Andrew Bolt: Brutal reality checks show why Albanese’s green hydrogen plan is foolish
Two brutal reality checks last week should have made Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen realise they are being fools who are promising to waste $8bn of your money.
Andrew Bolt
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The Albanese government’s insane green idea – to replace an energy system that works with one not yet invented – crashed around its ears last Thursday.
Two brutal reality checks should have made Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen realise they’d been fools to bet they could replace our coal, gas and petrol with green hydrogen, a gas made by pumping massive amounts of renewable electricity through water.
It’s been like jumping out of a plane, assuming someone will hand them a parachute on the way down. Now we all risk going splat.
The first reality check was the decision of Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest, a global warming crusader, to drop most of his green hydrogen schemes, and get rid of 700 of his workers.
Forrest now admits what was clear years ago: green hydrogen doesn’t make economic sense.
This was a stunning backflip. Only three years ago, he was signing in-principle green hydrogen deals totalling $200bn, claiming this gas was “the purest source of energy in the world – and one that could replace up to three quarters of our emissions”.
Now Forrest has just five projects left on his books, most small and most overseas.
Just hours later, the government got another wake-up. On the very same day Forrest backed off hydrogen, the European Court of Auditors warned the European Union that its own plans were in a shambles, too. It, too, needed a “reality check” on his target to make green hydrogen – a target the auditors said was based on “political will”, not facts or economics.
In short, Europe’s politicians, like Albanese and Bowen, had fallen for feel-good green fantasies.
That’s our tragedy. Albanese and Bowen bought Forrest’s pipe dream and counted on green hydrogen magically becoming commercial by the time Labor had finished destroying our remaining coal-fired generators, most of which will be gone in just a decade.
Even worse, they were saying no to nuclear power, which works, but yes to green hydrogen, which doesn’t.
It was madness from the moment Albanese and Bowen started making pixie-dust promises that green hydrogen was the key to turning Australia into a “clean energy superpower”!
Bowen, for instance, claimed our “green hydrogen future is fundamental to that clean energy future as a powerhouse”, even though it’s never been proven commercially at scale anywhere in the world.
Albanese in 2022 likewise insisted the “green hydrogen sector has enormous potential in this country”, and we’d become “potentially a green hydrogen powerhouse for Australia and the world”.
Albanese has since promised at least $8bn of your money on his green hydrogen schemes, even as experts were warning him not to try to pick winners, especially when hydrogen might not work. After all, it’s so expensive and explosive, and normal gas pipes can’t handle it.
But most astonishing is that this dishonest government kept pretending green hydrogen could save us, even when the projects it backed started falling over.
For instance, just before the last election, Albanese and Bowen promised they’d make the new Kurri Kurri gas-fired generator in NSW use hydrogen to fuel it – 30 per cent hydrogen from the start, and 100 per cent later.
Only months later, the plant operators said, no, using hydrogen was impossible.
But this government wouldn’t give up. It handed nearly $14m of your money to an Andrew Forrest hydrogen project on Queensland’s Gibson Island which Forrest claimed showed “Queensland leads the world in really exciting green industries”.
But another flop. Forrest in April gave up on that, too.
Yet still the Albanese government kept pushing green hydrogen as the fuel that would save us from running out of power. And kept throwing our money at it.
The very next month, Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced yet another handout for the hydrogen hypesters: “This Budget invests in our renewable energy superpower ambitions – including $13.7bn in production tax incentives for green hydrogen and processed critical minerals.”
Even last week, Bowen was still claiming (unproven) hydrogen was our future but (proven) nuclear was not, even though our electricity system is now in such a shambles that Bowen now suggested we drain the batteries of people’s electric cars during shortages to stop blackouts. What next – rubber bands?
I’ve never seen such economic vandalism, and all dressed up as some moral crusade to save a planet that doesn’t even need saving.
No, we don’t have a climate crisis but a Bowen crisis. How much longer with this government before it’s our electricity system that can’t be saved?
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