When the lights starts going out, you know who to blame

We’re lurching towards an energy disaster, and Chris Bowen is captain of the ship.

Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen.

When the lights start going out in brown and indeed outright black outs, the minister for destroying our energy system, Chris Bowen, won’t be the only one to blame.

And they will; go out, that is. Nothing is more certain than as night follows day - when of course, the sun absolutely don’t shine.

But because also, when the wind don’t blow, and, we now we have to add, even the lithium batteries have gone flat, and all the water has run down the hill, if indeed it gets to ever be pumped up in the first place, up Snowy way.

So, in that future, to which we are lurching at an escalating pace, Minister Bowen won’t be the only one to blame.

Our entire political, business and intellectual leadership have also been contributing craven culprits.

But Bowen will be the main one.

It is now almost entirely in his gift to turn off the lights or to keep them on, and he has quite deliberately – if, true, in his bottomless stupidity, seemingly unknowingly - chosen to turn them off.

Critically, this applies whether Australia was embarked on a rational future of generating most of its future electricity from a mix of coal, gas and nuclear power stations, or whether it embraced the really quite nationally embarrassing insanity of net zero.

Let me put aside that ‘rational future’; focussing instead on what a half-competent, if religiously fanatical, zealot like Bowen could do to achieve both lower carbon dioxide emissions from power generation and keep the lights on at reasonable, if not the cheapest, cost to consumers.

He or she would do two things.

First and primarily, keep coal-fired power stations open, by guaranteeing them daily supply into the national grid at a range of guaranteed prices.

Utterly unreliable wind and solar would have to be the ‘swing’ producers, not as now the ones that get guaranteed access, forcing coal to stop and start.

Secondly, extend this to future new gas and nuclear power stations.

So that as they came on stream – with gas, playing the up-and-down role of peaking supplier – the coal stations could be retired. Yes, utterly inane and indeed insane, wind and solar would still have a place; but a subsidiary place to ensure the lights stayed on.

Instead, we have this fanatical, frenzied, promotion by Bowen of wind and solar and batteries – and the environmental devastation of 10,000km of power lines, to say nothing of the bird slaughter.

Like a medieval religious fanatic – or a 20th century communist – if a million birds have to be slaughtered and 26m Australians have their lights (and air conditioners) turned off, so be it. My future demands it.

You get a sneaking suspicion that Bowen is not big on irony.

You could not have asked for a more emphatic – indeed, right in your face – exercise of it, that Cop28 was held in a city, Dubai, where the air conditioners run 24/7 and the desert has been literally greened, all by burning fossil fuels.

And China and India are going to close their coal-fired stations? Yeah, sure.

Originally published as When the lights starts going out, you know who to blame