BY TONY MOBILIFONITIS
CAIRNS News’ warnings on the stupidity of Australia’s transition to net zero energy policy are coming home to roost with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) warning of major generation shortfalls leading to outages.
“Stupid” is an apt description for economists, bureaucrats and politicians who are determined to shut down our primary source of energy – coal-fired power stations – and expect them to be magically replaced by wind and solar farms with gas and batteries to fill in the gaps in supply.
The Greens, the Labor Left and the horde of green NGOs like Greenpeace are compounding this stupidity by demanding an end to gas use. South Australia, which stupidly destroyed its coal-fired generators several years ago, was 70% reliant on gas at 6.30am on May 22nd.
The day before, the AEMO published an update to the 2023 Electricity Statement of Opportunities (ESOO) report, the 10-year reliability outlook for the National Electricity Market (NEM). Amidst all the bureaucratic jargon and mysterious charts it warned that delays in transmission projects and planned retirements of coal generators risk blackouts in the future. AEMO made the point clear in the heading on its media release.
Sensible people might be tempted to think that AEMO is stating the glaringly obvious, because if you check the AEMO’s national usage chart on any peak use winter morning or early evening you will still see black and brown coal suppling 60% or more of Australia’s electricity, as was the case at 8.05am on the morning of May 22nd, the day after AEMO issued its update. At 10.15am black and brown coal was still supplying 59% of the national market, even with wind lifting to 24%.
AEMO is not challenging the transition to net zero, just exposing an obvious flaw in the transition, which is its starry-eyed assumption that coal-fired electricity can simply be replaced by building heaps of wind and solar farms. These facilities are scattered across the country and must be connected by additional power lines across farmland and forests and backed up with new gas-fired plants and battery facilities.
The reality is that these renewable operations can’t properly supply the morning and late afternoon peak demand periods or low sun and wind periods without coal or gas. Battery technology is only sufficient to fill short term gaps.
The NSW Premier Chris Mins has also been forced to admit that the state’s manufacturing industries need reliable, not intermittent electricity supply, and therefore the shutdown of Eraring Power Station should be delayed at least until mid-2025, and even that date is looking unrealistic.
The underlying problem is the childish belief that burning coal in Australia’s 19 coal-fired power stations is some sort of national sin that is responsible for an alleged “climate crisis”. These simple-minded folk don’t know or forget that China, as of 2023, had 1142 coal-fired power stations, many of them burning Australian coal. Our northern neighbour Indonesia, has 91.
Prominent Australian economists Nicki Hutley and Saul Griffith not only buy into this “climate crisis” stupidity, but trade in it. Hutley spreads her fantastical climate paranoia at dozens of corporate events and media appearances across the country while Griffith was a “climate adviser” in the Clinton administration. Hutley is also a “councillor” with Australia’s peak body of climate zealots, the Climate Council.
Hutley and Griffith are all for shutting down coal-fired electricity and Hutley has come up with the unbelievable calculation that the “damage” cause by Australia’s coal-fired power station emissions totals a “potential $1.7 billion” per annum. She calculates this figure from “impacts to health, environment and economic activity from every additional tonne of carbon”. This is truly in the realm of La La Land economics.
Most astounding is Hutley’s claim that coal-fired power emissions somehow damage economic activity. We wonder if Hutley could name one economic activity or essential service that doesn’t directly or indirectly require electricity from coal.
Hutley works out her amazing $1.7 billion figure by putting a “carbon price” on emissions from Eraring Power Station in NSW, Australia’s biggest. The so-called carbon price is an arbitrary figure dreamed up by the climate change industry, but now figured into economic calculations at $AUD165.00 a tonne for the three years after 2025.
“It (Eraring) has around 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is the last year of reported figures, that is going to cost us in damage terms, $1.7 billion a year,” Hutley told the ABC. This would put the alleged damage from China’s coal power stations at something like $1,870,000 billion per annum.
Hutley’s plucked-out-of-the-air $1.7b figure leads her to make the following incredibly clownish claim: “This is the cost of climate change every time an additional tonne of carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere, affecting every single member of society in terms of lost productivity, lost opportunity, even loss of life.”
In other words, according to this economist, every Australian can blame the emissions from Eraring Power Station and others like it for causing them to lose productivity, opportunities and even their life. The claim is so mind-bogglingly stupid, we have to wonder whether we are still living on the same planet.
If this is the calibre of the argument for the transition to net zero, then Australia is facing serious economic peril, because cheap, abundant and reliable energy is central to higher living standards. Coal and oil plus nuclear have provided that energy to all developed countries because they are the sources of energy with the highest density. This is made abundantly clear in a 2013 paper by Scottish academic Robert Wilson.
