Opinion: UK shows move to renewables has little benefit

If coal is now a relatively expensive form of power, why does the first major country to move off it have the highest power prices in the world, asks Matt Canavan.

Then British prime minister Boris Johnson with naturalist Sir David Attenborough in 2020

In late 2020 then British prime minister Boris Johnson denied Australia a speaking spot at its Climate Ambition Summit because “we have tried to set a high bar for this summit to encourage countries to come forward with ambitious commitments”.

At the time, Australia had not yet signed up to the UK’s mad goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

But a year later, at the Glasgow climate conference Australia did back down, along with almost all other countries in the world.

Since then very few countries have taken the target seriously, at much cost to the relative competitiveness of those countries that have, like the UK and Australia.

This week the UK shut its last coal-fired power station. This news was cause for much cheer among the potpourri of radical climate activist groups that seem to be the only industry going gangbusters in both of our countries right now.

What these groups did not mention though is that there was other major news from the UK this week. The UK government quietly released new figures that showed the UK’s power prices were now the highest in the developed world.

Which raises the very reasonable question: if coal is now a relatively expensive form of power, as we are constantly told, why does the first major country to move off it have the highest power prices in the world?

The UK, like us, generates just over 40 per cent of its power from renewable energy, a massive increase from just a decade ago. We are told that renewable energy is the cheapest form of power, so why hasn’t the massive expansion of renewable energy in the UK and Australia delivered us cheaper power prices?

The problem for renewable energy is that it is a bit like modern art. There are lots of people who regard themselves as very intelligent telling you that it is actually, really good. But when you look closely at it you cannot help thinking, this is really pretty rubbish.

The UK’s experience has been the same for every country that has tried the renewable experiment. The other two countries that join the UK on the podium for the highest power prices in this Olympic event, Belgium and Germany, have been poster children for the green movement.

J.D. Vance (left) and Tim Walz at this week’s vice-presidential debate. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

Countries have been investing heavily in solar and wind for about 20 years, yet there is no country in the world that has lowered its power prices by significantly increasing the share of its electricity coming from solar and wind power.

These higher power prices have consequences. This week Britain’s last steel mill shut down.

Modern steelmaking (through the Bessemer converter process) was invented in England, and the UK was the world’s largest steel producer in the late 19th century.

While there are plans to make recycled steel in the next few years (with the help of massive government subsidies), Britain will no longer be able to produce steel from scratch.

The only thing the UK has got from all of the climate conferences it has hosted is the loss of its industrial capacity to other countries.

These other countries pay lip service to the climate gods at the talkfests, while massively expanding their fossil-fuel industries so as to take jobs from the gullible.

This does not just include the likes of China (building two coal-fired power stations a week), India (which just increased its coal imports by 40 per cent in July) or Indonesia (which has increased its coalmining by 25 per cent since signing up to “net zero”). It also includes our less naive friends like the US.

At this week’s vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz (the Democrat candidate) boasted that under Joe Biden “we are producing more natural gas and more oil at any time than we ever have”.

He is right. Last year the US produced more oil than any country, in any year, ever has. The United States now enjoys electricity and gas prices a third of those in the UK and Australia.

Worryingly, under this Labor government we are heading down the same path as the United Kingdom. Labor plans to double down on failure and double our use of renewable energy by 2030.

And, like the UK, Labor wants to host a climate conference in Australia in the next few years. This time we should not be so naive to buckle to the global pressure.

More than half of our exports now come from coal and gas. We do not need to replace them with the exports of our jobs, which is about the only thing the climate movement seems good at.

Matt Canavan is an LNP senator for Queensland

Originally published as Opinion: UK shows move to renewables has little benefit