Everywhere in the world, the higher the reliance on ‘renewables’ (solar and wind), the higher the electricity prices. It’s an iron rule of electricity generation.
Europe has been a world leader in ‘de-carbonising’ its electricity by shifting to wind and solar. Eight of the 10 most expensive countries for electricity are European. Australia, under the rule of the Climate Cult, is right up there, too.
And it is largely thanks to the deranged obsessions of Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen. In one of the most disastrous appointments since Whitlam made a literal Marxist Treasurer, the clown universally known as “Boofhead” has been put in charge of what was once a world-class energy grid.
While even his fellow Climate Cultists at this year’s COP29 beano acknowledged the vital role of nuclear energy in keeping grids running in the absence of reliable coal power, Boofhead just reckons he knows better. Bowen, and Labor, remain absolutely opposed to nuclear.
In Europe, though, even the left’s beloved Scandinavian countries are not nearly so stupid.
Sweden’s Energy Minister took to social media last Thursday to voice her displeasure with the Germans. German demand for Scandinavian electricity had sent power prices through the roof.
“It is a result of decommissioned nuclear power,” Ebba Busch wrote on X.
“When it’s not windy, we get high electricity prices with this failed electricity system.”
For all the green-left swooning, Germany’s so-called energiewende has been an ignominious failure. Like the other signature policy of former chancellor Angela Merkel, open borders to the Middle East and Africa, it’s a failure that’s poisoning the rest of Europe.
In Norway last week the ruling centre-left Labour Party pledged to cut the interconnector with the EU grid after Germany’s latest wind drought sent Norwegian power prices to record highs. Norway’s Energy Minister Terje Aasland summed it up thus: “It’s an absolutely shit situation.”
She might as well have been talking about Australia.
The case for nuclear generation in flat and dry Australia is compelling. The case against it is embarrassingly weak, as we discovered last Friday when Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen set out to discredit Frontier Economics modelling and failed […]
Accusing Frontier of pushing “dodgy figures” and labelling Peter Dutton’s endorsement of its findings as “a Christmas con job” provided copy for plodding journalists. Yet Bowen could not refute the report’s most damaging finding: the cost of decarbonising the grid under his policy.
Frontier’s headline figure of $594bn is a conservative underestimate. It does not include the cost of cleaning up the grids in Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
That’s putting it mildly. Even the fervently pro-‘renewables’ Net Zero Australia admits that the cost of Bowen’s policy will be $1.5 trillion by 2030. By 2060, that will explode to between seven and nine trillion.
This is according to a pro wind and solar outfit, remember.
Scaling up renewable energy is a nightmare proposition. The scarcity of suitable land, the fragility of supply chains, the challenge of gaining community consent and the demand for yet more transmission will only increase.
Global interest in nuclear is gaining momentum. At COP29 in Azerbaijan, six more countries joined the pledge to triple the world’s nuclear energy capacity by 2050, bringing the number of nations on board with the agreement to 31. Microsoft is reopening a mothballed reactor at Three Mile Island. Some of the world’s largest banks, including Bank of America, Barclays and BNP Paribas have agreed to bankroll nuclear […]
Meanwhile, Australia muddles along, legally shackled to a 34 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 that it cannot possibly meet under a Luddite government fighting a rearguard action against nuclear energy that defies rational explanation.
Au contraire, Labor’s die-hard opposition has one very rational explanation: votes. Labor is locked in a desperate death-struggle with the Greens for the far-left vote. Acknowledging the case for nuclear would give the Greens a gigantic brickbat to bash Labor over the head with – and steal the votes they so critically need.
