By Jo Nova

The Renewable Crash Test Dummy hits a fork in the road

Finally the Australian opposition is bravely popping the sacred cow of the Energy Wars. The Dummy nation was aiming for the holy grail “low emission” grid that no other nation had tried. The driest continent on Earth, with small hydro, and no extension cords to any nuclear power, were going to build the perfect grid based on the wind and sun alone. It was always doomed to fail, it was just a question of how much money would be burned at the pyre before the Crash Test Dummy crashed.

Because they didn’t do their homework, and the fan-media didn’t ask them too, the Labor Party set themselves up to fail. They left their left flank wide open, and the Opposition is finally launching the missiles that have been there all along.  The ultimate low emissions generator was always and obviously the unspeakable nuclear power. It’s a fifty year old technology. If anyone actually cared about carbon dioxide, they would have done this instead of the Kyoto scheme in 1997. But it was all a theater of grift and graft for unreliable, fairy energy, or for players who like trips to ski clubs in Davos, or jobs after politics with the UN or “energy companies”. (Not mentioning any names, Matt Kean).

Australia doesn’t need more “large-scale renewables” says the Opposition party, offering nuclear power instead of renewables technohell

Finally the dirty laundry of renewable power might be hung out to dry in an election. After ten years of rampant renewables growth in Australia, a dawning realization is sweeping the nation that wind and solar are not cheap, and will never be cheap. It’s hard to believe only two years ago Labor won on promises to bring electricity costs down by $275 dollars a household, only for prices to rise by $750 instead. At the same time, the awful reality of collecting low density energy is all too apparent in regional areas where developers are swarming to cover the land in renewables infrastructure. No one wants industrial plants in their backyard, but when we have to build 10,000 kilometers of high voltage towers, 40 million solar panels, and 2,500 bird killing turbines — its in everyone’s backyard.

Suddenly the real environmentalists are the ones who just want to build seven small nuclear plants on old industrial sites. Save the eagles, spare the whales, and don’t club the koalas, OK? The opposition are promising to build nuclear plants on the old coal sites, give cheap electricity to locals and to block major offshore wind projects and oppose large solar plants too. As they so aptly say, the low hanging fruit on this tree are already done.

This is the Deputy Opposition leader saying what was unthinkable only a year ago:

Nationals leader David Littleproud says Coalition* will find energy alternatives ‘so we don’t have to pursue large-scale renewables’

By Rosie Lewis, The Australian

Amid a pre-election brawl over climate and energy ­policy, Mr Littleproud said the Coalition would send “strong investment signals” that Australia didn’t need large-scale industrial wind farms onshore or offshore or other big renewable projects.

Mr Littleproud also indicated to The Australian that he was opposed to large-scale solar farms, saying: “We’d like to look for whatever option we can so we don’t have to pursue large-scale renew­ables full stop.

“All the low-hanging fruit for large-scale renewables has been done, we’ve now got to go out beyond that.

He had to clarify that one big wind farm offshore would go ahead, but one that was just approved this week in the Illawarra, would not. The Coalition says the Commonwealth will own the nuclear plants. They’ll build them in the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, the Hunter Valley in NSW, Collie in WA, Port Augusta in South Australia, and the ­southwest Queensland electorate of Maranoa.

Nuclear power is the sleeper policy — even half the Greens agree

Last year political number crunchers suddenly realized there is no mass anti nuclear protest movement here, just the ghost of one from forty years ago. Polls came out in May 2023 showing that with virtually no national discussion about it, right out of the starting blocks, fully 56% of Australian voters thought the government should seriously consider small modular reactors (SMRs), and only 12% disagreed. Which is all the more astonishing given that only 24% of Australians even knew about SMRs at the time.

Wait until Australians find out there are 440 nuclear power plants in the world, and that even Armenia has one. And Belarus. Mexico has two, Hungary has four, and the Czech Republic has six. They’re everywhere.

The Australian: commissioned by the Minerals Council of Australia | Insightfully polled 2,400 people, May 2023.

When will we get over the adulation of roof top solar?

Not everything about the Coalition plan is smart, Australia already has a glut of solar power at lunchtime, so promising to put more on roofs in capital cities isn’t going to help. It’s just more electricity we can’t store at a time of day when we don’t need it which non-solar households have to subsidize. The duck curve at noon vandalizes the market for reliable generators, which have to recover costs at breakfast and dinner time anyway. And one cloud can cover a million suburban houses.

If a large solar plant doesn’t make sense in Alice Springs where there is no cheap coal fired power, it certainly doesn’t make sense in Sydney where there is. Most new solar panels in capital cities are a waste of glass, metal and labor that someone has to pay. They are a pagan shield against the storms, supposedly protecting coral reefs from Parramatta. But we all had cheaper electricity when no one had solar panels.

The bottom line, which neither party is saying, is that we need to get the science right before we start pretending to change the weather — not after we blow a trillion dollars making technohell temples to fend off the evil spirits. Nuclear plants are good, but coal plants are cheaper, and CO2 is a gift from God. The world should pay Australia to burn all our coal and feed the forests and fields.

Who will audit the foreign committee in Geneva? Which scientists are paid to find holes in the IPCC religious sermons about boiling oceans? None of them. Not one.

*The conservative Coalition is the pairing of the Liberal Party and the Nationals.