Opening a crushing power bill while sitting freezing (or boiling) in the dark focuses attention on the obvious and only cause: heavily subsidised and hopelessly intermittent wind and solar.

Delivered according to the whims of mother nature rather than the demands of human industry, activity and endeavour, wind and solar power were never going to cut it.

Credit goes to the rent seekers and the cultists that run with them. That politicos and the proletariat went along with the scam (at least by acquiescence) for so very long might be explained by the model known as ‘mass formation psychosis’.

Call it engineering unwitting consent.

Whatever the pathological beginnings of the grand wind and solar transition, it’s evident that its demise will be wholly political. Starting with the ballot box.

The voters have, all of a sudden, woken up and, should politicians be so arrogant as to ignore them, then they’ll follow the dinosaurs to historical oblivion. As Peter Credlin details below.

Liberal true believers stand firm against false net-zero gospel
The Australian
Peta Credlin
29 February 2024

If you wonder why your power bills keep going up, the main reason is that, for years now, the system has been run to reduce emissions rather than to deliver affordable and reliable electricity; the “green religion” replacing the laws of physics and the realities of engineering.

Hence the incessant references to replacing reliable coal and gas-fired power with “clean” wind and solar power, which might indeed be cheap when the wind blows and the sun shines, but unfortunately we need power 24/7 so we first have to get it from the windy, sunny places to where consumers want it, and we need back-up for those days when nature has other plans.

The capital cost of quickly replacing existing “dirty” fossil fuel power with green, firmed alternatives, plus the extra transmission lines that are needed to support a decentralised system, runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, all of which you, the consumer, must ultimately pay for.

Despite claiming the move to 82 per cent renewables by 2030 (compared with about 30 per cent now) would cut power bills by $275 per household a year, even Labor admitted pre-election that 10,000-plus kilometres of new transmission lines would cost $80bn. Then there’s the capital cost of the 22,000 new solar panels (mostly imported from China) that must be installed every single day and the 40 large wind towers that must be built every single month.

That’s why a tri-university study, involving former chief scientist Robin Batterham, admitted last year that moving towards net zero would cost in the order of $1.5 trillion just by 2030. That’s the bad news. The worse news is that there’s no sign that the emissions obsession driving all this will subside any time soon.

In fact, last week the Victorian government passed legislation through the lower house to increase the state’s renewable energy target to 95 per cent by 2035, or roughly tripling renewable generation in scarcely a decade, in a state that currently gets more than 60 per cent of its power from coal. A state, too, that only days earlier had endured a blackout where more than 500,000 homes and businesses were without power for up to two days because renewable power could not ramp up to cover a weather-generated outage in the state’s biggest power station.

So the price pain that has accompanied us ever since the start of the renewables push will just get worse. Shockingly, the Victorian Liberals under John Pesutto backed in this madness, signalling another nail in his coffin with leadership change expected soon.

Invariably, the green messianism behind the renewables push is accompanied by claims that there’s an unstoppable global move to renewables.

In fact, global coal use reached record levels last year because while Europe and North America are using less coal (and nuclear is growing), Asia is using more. That’s why Australia remains the world’s second biggest coal exporter despite the phobia about using it here. And despite the hype, less than 15 per cent of the world’s electricity comes from wind and solar.

But, like all true believers, the Albanese government shrugs off inconvenient facts. When power prices go up, that’s invariably due to war, not government policy, even though the Ukraine war had already started while the government was reiterating its commitment to a $275 a year cut.

Energy policy in Australia has become quite literally insane. First, Labor subsidised renewables to save the planet. Now it’s subsiding coal to stop the lights going out and to prevent major employers leaving the country. And soon it’s going to further subsidise renewables to drive the huge increase in renewable generation needed to meet its legislated 2030 emissions reduction targets.

Of course, all this is invariably described as investment, but it’s still extra (borrowed) money that must come out of your pocket in higher taxes or higher power prices. The federal government is in the process of making a “default market offer” that’s meant to underwrite the rapid construction of roughly half of the additional 60 GW of renewable power that’s said to be needed to reach its target.

This is essentially a government-guaranteed minimum price but the government hasn’t said what that price might be and how much it might cost in total, allegedly to avoid bidding up the price but in reality to avoid scaring the bejesus out of taxpayers, especially with the Dunkley by-election coming up this weekend.

These are the same taxpayers who have suffered a real decline in disposable household income of 6 per cent across the past year partly due to the 20 per cent plus rise in retail power prices.

There are two reasons nothing will change any time soon, despite the obvious impossibility of having both lower emissions and lower prices; without, that is, the nuclear power that would take up to a decade to develop even if the current legislative ban were removed overnight.

First, there’s the vested interests that renewable subsidies have created. Whatever its environmental benefits, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s demand at the National Press Club this week for a green hydrogen subsidy, a nickel subsidy (because it’s required for batteries) and a tax on fossil fuel users and exporters would have the side effect of improving the economics of his Squadron renewable power business. So, see his opposition to competitor technology such as nuclear for what it is.

Then there’s the pusillanimity of the Liberal Party at challenging the climate cult that’s supposed to be unquestionable especially among young people.

Peter Dutton’s federal opposition looks to be moving towards a sensible energy policy involving no further coal closures, rapid opening of new gas fields, no further subsidies for new renewables, and an end to the nuclear ban.

But it was, after all, the Morrison government that formally adopted the “net zero by 2050” target, without a clear plan to get there, that amounted to a political surrender to the green left. And for what? It lost Scott Morrison teal seats anyway and caused the transfer of his vote among conservatives to a rabble of minor parties on the right where undisciplined preference flows helped elect Labor with a record low primary vote of 32 per cent.

At a state level, Liberal leaders who have tried to out-green the left have lost government; think Steven Marshall in South Australia and Dominic Perrottet in NSW who sadly was mostly a vessel for moderate Matt Kean. In Victoria, green policies helped Matthew Guy lose two elections and in Western Australia Zak Kirkup’s green zealotry reduced the Liberals to a two-seat rump. Left-leaning Liberals lose and that’s a fact.

In Canberra at last there is hope that the Liberals are waking up, but endless political rhetoric about a “climate emergency”, media weather porn about “extreme” events, and intellectual and political cowardice from our political class mean that it will probably take even higher power bills and widespread frequent blackouts for anything to change.

But just like the voice, believe me, the ordinary Australian has had enough, and electorally, things are now more volatile than ever.
The Australian