AEMO’s energy roadmap a mix of insanity and gas

AEMO says we need 10GW of gas-fired generation to iron-out the ‘volatility’ from a ‘weather-powered’ system. (Photo by Hristo Rusev/Getty Images)

The utter lunacy of our headlong rush to destroy our electricity generation system is captured – I’m assuming entirely unintentionally – in one sentence in the AEMO so-called “System Integration Plan” for the national electricity market.

AEMO - Australian Energy Market Operator – is the overall regulator supposedly charged with keeping the electricity (and indeed gas) flowing and at prices that don’t require you to double your mortgage to pay your next power bill.

It recently ‘suspended the market’- took direct control of electricity generation and supply - which some not unreasonably dubbed a re-nationalisation of our electricity system; albeit only temporarily as it’s now ‘unsuspended’ the market.

AEMO also slapped an – extraordinarily high – cap on the gas price; and which it has not withdrawn. So much for the ‘M’, supposedly for market, in its title.

Anyway, in its grand fantasy, misleadingly titled a ‘Plan’ for Australia to become the first – and if we actually did it, the only - country in the world to go all-in on wind and solar, it actually let the lunatic cat out of the bag, in that one sentence. This was when it talked about reducing the volatility of a “weather-powered energy system”.

Excuse me? We are racing to have a weather-powered energy system?

The Liddell coal fired power station in New South Wales. Picture: David Swift

Like we used to have, for the entirety of human existence until that first cave-man – or woman – discovered fire, the burning of a fossil fuel otherwise called wood; and more recently in the (late, very late) 19th century, when we started building coal fired power stations? Up until then we had exactly such a “weather-powered energy system’’. We had to rely on entirely, and entirely accept, the vagaries of the wind blowing to, rather lazily, turn windmills, or when the sun was shining we got a bit of heat, or when seasonal – is that another word for ‘weather’? – rivers and streams were running past mills to grind wheat.

So there you have it: AEMO saying out loud the fundamental truth – we are racing headlong back to the 18th century.

When – these are my words, borrowed of course from Hobbes, not theirs – life was “nasty, brutish and short”. Of course, our 21st century windmills and solar systems are so much more sophisticated than those ‘old things’. Except of course, they are exactly the same when ‘the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine’.

In a word: useless. In two words: utterly useless. In three words: destructively utterly useless, in a so-called electricity generation system. So what do you do, even with these very ‘sophisticated’, back-to-an-18th century, ‘weather-powered’ future, when the wind don’t blow…etc?

You install a lot, and I mean a lot of batteries, but which also, surprisingly, go flat very quickly…

... And – the dirty big secret that a semi-sane AEMO can’t avoid embracing – also a lot of, excuse my metaphorical belching in the church of climate change, gas-fired power stations.

AEMO says we need 10GW of gas-fired generation to iron-out the ‘volatility’ from a ‘weather-powered’ system – for when the wind ain’t blowing, the sun ain’t shining and those damn batteries have gone flat. That’s five Hazelwoods or Liddels. Indeed, it’s close to half our entire existing coal-fired fleet. Sure, they wouldn’t be running all the time – actually, they mostly would, as the record in the UK shows – but either way they would be pumping a lot and I mean a lot of, excuse my belching, CO2.

And just exactly how, where and when will these gas–plants be built? Do you think this government is going to back even one gas-fired power station?

Led by that idiotic twerp, posturing with his Climate Change and Energy ministerial title and wanting even bigger and faster CO2 cuts?

AEMO has inadvertently detailed our back to the 18th century future.