Bowen’s insane energy campaign heading for UK-style disaster

Chris Bowen is on an utterly insane campaign to destroy our electricity system and it will turn out just like the disaster happening right now in the UK.

Tony ‘Clyde’ Burke is disastrous enough – embarked on a literally mindless campaign to destroy businesses and jobs, under the benign gaze of an absentee prime minister on his occasional visits back to Australia.

Visits, suitably timed of course, to luxuriate in the shared glow of a hopefully successful sporting team, Bob Hawke-style. But Burke is an insipid piker measured against his cabinet colleague, our national twerp-in-chief Chris Bowen and his mad, bad and utterly, utterly insane campaign to destroy our electricity system.

A campaign to ensure that we not only can’t keep the gas – indeed, any heating- on in winter, but to the ultimate target: being literally unable to keep even the lights on.

I invite you to see the Bowen future, playing out, in real time, right now, in the UK. But with some, and for us, utterly disastrous differences. It was coming up for dawn on Wednesday in the UK: just over 24,000MW of electricity was being demanded.

And how much was the UK getting from wind and solar – which, according to our local lunatic Bowen will be our power future - according to the official electricityinfo.org website? All of 90MW.

And, no, I’m not missing a zero or two there. And no, it wasn’t just for 10 or 20 minutes, but for hours.

Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Obviously, the sun wasn’t shining. But also, right around the UK, both onshore and offshore, the wind wasn’t blowing either. Wind in the UK has the laughably designated ‘installed capacity’ of something liked 15,000MW.

But occasionally, like today, the wind don’t blow anywhere, and it gets effectively zero – a big fat zero – from all that very expensively installed ‘capacity’. So where was the other 23,900MW coming from? Well, for starters, cough cough, around 350MW was coming from coal-fired generation.

Yes, that was a piffling amount. You’d hardly know why you’d bother firing up for that. Although even so, it was about four times what the UK was getting from its entire wind and solar installations.

Most of the power – 14,700MW – was coming from gas generation. Are we going to be building a fleet of gas-powered stations? Heck no; Bowen – and other idiots like Victorian premier Chairman Dan - are even trying to turn off gas for direct household and industry use. The next biggest supply – around 4100MW – was nuclear. Our itinerant PM has just firmly ruled that out of our future.

A further 3000MW – just to remind you, that’s 30 times what the entire wind and solar installations were supplying – was coming from the UK’s extension cords into a number of European grids.

Remind me, please, Minister Bowen: who are we going to plug our extension cords into? NZ? Indonesia? The moon?

Then of course, there was the so-called ‘biomass’ - burning wood in a former coal-fired station – pumping around 1400MW into the grid and plenty of CO2. So contemplate our future when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine.

And with no gas, no nuclear and no extension cords.

Is it possible for a private citizen to take out an intervention order? We really need go get minister Bowen swapped from his obviously too-tight ill-fitting jackets into a more comfortable tailored straitjacket pronto.

Originally published as Bowen’s insane energy campaign heading for UK-style disaster