Power grab would leave us all in the dark

It is now clear shutting down the entire state is an even bigger test-run for an even more permanent future.

Health workers are seen in full PPE at a pop-up COVID19 test site in Clyde, Melbourne, Victoria. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Daniel Pockett

Chairman — sorry, premier — Dan might have to go and go right now as overlord of Victoria, the state of home imprisonment for a quarter of the entire Australian population and indeed outright 21-hours-a-day solitary confinement for those living alone, as I argued last week. But I have to also admit to some grudging respect for his devilish cunning.

It only came to me during the week that his closure of the state’s then biggest power station back in 2017 — Hazelwood, the supplier of up to 25 per cent of Victoria’s electricity — can now be so more clearly seen as actually a test-run for closing down the entire state, as he has done for most of this year.

But the devilish cunning gets even more devilish, or cunning.

It is now clear that the closing down of the entire state is itself an even bigger test-run for an even more permanent future — when the Labor government and its premier-for-life closes down all the other base-load coal-fired power stations.

Importantly, that is to say, closes them down while not allowing anyone to look for, far less develop, the gas that could power even just one token gas-fired station — or indeed even the gas we incarcerants, formerly citizens, might want to use for heating or cooking.

First, use the dusk-to-dawn curfew to get all Victorians used to scurrying home as the sun starts to disappear over the horizon — a real-life replay of those villagers scurrying home in those Hammer horror and vampire movies from the 1960s and 70s.

Then it’s but a short Pavlovian step to having them all go obediently early to bed when the lights are turned off from Party Central — when the sun of course doesn’t shine, the wind might decide not to blow, and somebody has forgotten to charge the state’s (future) big battery, as we all know can happen so easily and so often.

Ah, welcome, belatedly, to 2020: the year the world went officially insane.

One of the great conceptual images of the week was of our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, standing in a virtual reality sense atop one of the richest and most plentiful energy coal provinces in the world, to announce none other than a new — drum roll, please — gas-fired power station.

It has Buckley’s chance of ever being built; there is no gas to fuel it if it was; the NSW state government and/or assorted black, red and green tape would postpone either it or the necessary gas to a date beyond the 12th of never.

But beyond all that, it didn’t seem to occur to the PM that there was a rather significant inconsistency committing to a new gas-fired power station in the middle of a coal field when he was simultaneously committing more taxpayer money to the fantasy of so-called CCS — carbon capture and storage. If CCS can “work” — it can’t and never will; that’s one thing at least I can agree with Dark Green fanatics on, albeit for very different reasons — why not commit to a new coal-fired power station, with CCS? It would have even less CO2 emissions than a gas-fired one? The PM could have his fantasy low emissions and get to eat his, albeit very expensive, reliable power?

We have a simple choice. We can have the cheap, the reliable, and the plentiful electricity that not only makes life functional but indeed possible at the most basic level. Or we can have the (short-lived) feel-good fantasy of so-called renewable energy, now apparently with batteries.

Renewable is of course a synonym of “useless” or “doesn’t work” — apart from hydro, which has essentially become the energy equivalent of “don’t mention the war”.

A PM who was — what’s that word I’m searching for? Oh yes, a leader — would be making the case not for one fantasy gas-fired station but (at least) 10 to a dozen full-size 2000MW base-load stations, progressively over the next five to 20 years to replace the existing fleet of coal-fired stations as they reach their terminations.

They have to be, they can only be, coal-fired, gas-fired or nuclear. In a sane Australia — taking 10 as the starting point — they would be eight coal and two gas (to provide the on-off peaking power).

But sanity could contemplate an alternative mix of, say, four coal, four nuclear and two gas — but only on the basis that red and green tape absurdities would not be allowed to destroy the viability of nuclear.

Fantasists, main-chancers chasing billions of force-fed taxpayer and consumer dollars and assorted columnists keep prattling on about the future being renewable.

Could they please tell us in which century, not decade, that future will arrive? It sure won’t be this one.

After the trillions, yes trillions, that have been force-fed into so-called renewables aka useless energy, in 2018 the world still got 85 per cent of its energy from the old reliables — coal, gas and oil.

Yes, 11 per cent came from renewables but 7 per cent of that was from hydro. Just 4 per cent came from pre-19th century renewables. That’s wind and solar and the biggest component of all, so-called biomass: burning wood.

As I wrote in June when our twittering duo of Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull hailed the “end of coal” in the UK, one of the poster-children for this so-called renewables future, when the wind stopped blowing the UK had to turn on a coal generator.

This week, the UK was getting as much as 3000MW from coal — almost a Hazelwood and a Liddell.

When the wind stopped blowing, the UK was getting as much as 75 per cent of all its power from coal and gas; plus another 15 per cent or so from nuclear.

We have a choice.

We can live in a 21st-century reality of coal, gas and nuclear. Or we can go back to a pre-19th century future of useless renewables. Excuse that final tautology.