Andrew Bolt: Warmist crusaders don’t care their dud schemes are costing taxpayers the earth
South Australia’s massive solar farm project is just another wild green scheme to fail — and just proves these dud plans pushed by the warming crusaders are a waste of time and taxpayers’ money, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Haven’t you already been hurt enough by the global-warming politicians now wanting to make you drive electric cars?
It’s like your money doesn’t matter to them as they spruik their wild green schemes.
No wonder we now have electricity prices so high that disconnections in Victoria jumped 35 per cent in a year.
ENERGY RETAILERS STING VICTORIANS
Take the latest global-warming project that’s just crashed, even after the Turnbull “Liberal” government gave it $110 million in concessional loans.
SolarReserve has just junked its $650 million Aurora Solar Energy Project, a massive solar farm near Port Augusta with a molten salt “battery”.
It couldn’t make the sums work for investors, it said, even after its project was given that cheap federal loan, plus a guarantee from South Australia’s then Labor government that it would buy — at heaven knows what expense — all its electricity from Aurora.
Amazing. This just proves not only that solar power costs more, but that our warmist politicians barely care that such schemes are driving up your bills and taxes.
No, in their warming mania, they’ve helped to shut 12 coal-fired generators in seven years, and then squandered $70 billion in a decade on wind and solar plants that give us more expensive and unreliable electricity.
Plus there’s all those dud schemes. Consider the hysterical applause once given to this dud Aurora solar plant.
Then-premier Jay Weatherill, a warming crusader who turned South Australia into the blackout state, boasted it would provide 5 per cent of his state’s power. Nick Xenophon, who demanded the Turnbull government hand over that $110 million in exchange for his party’s votes in the Senate, crowed that the solar farm would be a “flagship project for the entire nation”.
Peter Malinauskas, now South Australia’s Labor leader, gloated that “a shiver has just gone up the coal generation industry’s spine”.
Except this project crashed, just like other green power schemes which took our taxpayer dollars with them.
Remember the geothermal technology that was supposed to turn South Australia’s Innamincka into another “clean energy” hub?
Tim Flannery, our former chief climate commissioner, had claimed the technology to extract the energy from hot rocks underground was “relatively straightforward”, and the hot-gospelling Rudd government gave a $90 million grant to a geothermal company in which he was a shareholder.
But that project failed, too, as did another clean energy project just last month — a wave energy plant off Albany, Western Australia.
The WA Labor government had been so excited by that green scheme that it promised a $15.75 million grant to turn Albany into “a hub of renewable energy expertise”.
The federal government promised another $12 million.
But it turned out to be another total flop, just like the taxpayer-funded wave generators that literally sank off Port Kembla and Adelaide.
Meanwhile, the governments which have scandalously sabotaged our electricity supplies now struggle to keep on our lights.
In 2017, Victoria joined South Australia in committing economic suicide, by helping to convince the owners of the Hazelwood power station there was no future in making electricity from coal.
The station that supplied 20 per cent of Victoria’s electricity was shut, driving up the price of wholesale electricity by 85 per cent.
That wasn’t the only bill passed on to the public. Suddenly short of electricity, Victoria spent $51 million on diesel generators and other backups.
It didn’t work.
Two months ago, a heatwave, not extreme by historical standards, hit Victoria just when a coal-fired generator was out of action and wind had died, leaving wind farms producing just 4 per cent of supplies.
Result: 200,000 homes were blacked out, even after Victoria had spent $32 million on stunts like paying big power users to shut down.
Expect more such folly and waste in 2022, when AGL closes its huge Liddell power plant in NSW, having declared it’s “getting out of coal”.
Given this crisis, it seems insane for federal Labor to now promise to make Australians buy 575,000 electric cars a year more than today — or half the annual new car sales from 2030.
Where will all the extra electricity come from, given Labor will also shut even more coal-fired generators with its promised 45 per cent cut in emissions? And at what cost?
But what does mere money matter to a politician with the global-warming faith?
That’s why Labor leader Bill Shorten, when asked last week about the cost of his global-warming policy, gave no answer.
Who cares about cost when there’s a planet to pretend to save from global warming? Let mug voters pay.
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