The Albanese government, fighting for its life in an election campaign, has been a masterclass in failure. From losing the 2023 referendum and spectacularly failing to lower electricity bills as repeatedly promised, to plunging the nation back into debt-without-end and presiding over the summary release of hundreds of violent foreign criminals, Anthony Albanese and his merry band of fools have managed to screw up nearly everything they’ve touched.
In a strong field of contenders for Canberra Village Idiot, though, few deserve the motley and bells more than Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen.
‘Boofhead’ as he’s universally known, hasn’t just thoroughly rooted Australia’s energy infrastructure, he gives every appearance of not knowing a single damn thing about it. For instance, Bowen repeatedly claims that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy.
But this is only true in that the marginal cost of wind and solar at peak output times is zero. It says nothing about the actual cost of system-wide electricity production.
The cost of electricity under ‘Net Zero’ tells the real story.
The International Energy Agency in January compared electricity prices in countries with different levels of renewables: those with the most wind and solar also have the highest electricity prices.
And it shows: Germany, which brags about its ‘energiewende’ transition to wind and solar, is so expensive that its biggest industries are all upping stakes and moving to China, where electricity is coal-generated, cheap and reliable. In Britain, which likewise boasts of its wind and solar farms blighting the previously picturebook countryside, energy prices have soared 300 per cent in just two decades.
An IEA graph charting prices per kilowatt hour versus percentage of renewables in a country’s system shows those countries approaching 40 per cent renewables and more have by far the highest prices. These include the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, Germany, Denmark and Greece.
For all that bill pain, grid reliability is collapsing. Ol mate Bowen is on that one, too: big batteries will save us! You won’t be surprised to learn that that’s completely untrue, too. Just ask Broken Hill, which just a few years ago was a poster-child for wind, solar, and big batteries. ‘Blackout proof!’ they said.
Until last year, when the entire town was completely without electricity for weeks.
Copenhagen Consensus Centre director Bjorn Lomborg wrote in the UK Daily Telegraph on January 25 that to provide sufficient backup for extended periods of low sun and wind, total UK system storage would need to be 10,000 times larger than it is now at a cost of £15 trillion ($31 trillion) – or five times the UK’s average annual GDP.
Citing the IEA, Lomborg wrote: “The average electricity cost with little or no solar or wind power is about 10 pence a kilowatt hour. For every 10 percentage points of additional solar and wind, the cost increases by more than 4p” […]
A peer-reviewed study in Germany and Texas suggests wind power with storage backup could be 12 times more expensive than coal.
Boofhead strikes again.
Just 21 of 400 community batteries promised by the Albanese government at the last election are currently in operation, latest departmental figures show, despite Energy Minister Chris Bowen saying they would help lower power prices and stabilise the electricity grid.
Anthony Albanese promised a $200m spend at the last election to “support 100,000 households by storing energy from solar households during the day, and drawing on it at night”.
The promise formed a key plank of the government’s energy policy.
Figures from the last two rounds of Senate estimates show just 21 of those batteries are currently in operation.
Truly, this idiot would be almost funny, if his moronic delusions weren’t costing us all an arm and a leg.
China’s communist despots, meanwhile, might be many things, but stupid as Bowen is clearly not one of them.
Global coal use peaked at 8.77 billion tonnes in 2024 and is expected to top out at 8.87 billion tonnes in 2027 after rising 1.2 billion tonnes since 2020, most of that in China.
A third of all coal burned worldwide is now used in China’s electricity sector. Coal use is declining in advanced Western countries.
Which is run by the more pragmatic leaders, do you think?
