Once again, Good Oil readers, you read it here first. As I’ve written, again and again, when you run the numbers on ‘Net Zero’, the full scale of its madness becomes shockingly apparent. The costs, economic and environmental, are beyond staggering. Not only will vast swathes of Australia’s scarce arable land be subsumed by fields of glass, aluminium and whirling blades of bird-slaughter, but the nation will have to spend the equivalent of the entire budget for WWI, every year, for 25 years. Then start all over again as all those turbines and panels reach the end of their useful life.
Now, (some of) the legacy media are finally catching on.
The stunning scale of Australia’s renewables rollout can be revealed: 1000 projects costing $1.33 trillion, including 25,000 more wind towers with 45,000km of associated roads, and 250 million solar panels on 406,000ha.
These are almost certainly conservative estimates. Firstly, who can remember a government project that ever came in on budget or on time? Secondly, these are figures from people who are still fully signed-up Climate Cultists.
Its list does not include transmission lines or rooftop solar, nor reflect the projected acceleration of projects to meet the Albanese government’s net-zero targets and flagged changes to streamline renewables approvals.
They don’t actually disagree with Net Zero, they just think it can somehow be tweaked to make it less of a disaster.
The figures – Australians’ first comprehensive glimpse of the true scale of the renewables revolution – have been compiled by conservationists and communities pushing for a better-planned rollout.
Those behind the project, led by Queensland conservationist Steven Nowakowski and Rainforest Reserves Australia, want to awaken Australia to the potential impact of a poorly planned rollout on wild places and rural land.
“I think the physical spatial footprint mapping is something Australians have never considered – and hence why this mapping may open Australians’ eyes,” Mr Nowakowski, a photographer and former cartographer, told the Australian.
Well, maybe not in environmentalist circles, but some of us have been trying in vain to point this obvious fact out for years.
Still, he’s right that the government is rushing in and throwing other people’s money around without any idea of what they’re doing. But then, these are the same governments responsible for the NBN and the NDIS. Who’d fool themselves that Net Zero would be any different?
This rollout is ad hoc, chaotic madness with no costings by government and no regional or national spatial planning.
I find it staggering that thousands of wind towers and transmission are being rolled out in such an unplanned manner and no one seems to care.
This is a $1 trillion infrastructure campaign that has no local, regional or national plan, except for the Integrated System Plan, which says we need to reach a certain target by 2050.
Oh, you sweet summer child: this is the government we’re talking about, remember?
So, just how (conservatively, remember) massive is the footprint of this mad rush?
Such is the increase in solar, it expands the area they take up from 27,176ha to 433,572ha, effectively equivalent to almost all of metropolitan Sydney, parts of the lower Blue Mountains and beyond Richmond and Campbelltown.
In terms of wind, there are more than 25,674 proposed new towers nationally, with more than 44,895km of associated new roads, as well as 7981km of undersea cabling for offshore wind.
A further 250,572,500 solar panels are proposed nationwide, covering 406,396ha.
The 1079 projects include 533 solar schemes (including 367 proposed), 323 wind farms (222 proposed), 184 battery (166 proposed), 15 pumped hydro (all proposed), 13 hydrogen (all proposed), seven hydro (all proposed or expansions) and four tidal (all proposed).
All this, supposedly, in just the next 25 years.
At the end of which, all of the turbines and panels already built will be at the end of their useful life and going into landfill. So, it all starts again.
The only thing renewable about all of this is the endless capacity for reckless delusion.
