulls of wind and solar in the grid. Even as the inquiry heard from doctors that Sydney would last just seconds on battery back-up if the grid failed.

Rather than question those who hold a science degree, Senator Sarah Hanson-Young showed her tin ears with one line: “I’m done – these guys have cooked the country.”