Bowen’s nuclear scare campaign a distraction from the coming renewables power crisis

The Albanese Labor government is all about telling people nuclear is too dangerous and too expensive. Pity about their renewables push, which is already well over budget.

The ABC is not the sort of place where one expects to find much scepticism about the renewable energy transition.

Which is why it was so surprising that on Monday the broadcaster published a story about electricity customers suddenly finding themselves with much larger bills after having “smart” meters foisted on them by power companies.

Buried deep within the report, which worked through the way new complex tariffs allowed power companies to charge customers more based on what they used at peak times, was a line that seemed to give the whole energy transition game away.

“It will become increasingly important for consumers to use energy when it is abundant – and therefore cheap – while cutting back their consumption as much as reasonable during periods of scarcity,” the author wrote, paraphrasing the words of the Australian Energy Council.

Got that?

Australia’s leaders are, entirely of their own volition, taking our energy rich nation down the road to energy poverty.

Instead of cheap, always available power from coal and gas and the nuclear we are not allowed to have, moving to the supposedly cheapest form of energy will see us all getting up at 2am to start the dishwasher to avoid peak hour power tariffs.

Australia still exports tonnes of fossil fuels even if we are not keen on using them ourselves for cheap energy. Picture: David Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The situation is being made inestimably worse by delays and cost blowouts in rolling out renewables projects (Snowy 2.0!) and transmissions lines across the country.

All but one major transmission line project underway in Australia is now behind schedule, with the average “slippage” time – that is, delay.

To say nothing of the potential for a season of blackouts at the end of this year if we get a typical hot, dry Australian summer that has the whole east coast cranking up the airconditioning.

This is one of the reasons why those who speculate about such things in Canberra expect Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to call an election later this year, before the mercury starts to climb in earnest.

It is also why energy minister Chris Bowen is so keen to make the coming election a scare campaign on nuclear power, to distract from his own government’s plans to make power more expensive and less reliable while lining the pockets of rent-seeking renewables investors.

French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech at the GE Steam Power System main production site for its nuclear turbine systems in Belfort, France. Picture: Jean-Francois Badias / AFP

No wonder Bowen is so keen to talk up the methodology of CSIRO – which is made up of, after all, scientists and not economists – in declaring nuclear the most expensive form of energy, despite what voters are seeing every time they open their power bills.

Far worse however is the scare mongering his office pumps out about nuclear power (“It has been 671 days since Peter Dutton first said the LNP would go down the path of risky reactors,” he tweets every day, upping the count each time).

Risky? For real?

For the party that supposedly “believes the science”, going down the “risky reactors” path is quite the flex.

As if residents of Lucas Heights all keep well maintained fallout shelters in case the research reactor blows, or DFAT warns Australians not to go to France because that nation takes 70 per cent of its electricity from nuclear.

Someone in the energy minister’s office should tell the boss that Monty Burns’ rickety Springfield Nuclear Power Plant was just a cartoon.

But this is all a distraction from the simple fact that in coming decades energy needs are going to go up, not down.

Labor is going to try to convince Australia that Springfield’s nuclear power station is close to the reality of atomic energy. (Picture: ChatGPT with apologies to Matt Groening

And if we are not careful, so too will our energy prices, just when we should be exploiting our abundant resources to provide the power for the next high tech phase of the industrial revolution.

Data centres and AI processors require heaps of always on power, and if Australia is going to compete in the new cyber world we’ll need plenty of cheap electrons coursing down the line.

For as much as the Albanese team talks down national small modular reactor projects, companies like Microsoft are looking at building the things into their own infrastructure.

At least, in countries where that sort of thing is allowed.

Yet for as much as Labor is spoiling for a fight over nuclear at the next election, it is not clear that Australians will bite.

According to the latest Lowy Institute poll, Australian attitudes have shifted markedly on nuclear over the past decade or so.

Around 61 per cent of Australians now support the idea of nuclear, and even a small majority of ALP voters said they were OK with the idea.

A summer of blackouts, or a year of quarterly energy bills that keep going up with or without rebates and handouts, may be enough to push that figure even higher.

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Originally published as Bowen’s nuclear scare campaign a distraction from the coming renewables power crisis