First World anxieties, Third World power

As the world’s largest exporter of coal, it’s verging on absurd that Australia is too environmentally squeamish to take domestic advantage of its natural assets, writes Peta Credlin.

This week’s heatwave across Australia’s southern states saw rolling blackouts throughout Melbourne’s suburbs and big employers like Alcoa told to shut down operations lest the whole system crash.

We were told it would happen and here it is; our First World anxieties about carbon dioxide emissions are rapidly giving us a Third World power supply.

And regardless of who wins the election, it’s going to get worse. It will get significantly worse under the Coalition with their 30 per cent plus renewable energy forecasts; and disastrously worse under Labor with their 50 per cent RET and the Greens pushing for 100 per cent.

Last Thursday, with at least three big baseload power stations out-of-action for repairs or maintenance, wind power was meeting less than 5 per cent of total demand.

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Because of that, load shedding or as we know it better, blackouts, hit more than 200,000 Melbourne households meaning sweltering heat and everything in the fridge needing to be thrown out.

The Ararat wind farm in western Victoria was officially opened on June 27, 2017. Picture: Supplied

Welcome to “modern” Green Australia! I hate to say it, but this is our new normal.

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Thanks to the subsidies that consumers continue to pay which distort the investment market, Snowy 2.0 aside, wind and solar are the only new generating capacity coming into the system.

We need power 100 per cent of the time. Yet wind and solar operate to capacity, on average, just 30 per cent of the time.

It’s verging on absurd that a country that’s the world’s largest exporter of coal, and is about to be the largest exporter of gas to countries that don’t have our green scruples, is too environmentally squeamish to take domestic advantage of its natural assets.

Labor is too infiltrated by the green-left to commit to new coal-fired power stations even though emissions from the new HEAL (High Efficiency Low Emission Coal) stations are 30 per cent lower than those of our existing ageing and increasingly breakdown-prone power plants.

And the Liberals are too timid and too frightened of the rampant virtue-signallers to tell people the truth — that, unless we start building new baseload plants now, we can say goodbye forever to affordable, reliable electricity.