When Donald Horne dubbed Australia “the Lucky Country”, it was a backhanded compliment. What he meant was that Australia is a land so rich in resources that it could rise above the incompetence of its ruling elites. But even Australia’s wealth of resources can’t save us from the derangement of the Climate Cult-addled ruling class.
Despite an abundance of almost every resource that should make the lucky country an unbeatable powerhouse, Australians pay power bills at extortionary rates under constant threat the lights will soon go off.
The major parties, which agree coal-fired power stations will be retired and gas will be the go-to baseload fuel, have run out of time.
And there’s the problem: the major parties both agree on stupidity. There is simply no reason to retire Australia’s coal-fired stations. Even if – and that’s a big if, despite the shrieking certainty of the Climate Cult – a modest increase in atmospheric CO₂ from burning coal will be on balance a bad thing, Australia’s contributions are so insignificant as to be laughable.
So, for the sake of an unproven, highly disputed hypothesis, Australia’s elite class have decided en masse to cripple the single, cheapest, method of generating electricity. That might be somewhat forgivable if these demented ninnies had a viable replacement ready to go.
They don’t, and probably never will.
Australia faces a frightening short-to-medium-term energy reality unless there is drastic action to increase gas supply, upgrade pipelines and build peaking plants. In politics, blackouts and power bill shock near the top of the list of vote-killers.
If you ask households and businesses about whether energy subsidies have helped pay their bills, the answer will be No.
So, while Australia exports massive amounts of gas to slightly more sensible countries, the idiots at the Top End of Town fiddle with windmills while the lights go out.
Under pressure from Labor comrades in Victoria, who previously imposed a moratorium on gas exploration despite the state’s depleting gas reserves, the government has favoured renewables and batteries over gas.
Even if the major parties accelerate gas projects to unlock supply and pipelines, approvals will take years and environmental groups will engage in costly green lawfare.
But what about renewables? The Guardian says Australia is ready to go 100 per cent ‘renewable’, right now.
Bullshit.
Leaving aside the arrant nonsense of the ‘renewable’ tag (even by the UN’s own definition, coal and gas are ‘renewable’), the idea that wind and solar are ready to power us into a utopian future is purely and simply a mad pipe dream. The same people who tell us that nuclear will cost too much and take too long to build, somehow seem to think that 30 Central Parks of solar panels will just magically appear in the remote desert, and even more magically channel energy thousands of kilometres to Singapore, a country slightly smaller than Auckland.
All that’s left to do is raise $35bn in capital, install 120 square kilometres of solar panels, build a modest 788km transmission line to Darwin, and lay a 4200km high-voltage cable on the seabed, and we’re good to go.
The Sun Cable AAPowerLink project feels like it was stolen from a Heath Robinson cartoon: a convoluted, unnecessarily elaborate, and impractical contraption designed to accomplish a mundane task. It may mark the beginning of the end of the renewable romance, the point at which the transition to wind, solar and hydropower collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.
The project will – allegedly – generate 1.75GW. That’s just one-thirty-thousandth of Singapore’s current annual electricity consumption.
These people are insane.
Compounding the insanity, they actually admit the sheer, monumental scale of their pipe dream and just how abysmally short they’re falling short. And still they insist that it’s all just a wish away.
If Australia’s demand for electricity exceeds 313 TWH a year in a 2050, we’re in trouble.
We’re in trouble.
Australia’s electricity demand was 272 TWH in 2021–22, an increase of two per cent over the previous year. At that rate, demand will exceed 313 TWH in… 2028.
As Chris Bowen points out, that’s going to take a lot solar panels and wind turbines. The Energy Minister says we need 22,000 new solar panels a day and a new 7MW wind turbine every 18 hours just to meet our 2030 target of a mere 202 TWH. For the record, the speed of the rollout in the first two years of Labor government is less than a tenth of that.
We’re screwed – and these gibbering nutcases just refuse to admit what their own figures tell them.
