Remember when you were a kid, and your mum asked: if your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it, too? The green-left would already be hurtling down the precipice before they stopped to say “Yes!”
Germany jumped off the “renewable” cliff, long ago, with Britain at their heels. Australia’s ruling classes are screaming, “Wait for us!”
Some of the stupidest sheep are the credentialled idiots put in charge of our energy regulators.
As the energy regulator revealed the other day, Australia has built four to five times more solar and wind energy than Europe, the US, Japan or China.
Perhaps Australia’s broken electricity system is due to this mad rush towards renewable energy? No, according to our energy regulator, “Recent international events and Australian market events have further strengthened the case for the shift to renewables.” The renewable energy investments must continue until morale improves.
Everywhere it’s been tried, the result has been the same: increased penetration of “renewables” drives up prices and drives down grid stability. “100% renewable” South Australia has the world’s most expensive electricity, and, when its wildly fluctuating wind farms blew the interconnector with Victoria, meaning that SA couldn’t import fossil fuel generated electricity from other, slightly less insane states, the entire state was blacked out.
Far from learning from SA’s mistake, the rest of the Mainland states are taking a run-up to the cliff’s edge, by closing down their remaining coal-fired stations.
These people are as impervious to bitter experience as socialists.
Energy regulators do at least acknowledge that we will need to install enormous amounts of storage in a world in which coal-fired power does not exist.
Although don’t ask them to do even the most basic calculations of how many giant batteries, at what cost — environmental and financial — we’d have to build, and how fast, to meet their fantastical deadlines.
Nor how we’d do it all over again in another eight years or so when the batteries and wind turbines all need replacing.
Their recent analysis shows that Victoria could experience a “renewable drought” of 1 terawatt hour of electricity over just one week in the future.
How much is 1TWh? Well, the South Australian big battery can produce 130 megawatt hours, so we would need more than 7500 of these to keep the Victorian lights on. At about $100m a pop, that is a total cost of more than $700bn, or more than Victoria’s total annual economic output.
That’s just Victoria. Australia has six other states, all needing a steady electricity supply.
Better get used to soaring electricity bills and regular blackouts every winter, and at the height of summer.
Nothing demonstrates our failed energy system more starkly than factory workers being laid off into the cold so green voters in relative warmth can watch the latest ABC report on how climate change has caused Sydney’s floods.
The Australian
But no one at the ABC, or in the wealthy, Teal/Green-voting suburbs, has to worry about losing their job, or keeping the heaters on.
They’re rich enough to worry about more important things: like how the ultra-wealthy (by the UN’s own reckoning) humans of 100 years hence will cope with a possible single degree of warming.
