Andrew Bolt: Chris Bowen’s green dreams don’t pass IKEA test

Chris Bowen needs to try assembling an IKEA desk to learn that plans rarely work out perfectly the first time around, before changing how we power Australia.

Chris Bowen wants to change how Australia is powered. Picture: Martin Ollman

Make shiny-eyed Chris Bowen sit the IKEA test before he does one more thing to change how we power Australia.

The IKEA test is one millions of us have failed, learning the humbling lesson that plans rarely work out perfectly the first time.

There we are, just trying to assemble, say, an IKEA Kleppstad wardrobe and … dammit!

We’ve put a panel on backwards. Or a shelf. Or used the long screw instead of short. Re-do.

But Bowen, our fervent Energy and Climate Change Minister, talks like he’s never wrestled with IKEA. Never forgotten the sauce for a barbecue. And it’s this ‘it’ll-be-perfect’ zealotry that makes warmists so dangerous.

Bowen babbles about his plan to change how we fuel our cars, power our homes and electrify our industries.

“We have a world-class Integrated System Plan for the transformation of the electricity grid,” he declares.

End coal-fired power! Get 82 per cent renewable energy in just eight years! Plus electric cars – 50 per cent of new car sales by 2030!

And it will work!

Does Bowen know the pain of a missing IKEA screw? Picture: Chris Eastman

Really? In the Good Weekend magazine on Saturday, motoring writer Tony Davis actually went one better than the IKEA test to check Bowen’s dream against unforgiving reality.

Davis is no warming sceptic and likes the electric cars he’s given to test.

But it’s hard to ignore the problems with them when he’s standing in “a wet and windy Goulburn” – so much for global warming – at a charging station on his way to Canberra and finding that charging his car to just 80 per cent will take 100 minutes he doesn’t have.

Then, finally in Canberra, finding another charger was “a lot harder than it should’ve been”, and “I sat in the car and worked while it slowly powered the car up”.

Just as well he had no kids with him, and nowhere he needed to be.

How often does reality laugh like this at green dreams? In 2007, former Climate Change Commissioner Tim Flannery insisted there was so much energy in hot rocks deep underground in South Australia that we could “run the Australian economy for the best part of a century”.

The technology was “relatively straightforward”, he said, and the Rudd government granted $90m for a test plant.

Oops. The wells blocked. Total flop.

Malcolm Turnbull has just had brutal contact with reality, too.

To achieve Labor’s net zero dream all Australians must “change their vehicles, heaters and building shells over the next 25 years”.

As Prime Minister, he promised another clean-energy dream – Snowy 2.0, using wind and solar power when there was plenty and letting that water fall to a lower dam when we were short, creating hydro power.

But that $2bn scheme has now blown out to at least $12bn. One reason was the classic mistake parents make when buying presents for children – not reading “batteries not included”.

In this case, not included were the billions needed for wires to hook up Snowy 2.0 to the grid. Also not included: the extra billions of dollars for all the workers and parts that are now hard to get.

Despite this history, the Albanese government talks as if none of its ministers ever had a plan that didn’t work out perfectly. Or ever failed the IKEA test.

The absurd scale of its net zero dream has now been sketched out by Net Zero Australia, a thinktank created by top Australian and American universities and the Nous Group.

Again, Net Zero Australia is a true believer, wanting emissions slashed to “save” the planet.

But it’s honest enough to admit that meeting Labor’s global warming targets means we must build an “immense amount of new infrastructure ... at a breathtaking speed”. And, of course, it must all work.

It says we must install in just eight years “about three times the production capacity” of our entire electricity system today. Wow.

Many of our farmers must “change their production systems and machinery”.

All Australians must “change their vehicles, heaters and building shells over the next 25 years”. Industries must “change production systems”.

As for Labor’s plan to become a “renewable energy superpower”, exporting as much renewable energy as we do today with coal and gas “may require several Tasmania-sized solar hubs ... to produce hydrogen using desalinated seawater” – a technology not yet proven at scale.

All this is “practically achievable”, says Net Zero Australia, improbably adding: “The cost of energy services need not increase as a share of our economy”.

“Need not”? Only if everything in Labor’s Soviet-style eight-year plan works out perfectly.

So make Bowen at least sit an IKEA test. Can he even assemble a desk?