Mainstream media have been cock-a-whoop for the past week at the news that billionaire climate alarmist Mike Cannon-Brooks was trying to buy out energy producer AGL, with a view to closing down its coal-fired power stations.
“Net Zero in our time!” was the jubilant crowing of inner-city elites who know they’ll never have to choose between keeping the lights on or going hungry.
Nor do they seem in the least inclined to report on what we know for a fact are the already-disastrous consequences of such blind green lunacy, elsewhere.
They did not link the bid and statements about bringing forward the end of AGL’s coal power generation to four months of European power shortages and soaring prices driven by a lack of wind power, nor to brownouts in California and Texas or even to Russian gas price extortion […]
Reporters showed no sign they had heard about last week’s pact between Russia and China to shore up 100 million tonnes of coal a year for their mutual benefit.
Even some of Australia’s energy regulators, who’ve largely been captured by green-besotted executives, often funded by mega-wealthy union super funds, can see trouble brewing.
The body representing the transmission industry here, Energy Networks Australia, warned last Thursday week: “Increases in energy supply charges across the UK are cause for concern as almost 22 million households will see an average increase in their energy bill of 54 per cent from April.”
Other energy regulators, even those who’ve shown themselves to be wholly sold to the Church of Gaia, are tacitly admitting that we’re being sold a pup. Kerry Schott, head of the Energy Security Board, has quietly admitted that there is simply not enough storage to back up the grid when wind and solar inevitably fail to meet demand.
Still, Schott saw no reason for the government to block billionaire Mike’s green follies.
But is good ol’ Mike really doing it for Greta: putting the planet ahead of his own pockets?
Not bloody likely: there’s a river of taxpayers’ money out there, and the rent-seekers are circling like sharks smelling blood in the water. As Cannon-Brooke’s partner in the bid admits.
“Energy transition will be one of the biggest investment opportunities of our lifetimes. It is estimated $US150 trillion will need to be invested globally through 2050 to drive the decarbonisation of energy markets.”
All paid for by us. If not from our taxes, then from our power-bills.
When people such as Cannon-Brookes simply announce renewables are cheaper than coal, they are forgetting the tens of billions of dollars that will need to be spent on storage and new transmission lines, all of which will have to be paid for by consumers.
This is a problem entirely created by climate alarmism.
It is only the market design mechanism created in response to political decisions that has made coal uneconomical. Coal stations that run 24 hours a day cannot compete at five-minute bidding intervals with renewables, gas and hydro. Gas and hydro can be turned off when not used but large coal plants cannot.
Then there are the strategic implications of this green madness. At the same time the West is fulminating against Vladimir Putin, we’re rolling over and showing our bare, exposed bellies. Germany, for one, is entirely dependent on Russian gas.
The transition is giving dictators in Moscow and Beijing a lever over the West that they could not have dreamt of. US President Joe Biden is playing into their hands right now, making it harder for gas pipeline companies to operate in the US.
Who cares about that? The loonies of the Green movement have a planet to save.
Part of the problem around the world wherever the energy transition is advanced is the zealotry of environmentalists and their business and media acolytes who won’t admit renewables just don’t work well when demand for them is highest[…]
They also hate admitting gas plants that can be turned on and off quickly are one of the most efficient ways of dealing with the intermittency problem.
The Australian
We need only look to Germany, which has made itself an energy-vassal state of Russia, or the UK, where power rationing is back for the first time since the 1970s, to see where the billionaire green Pollyannas are leading us.
