The deranged elite class of Australia – politicians, big business and the ‘cultural industries’ – couldn’t have imposed an energy regime more clearly designed to wreck the country if they’d tried. Xi Jinping probably hasn’t replaced the entire elite class with Manchurian Candidate-style sleeper agents – but what would they have done any different if he had?
A nation with known high-quality coal reserves to last centuries has closed nearly all its coal-fired power stations, with the few remaining left to fall into ruin as a result of government policy. The country with vast natural gas reserves imports gas. The land with the world’s largest uranium deposits actively bans nuclear power. Despite sitting on some of the largest known thorium reserves in the world, the government refuses to back research into next-generation thorium reactors.
And all the while, energy supplies skyrocket in cost, while the nation totters on the brink of widespread blackouts.
Australian Energy Market Operator head Daniel Westerman has said he cannot guarantee the current government policies will deliver lower power prices.
This despite the PM promising, nearly 100 times during the election campaign, to lower household power bills. Instead, they’ve soared by 30 per cent and more.
And it’s all only going to get worse.
The Victorian government’s “aggressive” electrification of the power network is likely to result in mass blackouts with demand forecast to outweigh renewable energy supply by more than 30 per cent in some months, a bombshell report by an energy expert warns.
The state’s push to rely on renewable energy will also lift power bills from the nation’s lowest to the highest, author Paul Simshauser predicts.
The report by Professor Simshauser, a leading academic who runs a Queensland government-owned energy business, concludes the average wholesale electricity price across the nation would be about 30 per cent more in a system mainly reliant on intermittent renewables than in the existing coal-dominated system.
And the report finds that the cost of solar, wind, batteries, hydro and gas assets needed to get close to net zero would be about $300bn in today’s dollars, compared with the current system’s worth of $136bn.
And the rest. Then there’s the cost of building a completely new transmission grid from scratch. The real figure is likely to be north of a trillion dollars.
The report cautioned that the state faced a severe risk of blackouts during colder months in autumn and winter by the 2030s, with renewable energy such as solar and wind underperforming when energy demand was at its highest.
Data in a “sobering” chart revealed demand in Victoria would surge due to the electrification push – where, for example, some gas appliances were banned – resulting in it outweighing renewable supply by more than 30 per cent in some months.
Then add in millions of Cucktorians trying to charge their dinky little e-bikes and Teslas.
The report acknowledged the Victorian and NSW governments had struck deals to keep coal-fired power stations open for longer than owners intended amid growing concerns about power shortages. Victoria’s Loy Yang A power station will remain open until mid-2035 under a $50m agreement signed between its owner AGL Energy and the Victorian government in 2022.
When those last remaining coal stations inevitably go down, the harsh reality of ‘Net Zero’ hits. Hard.
South Australia has already been blacked out entirely, for days. Broken Hill in NSW, whose mayor boasted that it was Australia’s first ‘carbon-free city’ was blacked out for weeks, despite its 200 MW wind farm, 53 MW solar array and large battery. When Victoria’s last remaining major coal-fired station was cut off from the grid, last year, half a million people went without power.
Nationals MP Keith Pitt told Sky News this was “a glimpse of the future” without coal-fired power. Former radio host Neil Mitchell agreed, telling 2GB’s Ben Fordham “be afraid – this is the future” during a segment in which Fordham claimed “solar and batteries failed when we needed them most”.
Yet, against all evidence, the climate cultists at the Guardian insisted that the massive blackout proved the wisdom of ‘Net Zero’.
These people are certifiable.
