Stuck on a horse-drawn buggy as world speeds past
The suggestion we can power modern economies at scale on renewable energy is farcical. This is why Australia is the only country pretending that it can do it.
Many years ago, the first time I saw Manhattan from across the Hudson River, I thought its built density was astonishing and joked that it looked as if the mass of buildings should sink the island.
The energy and ingenuity evident in this part of the world is palpable – from the vigour of the salespeople to the crush of the freeways, from the eagerness of the hospitality to the extent of manufacturing industries, and from the astounding complexity of the infrastructure to the availability of all your shopping and entertainment needs, all the time.
We took our boys to the home of Hershey’s chocolates in Pennsylvania and what we thought was an indulgent diversion turned into a revealing education about Milton S. Hershey’s extraordinary business acumen and incredible philanthropy that each year, to this day, educates thousands of disadvantaged children.
In the national capital, at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, my boys were able to see the rudimentary aircraft used by the Wright brothers for their powered flight breakthroughs in nearby North Carolina in 1903, then see all the progressions as constant innovation delivered supersonic aircraft, mass intercontinental travel and space flights less than a lifetime later.
The power of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship continues to dominate the world. Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and X – all relatively new, all American and all changing the world while they generate wealth for the US.
The annual electricity consumption of just the part of the US east coast we traversed dwarfs Australia’s national demand (we consume a total of 188 terrawatt hours a year, whereas US Energy Department figures show that between them New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and Washington DC consume almost 600TWh). This power is needed to heat homes through bitter winters, and of course it underpins and generates much of the area’s industry and wealth.
Natural gas, coal, hydro and nuclear power fuel the cities, towns and factories of the east coast. Five minutes wandering the streets of New York or the factories of Pennsylvania is enough to impress on you that solar and wind energy could never provide enough reliable power to sustain these powerhouses of the modern world.
To power the Big Apple on renewables you would need all the wind farms and solar factories we are currently trying (and failing) to build right across Australia – that is, about five times more than we have installed already.
Imagine the alienated land and transmission lines to keep the lights on in New York City, and try to comprehend where all this infrastructure would be located, and consider how intermittent it would be, how much storage would be required, and what it would cost – then consider you would need to replicate that all over again to power the Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis and Washington DC area just down the road.
The concept is laughably implausible.
The suggestion we can power modern economies at scale on renewable energy is farcical. This is why Australia is the only country pretending that it can do this – no other country has been foolish enough even to try. (Germany had a bit of a go but always had the back-up of transmission from other countries, in particular nuclear electricity from France.)
This reality explains why Microsoft has entered into a billion-dollar deal to restart a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, undertaking to purchase all the electricity it generates across the next 20 years to power an artificial intelligence database in the region. One reactor at the Three Mile Island plant suffered a partial meltdown in 1979 in America’s worst nuclear accident (no lives were lost) so the rebooting of another reactor at this nuclear generation plant is an especially symbolic revival.
We took a detour on our US road-tripping to see the site, where the familiar cooling towers rise from an island in the Susquehanna River just a few miles downstream from the state capital, Harrisburg. A major road passes right across the river from the plant so that this infamous nuclear power station sits cheek by jowl with agriculture, industry and residential areas.
The following day we drove around the neighbouring county of Lancaster, where Amish communities continue to lead their technology-shunning lifestyles.
They refuse to connect their homes and farms to the electricity grid, even if safety concerns and state laws have forced them to fit battery-powered lights to their horse-drawn carriages.
Increasingly the Amish will use self-contained solar or wind generation installations to provide some electricity or to charge these batteries. They are also happy to use gas, not connected to the pipeline system, mind you, but stored in tanks on their farms.
It is astonishing to drive the backroads of this fertile farming country and see people going about their business in horse-drawn buggies just minutes away from bustling freeways, chocolate factories, industrious towns and a nuclear reactor. A 20-minute drive from the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, local shops and banks have rails in their carparks so the Amish can tie up their horses.
We stepped into a local homewares store where the women wore traditional dress not dissimilar to what we saw in The Handmaid’s Tale as they spoke in old Pennsylvania Dutch. The religious traditions they adhere to are a living testimony to the freedoms offered by the New World and the ongoing diversity and tolerance of American life.
For all the innovation and inventiveness of the US, and for all its technological leadership over the past two centuries, here are people turning their back on these advances. The Amish communities deliberately shun the modernity around them. It was a fascinating travel experience, but then the obvious occurred to me – Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Party are the Amish of the global energy debate.
Labor’s illogical antipathy to nuclear energy is a deliberate rejection of the most modern, powerful and reliable form of emissions-free electricity generation. Like the Amish, Labor’s rejection is not based on logic or practicality but on ideology.
It is a lifestyle choice of self-imposed hardship. The Prime Minister and his Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, are happy for the rest of the world to use nuclear power – all the major economies – and they happily attend global climate meetings where pledges are made to triple world nuclear output.
They are even eager to build nuclear-powered submarines in Australia and export uranium for the rest of the world to use.
Albanese and Labor will live in the modern nuclear age but just steer clear of it themselves. They prefer wind turbines and solar panels, and pretend the modern world has got it all wrong.
Who knows, perhaps their next move will be a reversion to horse-drawn buggies. Imagine the emissions reductions.
Logic has gone out of the window. Labor, the Greens and the teals keep telling us that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is the greatest threat to humankind and the planet yet they reject the only proven, reliable, emissions-free technology, even though it is being embraced and expanded by most of the world’s developed economies. In a world where arable land and wilderness are at a premium, they adopting a plan that will destroy and despoil vast areas of countryside and bushland.
After a couple of centuries of developing ever more dense and reliable energy sources, they want to revert to the most expansive, decentralised and unreliable energy machinery ever constructed – a renewables plus storage electricity system – even though it will be frighteningly expensive and weather dependent.
Even then, the killer point is that credible engineering and economic advice tells us it will not even work – we will not always have power when we want or need it. As I have been saying for more than a decade, this is national energy self-harm on a grand scale.
There is no doubt a nuclear buildout will be costly. And there is no doubt that renewables, fossil fuels and batteries will all be part of any future mix.
But we know nuclear plants work, have tiny footprints, minimise transmission needs, are reliable and last upwards of 75 years.
The Coalition has produced modelling by Frontier Economics showing its nuclear plan will be $260bn cheaper than the Labor, Greens and teals renewable plan.
This is the central point that Peter Dutton’s boldness has forced into the spotlight – the proposed renewables transition is immensely costly and has already driven our electricity prices to record levels. Our cheapest option is to keep going with coal and gas but, in a world committed to cutting emissions, nuclear is the only affordable and reliable option.
The benefits become even greater when you consider how much land will be spared from renewable and transmission projects, how our industrial base and workforce will be modernised, how our energy security will be enhanced and how these benefits will complement nuclear plans for defence.
It is a no-brainer, which is why the anti-nuclear activists have been reduced to displaying petrochemical materials inflated with CO in the shape of a three-eyed fish outside Coalition campaign events.
The Amish are more inventive and less dogmatic than this lot.
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