As power prices rocket into orbit, thanks to an obsession with unreliable, subsidised wind and solar, businesses and households are finally waking up to the greatest economic and environmental fraud, of all time.

Rural communities being treated as roadkill by industrial wind and solar outfits are furious; and every power consumer understand full well why they are struggling to pay their power bills. So far, so obvious.

What’s not so obvious is that, behind-the-scenes, Australia’s grand wind and solar transition is on the brink of implosion. Investors are dumping projects like potatoes, and no amount of cash and cajoling from the Federal Green-Labor Alliance can rectify the exodus.

The summer – which portends to be hot and dry, with major surges in power demand during heatwaves that will never be met by wind and solar (think calm 42° nights) – the rubble will hit the road with widespread load shedding and mass blackouts every time wind and solar output hits the floor.

As Jennie George (former union boss and Labor MP) points out below, the writing is on the wall but, evidently, her old Labor mates have chosen to double down on the disaster.

Bowen’s Reliable Renewables plan is serving us ill
The Australian
Jennie George
12 October 2024

The Albanese government is facing a loss of social licence for its energy transition, particularly in regional areas. A recent survey confirmed this decline, with less than half of the respondents (47 per cent) feeling positive about the renewables transition compared with the peak of 70 per cent in August 2022.

Instead of dealing with concerns, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen persists with a rebranded Reliable Renewables plan and attempts to convince us it’s working well. Labor’s message doesn’t accord with the experiences of many communities or acknowledge the burden of rising power bills and systemic problems.

To claim weather-dependent, intermittent renewables are reliable is akin to Bowen’s claim that renewables are the cheapest form of energy because the sun and wind don’t send you bills. People see through the spin, knowing the cost of power has never been higher.

Governments are responsible for ensuring the lights stay on and industry functions. Labor believes reliable renewables, backed up by batteries and pumped hydro, can power our economy. They can’t. Baseload power is essential in the energy mix to guarantee certainty of supply. It’s like previous assurances that Labor’s modelling stood up to scrutiny, only for it to unravel with the first broken promise that household power bills would be reduced by $275 by 2025.

Last year the transition stalled, with investment falling to the lowest level since 2017. Emissions fell by 0.5 per cent and renewables were 50 per cent short of target. With the government desperate to meet its 2030 targets, the Capacity Investment Scheme will now underwrite a further 32 gigawatts of renewable capacity.

The scheme operates off-budget with no stated cap on costs. In secret contracts for difference, risk for revenue losses below the floor will be transferred from investor to public. It’s an incentive to invest and profit from subsidised renewable projects. No wonder overseas investors are lured by such terms.

The saga of Snowy 2.0 continues. After years of delay, huge cost overruns and problems with tunnel boring machine Florence, a complex fault zone has been discovered. It has required the purchase of a fourth tunnelling machine, costing $75m and now awaiting approval to be used.

It’s unlikely Snowy 2.0 will be operational this decade, if ever. What if and what then? We’re also told repeatedly “there’s no transition without transmission” but, two years on, not one of five “urgently needed” transmission projects is at the construction stage.

Labor remains conflicted about the importance of gas for domestic use, to provide industry with reliable and affordable power 24/7, to firm renewables, provide stability to the grid and underpin 225,000 manufacturing jobs. With Victoria, Bowen repeatedly has rejected gas, even as a transition fuel, and excluded it from the CIS. How does he intend to replace 90 per cent of our baseload power with coal’s exit during the next decade?

Now there’s concerns with the Kurri Kurri gas plant. Costs have blown out to $1.4bn for a plant that doesn’t tap into the main trunkline. The construction of a 21km gas and storage pipeline has been delayed another year, with approval needed to run the plant on diesel next year. How will future gas supply be guaranteed? So much for Labor’s promise the plant would open on a 30 per cent hydrogen-gas mix and run on hydrogen by 2030.

With Labor’s ambivalence about gas and an irrational prohibition on nuclear, the public needs to know how reliable baseload power will be provided under Labor’s plans. Instead of the minister addressing this critical issue, his focus yet again is on targets; the emissions reduction target for 2035. He’s awaiting advice from the Climate Change Authority, chaired by Matt Kean, which previously suggested an increase in the 65 per cent to 75 per cent range.

Virtue signalling and targets continue to drive Labor’s agenda. In a world of magic pudding economics, the energy transition is held together by subsidy on subsidy, temporary relief packages and grants galore. Hydrogen projects, central to Labor’s vision of being a renewable energy superpower, depend on these grants. Despite billions in taxpayer support, private capital has remained wary. Fortescue and Origin Energy have cut their losses and walked away from involvement. Labor’s $63.2m grant to underpin the promise of green steelmaking at Whyalla also is teetering on the brink.

Labor’s demand that the opposition “finally lay out detailed costs, analysis and modelling” is the right call. It should apply equally to Labor’s plans. The government should respect the public’s right to know and provide its whole of system costings, incurred and estimated, as well as funding for the CIS and transmission costs passed on undeclared in our power bills.

Labor’s plans are not working well and its 2030 targets won’t be met. We’re at a crossroad where decisions about our energy future will have lasting consequences.

The warning signs are there, but is Labor listening?

Jennie George is a former ACTU president and Labor MP for Throsby.
The Australian

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

We all knew it was going to happen, but the green blob turned a blind eye:

It was the warning Ed Miliband didn’t want to hear.

Days after the Energy Secretary pledged low-carbon power for all at Labour’s annual conference, energy giant EDF discussed plans to close four of the UK’s five remaining nuclear power stations.

Two are currently scheduled to close in 2026, followed by another two in 2028.

“They can’t go on forever,” said Rachael Glaeving, commercial director at EDF’s UK business. 

“Any life extension of these power stations is going to be measured in months.”

The decision, announced after thorough engineering reviews, is set to make Miliband’s dream a lot harder. He has promised to deliver a net zero power grid by 2030, although in practice this is expected to mean 95pc green energy – with the remainder coming from burning gas.

Eventually, if the Government succeeds in the scale of wind and solar farm construction envisaged, it could lead to an abundance of energy.

But in the nearer term, some fear the breakneck pace of change could stretch the grid to the limit. In September, the country’s last coal-fired power station, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, closed.

As Britain’s reactor fleet shrivels, the amount of nuclear capacity will fall from six gigawatts (GW) today to just 1.2 GW by 2028 or soon after. Along with rising demand from power-hungry data centres and technologies of the future, it will make it even harder to keep the lights on when wind and solar generation is low.

Against this backdrop, the National Energy System Operator (Neso), the newly nationalised body overseeing the electricity grid, is turning to households and businesses to help balance the system.

Last week, it announced year-round plans to manage demand by paying consumers to cut their electricity usage at times of tight supply.

The so-called demand flexibility service has been billed as a forward-looking way to manage an increasingly complex and “smart” system, as we move from using a small number of large coal and gas-fired plants to relying on a plethora of intermittent sources of wind and solar power – backed up by batteries, energy-storing giant flywheels, interconnectors and other gadgets.

Yet some critics warn this all looks strikingly similar to rationing, especially coming at a time when electricity production continues to fall.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/13/why-age-of-energy-rationing-is-looming-for-britain