No one’s ever accused Australia’s “Minister for Climate Change and Energy”, Chris Bowen, of being any kind of genius, but does he have to make such a point of being so dumb?
When Boofhead tried to hose down growing calls for Australia to adopt nuclear energy, by claiming it would cost $387 billion, the most obvious response was: so, $7 trillion cheaper than your demented “Net Zero” plan, then?
The next most obvious response is: where does Bowen even pull that nuclear figure from, anyway?
Federal energy minister Chris Bowen said using nuclear as, proposed by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, would cost $387bn, but Westinghouse senior vice-president Rita Baranwal – a former assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the US Department of Energy – said the figures were incorrect and misleading.
“I only have three engineering degrees and that math doesn’t make sense to me,” Ms Baranwal told The Australian Financial Review Energy & Climate Summit.
The other obvious rejoinder to Bowen’s dumbassity is: who says taxpayers will foot the whole bill? Clearly, it doesn’t occur to a socialist like Bowen that anything can ever be done without gobbling up billions from the taxpayer.
Ms Baranwal said Westinghouse’s own small modular reactor cost about US$1bn ($1.58bn) for a 300MW facility, which would be used to supplement renewable energy as a baseload generator.
Factoring in additional costs for transmission upgrades, nuclear power could be a significant contributor to supporting renewables for far less than $387bn, Ms Baranwal said.
And here come the troughers.
Ms Baranwal’s comments are likely to reinvigorate the Coalition’s attack on Labor. It could also stoke anxiety within Australia’s energy industry which fears a muddying of government policy as billions of dollars of investment decisions have been predicated on the country having renewable energy generate more than 80 per cent of the country’s electricity by 2030.
In other words, the “renewables” industry has got its snout firmly in the taxpayer trough, and they’re squealing blue murder that it might be taken away from them.
One thing they’re certainly not doing is making enough electricity.
Australia is struggling to develop sufficient renewable energy sources to back up vast amounts of solar and wind generation which has been earmarked to replace the capacity of coal.
Energy experts said Australia must move to rapidly expand development of large-scale batteries and pumped hydro, or the country would be susceptible to price surges and even blackouts during periods when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing – so-called renewable energy droughts.
We’ve already got both: the price surges in particular, in spades. And they want us to do more of what’s already causing an energy crisis?
What planet are these “experts” living on?
Coal-fired power stations, which still provide more than 60 per cent of Australia’s electricity, generate throughout the day. But the country’s energy market operator expects two thirds of the traditional generators to have been retired in the next 10 years, leaving the country scrambling to seek new sources of power […]
Undercutting the nuclear advocacy, however, Ms Baranwal said that even if work began immediately to install a small modular reactor at coal sites set for closure, it would still take a decade before electricity would be generated.
The Australian
Read those sentences again. Coal, “retired in the next ten years”; “a decade before electricity would be generated” by nuclear.
Even then, the decade-long nuclear timetable isn’t because of the challenge of building them: it’s because of the red-tape decades of government have strangled the industry with.
In other words, the time to start building Australia’s nuclear capacity is now. Before idiots like Boofhead Bowen trash our energy infrastructure completely, in the name of some demented quest to placate Mother Gaia.
