Andrew Bolt: Power sabotaged by climate zealots
As Victoria sweltered through a heatwave last week, the state ran out of electricity, just like a Third-World country. But it’s climate mania that really left us sweating in the dark, writes Andrew Bolt.
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Victoria is now an even bigger joke than South Australia, becoming our second blackout state thanks to global warming madness.
Consider: Victoria sits on vast deposits of coal — enough for electricity for hundreds of years.
It also has lots of gas.
Yet last Thursday and Friday it somehow managed to run out of electricity, just like some third-world country. Just like South Australia.
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Result: 200,000 homes and businesses had their power cut off without warning. Portland’s smelters and other big electricity users were also paid by government to shut down during the emergency.
Wholesale prices soared as Victoria desperately imported power from Queensland and NSW, which for now still have enough of the coal-fired generators that the Greens and Labor demand we scrap.
Those prices — which will be passed on to consumers — tell the damning story.
On Thursday, the average spot price of wholesale electricity in Victoria was an astonishing $3378 per megawatt hour, and in South Australia it was $3360.
In contrast, it was just $100 in coal-fired Queensland and $104 in NSW.
Four years ago, the average wholesale price in Victoria was just $30, but then global warming vandals sabotaged the electricity system that once made the state a manufacturing powerhouse. See, the Labor government got the idea that coal-fired generators were a menace that would help cause the planet to fry and oceans to rise.
To drive those generators out of business, the government set a very high target for renewable energy — 40 per cent by 2025. It also subsidised wind and solar plants and imposed a new tax on coal.
Meanwhile, federal Labor likewise warned it would force Australians to take 45 per cent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Coal must go.
The owners of our ageing coal-fired generators got the message. Why spend billions to upgrade their plants when even Liberal politicians were determined to shut them?
And so the giant Hazelwood power station — more than 20 per cent of Victoria’s supply — closed two years ago, the ninth Australian coal-fired generator to shut in just five years.
More will go. Generator AGL will shut NSW’s giant Liddell power station in 2022 because it wants to “get out of coal” and make more money from green power.
But check Victoria to see what this means.
Closing Hazelwood caused Victoria’s wholesale electricity price to jump 85 per cent. The average spot price has now rocketed from $30 in 2015 to $92 last year.
In South Australia, the state most hooked on wind power, it went from $39 to $98. (Queensland’s average price last year was $73; NSW’s $82.)
No wonder some pensioners can no longer afford electricity for heating and cooling. No wonder big manufacturers now think twice about investing here.
Victoria’s government is now blaming last week’s power chaos on everyone but themselves and global warming zealotry. But they look as shifty as they do clueless.
At 10.30am last Friday, Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio promised Victorians: “Blackouts are something that will absolutely not be a feature of today, or a possibility.”
Just 90 minutes later, the blackouts began, and D’Ambrosio then blamed them on breakdowns in Victoria’s coal generators.
What she didn’t add was that losing Hazelwood had left the state vulnerable from such inevitable failures.
Instead, this warming zealot boasted: “Wind power came through today — it produced sufficient power generation.”
Wrong again: wind generators in Victoria and South Australia produced around just 4 per cent of electricity power when it was most needed.
The winds didn’t blow enough, so Victoria’s wind farms worked at just 20 per cent of capacity and South Australia’s even less. But what idiot relies on wind always blowing?
What a colossal farce. And this is the electricity system we get after lavishing $70 billion in a decade on massively-subsidised wind and solar plants, rather than on reliable coal generators.
Yet Greens leader Richard Di Natale still insists on more of this crazy same: “We have to (phase out coal) and, look, we talk about not using a dishwasher for a couple of hours, we’re facing an existential threat as a species.”
What bull. Australia could scrap every coal-fired power station — and every car and factory — and still make virtually zero difference to global temperatures, as Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, a warmist, has admitted. Nor is global warming “an existential crisis as a species”.
This is just a religious mania speaking, and it’s for this mania that bamboozled Australians must now sweat in the dark.
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