Energy illiterate politicians have undermined our power grid and will leave our nation poorer and weaker | Chris Uhlmann

Journalist Chris Uhlmann reveals energy-illiterate politicians don’t understand the power grid they built, and risk plunging Australia into a future of regular summer blackouts.

Last week the political push to build an electricity system based on erratic generation collided with the physics of delivering reliable power.

And when physics and politics clash, physics always wins.

NSW Premier Chris Minns underlined this iron law as he urged his people to turn down their electricity consumption to save the power system from collapse.

“Solar production in the energy markets starts to come off at 3pm, at exactly the same time as people return home from work,” Minns said.

“If you can not run your pool filter, not run your dishwasher, not run your washing machine, this afternoon between 3pm and 8pm, you’ll help the grid.”

The grid is the eastern National Electricity Market. It is our nation’s central nervous system. This indispensable machine runs from Cooktown in far north Queensland, down the eastern seaboard and across Bass Strait to Hobart, then west to Port Lincoln in South Australia. It connects 85 per cent of Australia’s population to power and if it fails, everything fails.

Chris Uhlmann hosted the Sky News documentary The Real Cost of Net Zero.

One hot day in spring delivered a glimpse of our energy future and the dangers posed by politicians meddling in physics. As state and federal governments race to drive up the share of wind, solar and hydro power on the grid from 38 per cent to 82 per cent in the next six years, we are on the path to becoming slaves to a system that was once designed to serve us.

What’s driving the over-reliance on wind and solar energy harvesters is not a plan to deliver affordable, reliable power but a push to hit a target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This is a noble cause for many, but people should have been warned it was a trade-off – something would be gained and something lost. What might be won on the green swings would be lost on the affordability and reliability roundabouts.

But the carbon-cutting quest came wrapped in a tissue of lies. Politicians and a long parade of activists and billionaire energy hobbyists assured the public nothing would be lost. The new system would be reliable, cheap and green.

Wind and solar farms are as reliable as the weather and are off more often than they are on. On average the best onshore wind farm will deliver 40 per cent of its maximum capacity. Solar’s best effort is less than 30 per cent. These are not energy generators, they are energy harvesters. Like throwing a fishing net into the sea, you get what nature provides. Sometimes that’s nothing.

Everywhere wind and solar rise to become a dominant source of power, electricity systems suffer increasing reliability problems and become harder to manage.

And three times as much weather-dependent capacity must be built to replace every coal generator that retires. They have to be sprayed over a vast amount of land and linked together with 10,000km of new transmission lines.

Because wind and solar can’t deliver 24/7 power, it must be backed up with a complex and expensive life support system of batteries, hydro power and gas.

All the capital costs for this massively overbuilt system will be paid by consumers or taxpayers.

The weather harvesters do drive down the wholesale power price, when they generate. But it’s the highest cost of generation that sets the market price of electricity, not the lowest. Wind and solar rarely set that price in hours of peak demand because of the massive supply gaps they leave. So, as cheap coal exits, those gaps will increasingly be filled by much more expensive gas, hydro and batteries.

Chris Uhlmann at a massive rural solar farm, which can produce a lot of power but is not reliable and therefore must be backed up by other energy sources.

Mix energy scarcity with massive complexity and it drives up costs across the board. That’s why federal and state governments are sending you subsidies and the truth is written in your electricity bill.

The green energy plan won’t work at all without the fossil fuel of gas delivering enough power for 15 million homes from now until well beyond 2050. This will be the grid’s backbone because physics demands a generator with a predictable fuel source to run a bulk electricity system.

Yet, the same energy ministers driving the over-reliance on wind and solar demonised gas and made it hard to get. Criminally dumb climate politics has delivered critical gas shortfalls and an energy-rich nation is now building liquefied natural gas import hubs.

That federal and state energy ministers are now desperately trying to get more gas reveals a terrible truth – they have no idea what they were doing. They don’t understand the system they are building and are profoundly, dangerously energy illiterate.

That should terrify everyone because the stakes could not be higher.

Whether you recognise it or not, your wealth is directly linked to the amount of energy you get to use. Poor nations, and poor people, are energy poor.

The grid under construction is being driven by clueless politicians. It will deliver a breathtakingly expensive and highly unreliable, feel-good power system.

You will pay more for less reliable power. Businesses will pay more. Industries will shift offshore. The rest of the world will continue its trend of burning ever larger amounts of coal, oil and gas as Australia falls to become a poorer and weaker nation.

The Real Cost of Net Zero
Stream at SkyNews.com.au or download the Sky News Australia app

Originally published as Energy illiterate politicians have undermined our power grid and will leave our nation poorer and weaker | Chris Uhlmann