Good Oil regulars will be aware that I’ve many times run the numbers the Climate Cult don’t want you to see. Basic, back-of-the-envelope, calculations that lay bare the lies and staggering costs of ‘Net Zero’.
For instance, Australia would have to spend the equivalent of its entire spending for WWI, every year for the next few decades – and still not have a reliable grid. Just one state, Victoria, would have to cover at least half its arable farmland in solar panels and wind turbines (and that’s on the sotto voce admission of a government-funded climate group).
As Carl Sagan once wrote, back-of-the-envelope calculations are a vital method of cutting through the bullshit. Mathematics is a form of deductive logic that can quickly demolish entire mountains of hyperbole.
Of course, back-of-the-envelope calculations are rudimentary. As any statistician will tell you, confounding variables must be taken into account for a definitive answer. In the case of ‘Net Zero’, as I cautioned, my back-of-the-envelope calculations were likely under-estimating the cost. For instance, they were based on such assumptions as the current cost of materials to build panels and turbines.
With so many other governments jumping on the ‘Net Zero’ bandwagon, demand for turbines, panels and the skilled labour to build and install them will rise sharply. Increased demand of a limited supply will inevitably drive prices higher.
Oh, boy… right again.
Construction of new wind farms for the national electricity grid, which are crucial to Anthony Albanese’s clean-energy ambitions, came to a halt in the first half of this year, as the godfather of Labor’s climate policies warns the government will miss its 82 per cent renewables target by “a big margin”.
Soaring costs for wind turbines, combined with uncertainty around wind farm policy at the recent federal election and a sharp rise in the frequency of negative energy prices around the country, meant no new wind farms entered construction in the first six months of this calendar year, according to an analysis by Rystad Energy.
It’s so obvious that even the High Priests of the Climate Cult are admitting it.
Ross Garnaut, a long-time adviser to the Labor government and a backer of renewable energy, declared on Tuesday that the end-of-decade goal was unachievable even with an expanded capacity investment scheme, which aims to fast-track construction of major solar and wind projects. “Australia is currently on a trajectory to miss its renewable targets because of low investment and output in grid-scale solar and wind – not by a little, but by a big margin,” Professor Garnaut said in Sydney.
“Expanded capacity investment scheme” – in other words ‘taxpayer’s money’. Even throwing billions more of other people’s money at these useless monsters won’t make them work any better.
Yet, like any student socialist, this “educated fuckwit” (to borrow Kerry Packer’s pithy phrase) insists that doing more of the same will work ‘this time’.
Professor Garnaut was critical of government policy and the CIS for distorting the market, arguing the best solution was to introduce a carbon price. “There are now virtually no new investment commitments for solar and wind generation that do not have CIS or other government underwriting,” Professor Garnaut told the Australian Clean Energy Summit.
In other words: more of other people’s money.
All the while these monstrosities destroy rural landscapes, engender massive blackouts and drive household electricity prices through the roof.
