Fact is, Dick Smith has revealed the lies about renewables

It took one of our great innovators to force the ABC to own up to its deceit.

It took one of our great innovators - Dick Smith - to force the ABC to own up to its deceit. Picture: Nikki Short

The RMIT ABC Fact Check own goal against Dick Smith exposed not only the green-left bias and ­deceit of the national broadcaster and the so-called “fact-checking” outfit, but also the central lie at the heart of the national climate and energy debate. The renewables-plus-storage experiment that Australia has embarked upon is not only unprecedented but impossible with current technology.

This is an inconvenient fact that is denied daily by the Australian Labor Party, the Greens, the ABC, the climate lobby, and the so-called elites of our national debate. We are undermining our national economic security by chasing a mirage, and our taxpayer-funded media deliberately misleads us down this dead-end path.

In an age when most of us were analogue, Smith made an electronic fortune then turned his attention back to the organic and irreplaceable, focusing on conservation and adventure.

The Australian Geographic founder epitomises the admirable qualities of initiative, innovation, and environmental stewardship.

Which makes it confounding that the RMIT ABC nexus targeted him. It seems he committed the mortal sin in their eyes of supporting the only reliable, weather-­independent, emissions-free electricity generation available – nuclear.

It is an energy source increasingly embraced by green activists and leftists in Europe and the US. But not here. Whether it is due to intellectual rigidity or partisan positioning, the left in Australia are stuck in an old-fashioned, Cold War mindset of nuclear fearmongering and denial.

The ideological blinkers are so strong at RMIT ABC Fact Check that when the renewables enthusiast and environmentalist Smith made perfectly sensible and apolitical comments about the inability of renewables alone to power a country, he made himself their public enemy. The fact checkers decided to take him down, even though he was right.

This is an example of all that is wrong in our public square.

Facts do not matter so much as perceived motives or ideological side.

Anyone who has spoken with Smith, listened to him being interviewed or read his comments would be in no doubt that he would favour an all-renewable energy system if it could work. (For that matter, who would not?)

But with his technical nous, environmental bent, and practical mindset, Smith asks the obvious question: if renewables alone ­cannot give us an emissions-free world, what is the most efficient and effective way to deliver that goal?

And his answer is nuclear.

Despite Smith aiming for the right goal and advocating the right outcome through the only indisputably effective means, his answer apparently is not what the woke want to hear.

Because in making his case, Smith dared to speak the truth about renewables.

“Look, I can tell you, this claim by the CSIRO that you can run a whole country on solar and wind is simply a lie,” Smith told 2GB.

“It is not true. They are telling lies. No country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables — that’s impossible.”

It is worth picking over this dispute because it is illuminating. Smith’s initial complaints to RMIT ABC Fact Check were ignored, until he appeared on my Sky News program threatening legal action and got his lawyers involved.

The eventual apology specifically retracted their claim that Smith opposes renewable energy. Little wonder, this is a bloke who charges his EV with renewable ­energy – Smith loves the technology, he is just realistic about its limitations.

Reworking their “fact check” after Smith’s threats, RMIT ABC included tortured and implausible arguments. They reported that the CSIRO denied ever having said you could run a whole country on renewables.

It is not difficult to find contradictory evidence. For instance, a 2017 article on the German “Energy Transition” website was headed “CSIRO says Australia can get to 100 per cent renewable ­energy”.

The article talked about a “toxic political debate about the level of renewable energy” that can be ­accommodated in the system.

“CSIRO energy division’s principal research scientist Paul Graham said there were no barriers to 100 per cent renewable energy, and lower levels could be easily ­absorbed.”

Years later, Graham doubled down on this, declaring; “The whole system is getting ready for renewables supported by storage.”

In 2020, on Australia’s “Renew Economy” site, we saw the headline “CSIRO embraces transition to net zero emissions ‘without derailing our economy’ ”.

And just last December, the CSIRO published an article titled “Rapid decarbonisation can steer Australia to net zero by 2050”,

There is no renewables scepticism or realism in those statements. It seems that Smith was right about the thrust of CSIRO analysis.

Yet now, via RMIT ABC Fact Check’s revised article, we learn the CSIRO has a more nuanced, and realistic stance: “Its position is that ‘renewables are a critical part, but not the only part, of the energy mix as Australia moves towards the government-legislated target of net-zero emissions by 2050’.”

Smith has flushed out an important concession to reality from the CSIRO. The “renewables are a critical part, but not the only part” formulation is exactly the point Smith was making when RMIT ABC tried to take him down.

Talk of a 100 per cent renewables-plus-storage model is fantasy for now. I wonder how long it will take the politicians to become similarly frank, and most of the media.

Perhaps even more deceitful was the RMIT ABC pretence that some countries are already powered entirely by renewables.

“There are four countries running 100 per cent on wind-water-solar (WWS) alone for their grid electricity,” reported RMIT ABC, quoting an academic report that cited Albania, Paraguay, Bhutan, and Nepal.

Right off the bat, these were ­ridiculous comparisons. These are not large, modern, or developed economies (why not compare our emissions challenge to the performance to subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa?). Australia’s GDP per capita is about eight times higher than Albania’s (which had to import electricity from neighbouring countries just two years ago anyway, thanks to a drought undercutting its hydro generation), 10 times higher than Paraguay’s, 20 times Bhutan’s and about 50 times higher than Nepal’s.

The comparisons are laughable on those grounds alone, but it gets worse. The so-called fact checkers were only accounting for the electricity grids in these nations, even though huge parts of their populations and economies are not connected to the grid, and there is heavy use of other fuels for heating, cooking, and transport.

The most pertinent figures, now included in the RMIT ABC updated article show that renewables account for only a third of Albanian energy, closer to 40 per cent in Paraguay and just 6 per cent in Nepal. A long way from their previously claimed 100 per cent.

Perhaps self-conscious about the absurdity of their claims about those small, poor nations, the fact checkers had also made reference to a comparable developed economy, choosing the US state of ­California.

Stanford University’s Mark ­Jacobson noted California had “been running on more than 100 per cent WWS for 10 out of the last 11 days for between 0.25 and 6 hours per day”.

Really? As little as 15 minutes on renewable energy and that proves a modern economy can thrive on renewables plus storage?!

The intellectual rigour at play here is Thunberg-esque. California has nuclear energy, gas generation and constantly falls back on interstate interconnection to coal-fired power. And despite all this, it is dealing with supply shortages that have led to calls for EV owners to avoid charging their vehicles at certain times.

The green zealots are going to have to do a lot better when coming up with their examples of renewable energy nirvana. The RMIT ABC’s desperate attempt to talk up renewables only underscored Dick Smith’s crucial point – renewables can and often do fill the grid in places where they have high penetration, such as South Australia or Germany, but they are intermittent and cannot reliably provide power when it is needed.

So far, except in some unique situations with abundant hydro-electricity, there is no way to efficiently and affordably store sufficient electricity for long enough to underpin a renewables-only system.

The International Energy Agency says current technology can only get us about halfway to net zero, the rest of the emission reductions will have to come from technology not yet in operation.

All this exposes the big lie at the heart of the nation’s climate and energy debate. Labor, the Greens, activist groups like the Climate Council and activist journalists at the ABC and elsewhere are consistently misleading the population about the prospects for renewables. They not only suggest that renewables can get us to net zero, but that some countries are already there.

This is absolute bunkum, it is spouted daily, and Dick Smith has exposed it. By fact checking the fact checkers he has corrected the narrative.

Perhaps RMIT ABC might like to fact check the constant government claims that renewable energy is delivering reliable, affordable power and a green jobs bonanza. They might also want to interrogate whether there is such a thing as a “renewable energy superpower”.

They might test whether the claimed prohibitive costs of ­nuclear energy have sent France, Finland, the US, UK, South Korea, Japan and China broke.

Perhaps RMIT ABC might want to check facts instead of pushing propaganda and attempting to discredit their perceived ideological enemies.