Andrew Bolt: A crash is coming that will make the defeat of the Voice look like a minor faux pas

Crusader Chris Bowen is asking us to trust him but his plans are falling to pieces, threatening us with both higher bills and power shortages.

The Voice is bad enough. Worse for the Albanese government is that its other crusade – 82 per cent green electricity by 2030! – is suddenly collapsing, too.

No surprise, of course, given the global warming zealot in charge.

Remember the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments letting in 50,000 illegal boat people? Chris Bowen was the immigration minister for 2½ years of that, and let his crusading zeal shut his eyes to the obvious fix.

Former immigration minister Chris Bowen. Picture: Gary Ramage

When the Liberals said “turn back the boats”, Bowen mocked the plan as “ridiculous”, “dangerous” and “totally unworkable”.

Yet under the new Abbott government, it worked.

Now here’s crusader Bowen back again, this time as Energy and Climate Change Minister, trying to change the whole way our electricity system works. Telling us to trust him to replace most of our coal and gas-fired generators with renewable energy in just seven years – and even cut your power bills, too. All to pretend to fix a pretend climate “crisis”.

But here are the latest signs that Bowen’s plans are falling to pieces, threatening us with both higher bills and power shortages.

POWER CORD BLOWS OUT

Tasmania’s Premier this month said the cost of the planned Marinus Link power cable to link Tasmania to Victoria had blown out so badly that he’d need more money from the Albanese government.

This cable would let Tasmania sell green hydro and wind power to green Victoria, now dangerously short of electricity, as well as to other eastern states.

What’s more, every other new major connector needed to shift power around the country has also blown out. HumeLink, to connect the Snowy 2.0 project, is estimated to have tripled in price, to $3.3bn.

SNOWY 2.0 DISASTER

The Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro storage project is meant to be our biggest store of green power. It’s supposed to use wind and solar power to pump water to a higher dam when there’s lots of cheap electricity, and let it fall to make hydro electricity when we’re running short.

Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister promised it would cost $2bn, but costs now are estimated at $10bn, excluding the wires. The project is still years from being finished, with a digging machine stuck underground for a year.

GREEN HYDROGEN FAIL

The government has touted hydrogen – a gas made from water – as the miracle new green fuel, even though it takes massive electricity to make and hasn’t been proved commercial at scale,

Last month, the big Atco gas company scrapped plans for a green hydrogen plant in Western Australia, and it isn’t the first corporate titan to back out.

Last year, steel producer BlueScope Steel admitted it would be decades before hydrogen could be used to make steel, after Shell pulled out of a joint project to test using green hydrogen for a blast furnace.

Chris Bowen then demanded the new Kurri Kurri generator in NSW be run on hydrogen, but that couldn’t be done, either.

ABORIGINES KYBOSH WIND POWER

Last month Bowen himself bizarrely wrecked a giant offshore wind project off Victoria’s coast, after a local Aboriginal group opposed it. He said the project, which would have been 10km from the coast, had to be double that, adding to costs and putting it in doubt.

A wind project off Victoria’s coast has been opposed by an Aboriginal group. Picture: Getty

No wonder Bowen’s plan to “build around 40 wind turbines a month” until 2030 is running way behind schedule.

People hate wind farms spoiling their views, so Bowen demanded more turbines in the sea instead, even though they cost twice the price. Now even those are being fought.

HATE THOSE TRANSMISSION LINES

Bowen also says we need at least 10,000km of transmission lines to hook up all those new wind and solar farms we’ll need.

But farmers and other land owners are fighting them, causing delays and a jump in compensation to as much as $300,000 per kilometre. In June, CleanCo, a Queensland state-owned entity, cancelled a planned wind farm because of delays to connections to the grid, as well as rising costs.

COMPANIES WAVE WHITE FLAG

Last week Boral, a huge corporate emitter, thanks particularly to its concrete making, said its planned emission cuts were up to a third behind its 2025 targets.

Miner Rio Tinto last month said it probably wouldn’t hit its own 2025 target because there wasn’t enough constant green power for its aluminium smelters.

Yes, a crash is coming that will make the defeat of the Voice look like a minor faux pas for the government. Read these signs, and weep for the country.