Andrew Bolt: Iceberg looms as Chris Bowen’s green plans sink

Chris Bowen’s plans to go green are springing leaks everywhere they make contact with reality, as our bills keep rising and power supplies get more stretched. Can he not see the disaster he’s creating?

Two anecdotes about Chris Bowen, our hot-gospelling minister for climate change and energy, help explain why Australia’s power supplies face a catastrophic crisis.

The first is from last year, when Bowen, visiting the United States, posed with a cheesy grin with an EFord150 – an electric ute he thinks Australians should drive instead of our hugely popular petrol-driven ones.

This electric vehicle, he tweeted, had a “range of around 500km, can tow boats & caravans & goes like you wouldn’t believe,” but was “not currently available in Australia due to poor policies”.

Bowen would fix that! He’s now working on policies to make us buy more electric cars by imposing emissions standards that will knock many petrol utes out of the market.

But there’s a reason why Australian motorists don’t share Bowen’s passion for electric cars like the EFord150, and it’s not just that this particular model costs $110,000 – 50 per cent more than our top-range HiLux, which goes twice the distance.

Jim Farley discovered that reason two weeks ago.

Chris Bowen’s plans to go green are springing leaks everywhere they make contact with reality. Picture: Dan Peled

Farley is the head of Ford, which makes the EFord150, which he took for a test spin on Route 66 from Palo Alto to Las Vegas.

It didn’t go well. Recharging the car, tweeted Farley, was “pretty challenging”.

At one stop he had to use a slow charger, which took 40 minutes to get his battery to just 40 per cent. At another, he had to get up at 3am to get his car charged.

“It was a really good reality check of the challenges which our customers go through,” Farley said ruefully.

This is the car Bowen last year flogged as our future. But does he even register any news he doesn’t like?

Probably not, to judge by the second anecdote.

Paul Broad was the CEO of Snowy Hydro, and charged with building a new generator at Kurri Kurri to partly replace the Liddell coal-fired station that closed this year.

Bowen, the politician, insisted Kurri Kurri be fuelled by hydrogen, the miracle green fuel he’s been touting and funding. Broad, the expert, told him it couldn’t be done.

Broad said that advice “got Bowen’s back up”, and last year he was effectively forced out from Snowy Hydro, even though he was right. Kurri Kurri, now a year behind schedule, will be fuelled by natural gas instead.

Chris Bowen is now working on policies to make us buy more electric cars by imposing emissions standards that will knock many petrol utes out of the market.

But Bowen’s wider plan to go green are also in strife – particularly his plan to get rid of coal-fired power and get 82 per cent of our electricity from renewables like wind and solar in just seven years from now.

Broad, now free to say exactly what he thinks, says that target is “bulls--t”.

Even experts who cheered this disastrous green revolution, now warn Bowen’s plans for green power are in strife. Coal-fired plants are closing, with little to replace them.

On Monday, Tony Wood, Energy Program Director at the Grattan Institute, told me “we haven‘t been building what’s necessary to meet that sort of target.”

On Wednesday came more confirmation. The Clean Energy Council said just four renewable energy generation projects got financial backing in the first half of this year – the fewest since it started collecting data in 2017.

Now even the Victorian government, militantly green, realises it could need coal, after all. It’s agreed to pay AGL to keep open its huge Loy Yang coal-fired power station in 2035 to save the state from blackouts if the green revolution hit the wall.

Even the Victorian government, militantly green, realises it could need coal, after all.. Picture: Jason Edwards

The NSW Labor government says it could have to make a similar deal with Origin Energy to keep open the Eraring generator.

Indeed, Bowen’s plans to go green are springing leaks everywhere they make contact with reality. They are delayed, collapsed or way over budget.

For instance, farmers are now fighting against the massive transmission lines being built over their lands, further delaying the already troubled rollout of 10,000km of wires we’d have to build in just seven years to hook up all Bowen’s planned new wind and solar farms.

Meanwhile, Aboriginal activists at Portland, Victoria, have forced Bowen to order a planned offshore wind farm to be built further out to sea, putting it in doubt. Locals are trying to stop massive wind turbines being built near rainforest in Chalumbin, Queensland.

And all through this, our bills keep rising and our power supplies get more stretched.

But does Bowen even let himself see the iceberg ahead? His green religion has made him reject the most obvious solution – zero-emissions nuclear plants. Has he been blinded to this disaster he’s creating as well?