Energy fiasco could doom Albanese to poll defeat

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is facing many challenges. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

If the Albanese government is to lose this year’s election it will be two years of falling GDP per person, the resultant household recession, and the largest fall in living standards since the Great Depression that gives the opposition the 18 seats it needs to win.
But it will be a first-term government’s energy policy that has most likely crystallised for voters the combination of hard-left ideology and epic incompetence that’s to blame for their cost-of-living pain.

What will haunt this government to its political grave is the promise it made to reduce power bills by $275 per household per year – which has turned into increases of up to $1000, mostly because of the government’s insistence the whole purpose of our electricity system is to reduce emissions rather than to deliver affordable and ­reliable power.

A government that still claims the so-called energy transition is “unstoppable” now plainly can’t meet its much-vaunted 82 per cent of electricity from renewable sources within five years; won’t specify its further emissions target for 2035; and is still clinging to a net zero by 2050 commitment that none of the four biggest national emitters share, thanks to Donald Trump’s resolve to “drill baby drill”.

Due to the Albanese government’s green fanaticism, embodied in climate crusader Chris Bowen, a country that’s still one of the world’s top three gas exporters is either going to run out of domestic gas, break supply contracts with trusting friends like Japan, or – wait for it – import back its own gas at vastly inflated global spot prices – a ludicrous process likened by one industry insider to “importing sand into the Sahara”.

This week, the government started to lose the backing of the industry groups that had previously been conned by claims of a “green jobs bonanza” or been exploiting subsidies to promote their short-term economic interests ahead of the long-term national interest.

US President Donald Trump’s resolve to “drill baby drill” has derailed the government’s energy transition. Picture: AFP

Indeed, it’s more and more obvious – notwithstanding the government’s claims we could be a “renewable energy superpower” (as if no one else has sun or wind) – that the only real renewable energy superpower is China, which is supplying 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels and wind turbines while also planning 100 new coal-fired power stations and 10 new nuclear power stations.

First, Food Distributors Australia claimed its members’ power bills had leapt by more than 50 per cent under this government and called for the fast-tracking of new coal and gas power.

Then the head of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry said the government’s 82 per cent renewables target was a “pipedream”; and the head of COSBOA, the leading small business lobby, added that energy costs were making many small businesses unviable.

Now the former Business Council chief and head of Infrastructure NSW, Graham Bradley, says the energy transition is simply not happening. It’s a local echo of Trump’s new energy secretary’s observation that “there is no climate crisis and there is no energy transition”.

Head of Infrastructure NSW Graham Bradley says the energy transition is simply not happening. Picture: AFP

As the Opposition Leader told me for my hour-long special with him on Thursday night on Sky, “intermittent power, it won’t work”. He predicted even the Labor Party would eventually be “mugged by reality”, but not under Anthony Albanese.

As Peter Dutton says, the renewables push is “driven by emotion, not reality, and there’s no regard for cost”. What’s also becoming obvious is the extent to which the renewable energy­enamoured teal independents are the dupes of Big Wind.

This week it was revealed the teals’ biggest financial backers last financial year, to the tune of about a million dollars each, were Rob Keldoulis, who founded VivCourt, a speculator in renewable energy, and Marcus Catsaras, who runs Aethra, a climate tech fund. Then there’s the Climate 200 principal, Simon Holmes a Court, whose latest business is called Decarb Ventures, which is pursuing “global investment in clean energy technology”.

At one level, why shouldn’t slick business types take advantage of gullible politicians thinking they’re saving the planet? It’s just that the result has been a massive subsidy-go-round. First, the government subsidises renewable ­energy to make it economically ­viable; then it subsidises coal-fired power to keep the lights on when the wind drops and the sun goes down; finally, it subsidises consumers to avoid the political pain from massive bill shock.

Meanwhile, the “green transition” – which Chris Bowen has ­likened to a second Industrial Revolution – is not happening at the scale required: the installation of 22,000 new solar panels every single day; 40 large wind turbines every single month, over eight years; and the construction by 2030 of at least 10,000km of new transmission lines; plus all the batteries, pumped hydro schemes, and new gas peaker plants needed to make an 82 per cent intermittent energy system work.

The Snowy Hydro 2.0 project is almost a decade behind schedule.

The Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme is almost a decade behind schedule with a 600 per cent cost blowout. And the HumeLink transmission line is five years ­behind schedule with costs blown out five times.

The government’s offshore wind power zones are bedevilled by environmental protests and massive extra costs. Onshore wind is meeting massive resistance from farmers and conservationists, angry at the industrial-scale desecration of prime agricultural land and national parks.

As parliament returned this week, the government that keeps demanding the opposition’s nuclear costs could not specify the costs of its own energy plans. The fact that no other country on earth is attempting a near total transition to renewables while more than 30 countries are already using nuclear power, with another 20 seeking it, says all that is needed about the relative cost and feasibility of what’s happening here versus what’s happening overseas.

For a government committed to reducing emissions further and faster to avoid what it says is an otherwise inevitable climate catastrophe, the logical consequence of America’s abandonment of net zero is that Australia must do more – hence the significance of the 2035 targets the government won’t reveal.

It won’t just be the energy sector that is impacted, it will be most aspects of life including the food we eat, the houses we live in, and the ways we move around. Because the only way to get agricultural emissions down is to cull the herd, up goes the price of meat; to make houses more energy-efficient, up goes the price of homes; and to end fossil fuels in transport, out go more than 95 per cent of our existing vehicles and there’s no more air travel.

As Peter Dutton will say on Sky on Thursday night of Labor’s 2035 targets: “If it’s a good story to tell, why not put it out there?”

Instead, new targets are the last thing the PM wants to discuss before an election. That’s because there’s a lifestyle upheaval coming if Labor gets a second term – especially if they’re in an alliance with Greens and teals.