Energy spin can be powerful, but rhetoric won’t keep the lights on

As a rule, you should pay more attention to what politicians do than what they say.

The German Greens once championed the complete exit from coal-fired power by 2030. Now they are part of a three-party governing coalition where idealism has collided with the real world.

The Scholven coal-fired power plant in Germany, where coal power is back in the mix after gas supply from Russia was cut.Credit: Bloomberg

In response to Russia cutting gas exports to Berlin by 60 per cent, Germany’s economic minister Robert Habeck, a Greens MP, had the baleful task of telling the nation that rebooting coal-fired power plants was “painful” but “a sheer necessity”.

Germany burns lignite, the dirtiest kind of brown coal. So, the nation is facing a hard truth: most of its carbon-cutting has come through outsourcing industrial production to China and propping up renewable energy with imported oil and gas.

The giant flaw at the heart of the Paris Agreement is that countries are generally held accountable for greenhouse gas emissions generated within their own borders, but emissions generated anywhere are a problem everywhere. Europe’s dirty little secret is that it parades its virtue while exporting its vice. That would explain why carbon has been steadily rising in the atmosphere since the problem was first confronted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

At the world climate summit in November, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson – a man with an almost supernatural capacity to say one thing and do another – announced the “death knell for coal power”. It came at the same time his government was planning the first new coal mine in the UK in decades. Now British energy companies have been asked to delay the closure of coal-fired power plants.

Europe’s dirty little secret is that it parades its virtue while exporting its vice.

Closer to home, when all lights went out in South Australia in 2016 the state maintained there was no issue with the balance of its wind-dominated generation and made much of installing a 100 megawatt Tesla battery, which can power 30,000 homes for one hour. But before the battery was running, SA had built nine diesel generators that can deliver 276 MW for as long as there is fuel.

Perhaps nowhere has perfected the “do as I say not what I do” routine better than Victoria. In August 2016 Premier Daniel Andrews trumped a permanent ban on the exploration and development of all onshore unconventional gas. Now, with the energy crisis biting, Andrews has demanded gas from “our ground” be delivered cheaply to his state. The gas in question is fracked, comes from Queensland and is already contracted to overseas buyers. If Andrews wants gas, there is plenty of it under his feet in Victoria. At least now he is allowing exploration for conventional gas.

Meanwhile, Victoria’s Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio says the development of a capacity mechanism to secure the power supply cannot include coal and gas. Pause on that proposition for a moment. Victoria is demanding that 70 per cent of the National Electricity Market’s generating capacity be excluded from a capacity market.

And this is the minister who struck a secret deal with Energy Australia to ensure brown-coal-burning Yallourn Power Station keeps its capacity in the market until its scheduled retirement in 2028. This raises pretence to performance art.

Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen rejected a suggestion that coal was a short-term fix to the energy crisis. Credit: Janie Barrett

Last week, this column asked federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen if the short-term fix to the energy crisis was to keep coal-fired generators operating until their retirement date, fix the ones that are broken and include them in the capacity market.

There followed an impassioned speech.

“No, that has been a long-held view of yours, and it is not one I agree with,” Bowen said. “The problem is there is not enough investment in renewable energy. There hasn’t been enough investment in storage. Yes, you can say the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. The rain doesn’t always fall either, but we can store the water and we can store renewable energy if we have the investment. That investment has been lacking for the last decade. That is the problem.”

In no particular order, storing water involves digging a hole in the ground, storing energy is a tad more complex. The question asked about dealing with the real world, in the short term, with the assets that we have. The answer was a lament to a world that does not yet exist.

And this reporter’s long-held view is that “renewables are the future but, today, they present serious engineering problems. To deny that is to deny the science”. I could lie and claim the transition was easy and win plaudits from the conga line of dopes on Twitter, but that show is already oversubscribed.

Some things in politics can be spun and don’t matter. But the electricity system is governed by physics and is really serious. No amount of rhetoric will power it. Like gravity, you get this wrong, you fall.

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