Bulls-eye: Mike, you are absolutely on-target. In fact, you’ve hit so many targets in this single report that it looks like carpet bombing! It is hard-hitting, and should be heavily and permanently bruising in certain sectors. Every voter in the country should read and understand this statement, but what is the point when the voting options are shabby and next to worthless? Still, we can only hope for seriously beneficial change, sooner or later… can’t we? A special thank’s to Chris for hosting commentary of this quality.
Graeme, thank you for the kind words. Having worked inside the public service (albeit briefly) I have seen first hand how environmental policy is set by people with generally no commercial or technical understanding. It’s political before being feasible.
Thank’s Mike, and your experience also illustrates how the design, construction and operation of our electricity system has been taken out of the hands of highly-skilled engineers. A politician (and ex union lacky), is now chief architect of an entirely unproven remodelling of the electrical system. Sad, and doomed.
All so stupid. Of course living standards collapse when you pump up land prices to infinity via near zero interest rates for years and refuse to use cheap coal and gas. Net zero is a religion like a slow motion Jim Jones cult.
Kudos for researching diligently the composite failures of the multiple branches of the government and corporate behemoth that comprise the net zero fantasy. The crunch when this lurching, out of control, careering jalopy hits the wall will deliver a resoundingly heartwarming surge of schadenfreude.
Worth the read for this alone: ‘Major financial institutions—JP Morgan, HSBC, UBS, Mitsubishi UFJ, Goldman Sachs, and Macquarie, to name a few—have had their Spartacus moment.’
Further inquires might try to discover and unravel the causes of this remarkably wide spread frenzy of me-too insanity.
One factor that fired the blaze to uncontrollable heights: mandating renewables as the primary measure to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (!!), thereby shifting the cost onto energy consumers, who then bear the risk with no recall if failure ensues.
Previously, new ventures were funded with private capital (or government bonds in times of war), and if development was successful the product was sold to consumers happy to switch to a proven, less costly option.
That ought to be enough for politicians to muster sufficient opposition to turf out those who have forced this pipe dream on everyone. Yet … that is not happening to any shapeshifting degree. How high do energy bills have to rise before the majority of people begin to wonder if they’ve signed on to a dud?
The core problem: a persistent majority belief that the climate change hypothesis is real. Pop that illusion, and the house of cards will fall. Until then … the crazed decommissioning of the power grid, and massive build of an inferior substitute will continue.
History shows that outbreaks of social crazes occur periodically. But the CC one is a doozy, more widespread, more costly, and funny were the damage not so serious.
Andrew - I agree with nearly everything you have said. However, we already know the answer to your statement:
“Further inquires might try to discover and unravel the causes of this remarkably wide spread frenzy of me-too insanity.”
In your list of factors you have missed the major driving force of the ‘Renewables’ juggernaut - namely that it is a huge financial scam engine and there are many bloodsucking financial and political parasites feeding off it.
The Australian public will understand and respond to that line of argument if it is exposed as such. Trying to defeat the scammers by explaining the falsity of the ‘scientific’ basis of the Net Zero juggernaut will not work in a country like Australia with such a dumbed-down education system. Rather what needs to be exposed is that the ‘$cience’ is deeply corrupt and a powerful parasitic class is feeding off it.
When the black outs and brown outs begin, this net zero rubbish needs to be rapped around the necks of Albo, labour, the greens and that moron Bowen!!!
I don't think the connection between energy and debt is well understood. Debt is contingent on the assumption that future production will increase to cover both the principal and interest. This is not possible with lower productivity (lower EROI) energy sources that provide less surplus energy to the economy.
Support for the wind and solar transition should collapse like a punctured balloon when people regularly check the dashboard of the local grid at sunrise and sunset, or breakfast and dinnertime.
This will signal the number of occasions when the meals will have to be served cold if we depend on RE to heat them.
If you are not a breakfast person, just think about your first coffee of the day, on the way to an electric train to get to the lift to access your office.
SOMEONE GET TO THE POTUS AND PERSUADE HIM TO WRITE AN EXECUTIVE ORDER THAT INSTRUCTS ALL WEATHER REPORTS TO INCLUDE THE AMOUNT OF RE IN THE LOCAL GRID AT THE TIME.
Trillions of dollars have been spent around the world rolling out wind and solar infrastructure and in return we have more expensive and less reliable power with catastrophic environmental impacts.
The elephant in the net-zero room is the wind droughts or dunkelflautes that the Australians Anton Lang and Paul Miskelly described over a decade ago.
Wind droughts become an existential threat to thousands or tens of thousands of people when the wind drought trap closes on a windless night during extreme weather conditions coinciding with outages of conventional power. See Texas February 2021.
Peter, the senior execs in the NSW Gov't department responsible were warned repeatedly over three years that the suite of policies signalled little intent to attract investment from North Asian investors. As bureaucrats, self appraisal trumps actual feedback.
Seeing this play out in my country with my own eyes and paying for electricity through the nose which until the last the last 10 years was perhaps the cheapest in the world is depressing.
But why and for what? As I see it our actions are actually contributing to the release of more carbon emissions in the atmosphere not less. By not consuming our own coal and gas we are actually lowering demand, hence the cost of these resources for China to buy and consume much more than they otherwise would. And, what do they do with this abundant cheap energy, they waste much of it on non market driven boondoggles: ghost cities, highways to nowhere and its military. Let alone the energy used in all its industrial capacity with hazardous environmental standards. As the saying goes, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ Not sure about the good intentions though!
Brilliant article, Mike. There is nothing more powerful than entrenched stupidity, and you have described a bunch of it. I am an Alaskan, and have seen the social costs of drinking the Green Kool Aid. Keep up the good work! Eventually sanity will win out!
Mike Newman precisely encapsulates Australia’s greatest crisis in the following passage:
“The net zero gravy train in Australia has been a powerful magnet, drawing in every conceivable type of wannabe to the climate space—from government departments, universities seeking grant funding, rent seekers, and even those wanting to sound sophisticated at Surry Hills cocktail parties. Corporates, not wanting to be seen swimming against the tide, felt compelled to hire productivity-sapping chief sustainability officers, who advised boards on the imperatives of enforcing paper straws and branded keep cups at work, to comfort shareholders in annual reports that they were committed to saving the planet.”
All the people named in this passage are either complete half-wits or parasitical economic bloodsuckers who need to be exposed as such. They can easily be defeated by exposing them for what they are. So where is the near useless Liberal Party in this? The answer is that it has joined this club of half-wits in its slide into political oblivion.
Much of this applies to Canada. Sadly we have 'green' groupthink firmly entrenched.
After a decade of ruinous Liberal policy under Trudeau, Canadians elected Mark Carney expecting change that will not come.
The key persons behind the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) are largely tied to its parent organization, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which was launched by Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, and the COP26 presidency in April 2021. Mark Carney is a central figure in the creation and leadership of GFANZ, which convened the NZBA under its umbrella.
As one can see, we have elected the chief wizard, the grand master of green.
Our neighbours to the south are doing some impactful and interesting things under Trump.
Trump's move to counter the UN green initiatives will allow the USA to keep its electrical grid functional and stable.
In addition to helping to keep people from freezing in the dark, there will undoubtedly be increased foreign investment.
That is the best article I have ever read about the utter idiocy of Net Zero protaganists and helps confirm for me that ,at last,there is some light(electric) at the end of the tunnel.
It’s been a punishing process and scared my grandkids and cost all of us so much money.
It will continue to do so but there is an end time now.
A most apt head line & insightful Op Ed thanks Mike. Couldn't agree with you more.
Perhaps the one thing I find missing here & in other like editorials is a direction, a way out of this unholy quagmire that's been created to solve, what essentially is a non-problem.
Net Zero might make sense IF there were empirical evidence proving the case against CO2, BUT there isn't. CO2's an invisible, minuscule, odourless, tasteless atmospheric trace gas necessary for life on planet Earth. With out it we'd be dead.
As a way forward, how about campaign for adoption of a sensible Energy Policy. One that's fair too all concerned, including the unreliables, is market driven and;
• Is technology agnostic;
• Removes current anti-competitive subsidies favoring the unreliables;
• Requires industry to comply with clearly defined QOS (Quality of Service) standards of reliability & availability (i.e.; 99.98% reliability per current AEMO specs);
• Invites industry to commit by way of auction (a week or a month in advance of the offered opportunity) to deliver reliable 24/7, base load power at their best competitive price(s);
• Imposes SUBSTANTIAL financial penalties for failure to deliver in accord with mandatory QOS obligations (Force Majeure notwithstanding eg earth quakes, floods, bushfires, tornados etc);
• Requires a substantial bond to restore the environment (i.e. recycle aged solar-PV’s & wind turbine blades etc as is already commonplace in the coal mining industry);
• Repeals anti-competitive CO2 legislation (i.e., the Safeguard Mechanism, LRET, RET etc).
Thus, let market forces prevail on a level playing field.
Doubtless, some will invest in perceived market opportunities associated with the unreliables plus ‘firming’ (back-up by way of batteries etc, but at THEIR cost) to meet mandatory QOS reliability obligations.
Whereas others might be more circumspect. Investing in proven, reliable, base-load (fossil fuel) technology.
Longer term, in nuclear (assuming the current ban is repealed) & providing it's cost competitive Vs competing technologies, not least fossil fuels. Easy IMO.
On the solutions, I agree with you. It all boils down to numbers too. I did a speech to an Exec MBA class after the devastating bushfires by examining the data and pairing it with the hysteria that it was all climate change related.
It was about ensuring they didn’t cherry pick data to suit their hypothesis but go out of their way to disprove their own beliefs.
We used publicly available data which showed that contrary to media reports, fire dept budgets rose $1bn across 8 agencies. Instead of spending it on equipment and back burning, it revealed that most was spent on more staff (especially admin) and higher salaries.
It’s the same for Net Zero. Rudimentary analysis of the emissions data and the ridiculous costs of transition speak for themselves. All pain for no gain. But we live with ideology that seeks to shame and belittle people who question the basis of their assumptions.
I’m a big nuclear advocate. I live in Japan and went through Fukushima. I used to tell my clients that the further away from the reactor one was, the more hysterical they became. Japan is not only reopening reactors but leaving it king hard at introducing new plants especially SMR. It is cost competitive regardless of CSIRO maths, which cherry picks data to suit an agenda.
For energy resource poor nations, they must be pragmatic. The retroactive application of the Safeguard Mechanism and our ever overreaching regulatory framework is driving international investors like Japan and Korea away from investment here.
Agreed, sensible policy on energy would be to have a mixed generation fleet with reliable baseload. That our political and bureaucratic classes have painted us into a corner on energy means the only solution to them is introducing more regulation and higher subsidies to pay for their vanity projects which mask failure which has such long term implications for our economy.
As far as nuclear moratorium goes, if Mr Bowen believes he is in possession of the best intel, he should be the first to push to repeal the ban on civilian nuke and allow the market to decide. If he’s right, there will be no change. Haven spoken to nuclear players in Japan and Korea, they can’t wait to get involved.
Hi Mike - Yep, the sooner Australia can repeal that ban on nuclear the better.
However, that's not going to happen any time soon. If the pundits are right, with another Labor win in 2028 (Yuckko - hardly bears thinking about), earliest 2031 assuming a conservative Govt regains power. That's a very long time between drinks as it were.
Meantime, we've got to maintain reliable base load power that's simply possible via the unreliables.
Only real option is coal and/or gas for the foreseeable future, with hydro (just another battery) where it can provide base load until the water runs out.
Difficult times ahead for the land Down Under, not helped by the Quockerwodgers within our ranks.
You are conflating too many issues with an ambition for net zero. Our sclerotic industrial relations systems is a much bigger cause of our economic performance and we have been going backwards since ré regulating the system after Kevin07. Australian house prices have been too high for a long time before net zero policies were introduced. Stock markets all around the world are losing companies to private equity, including in America. It is not just Australia’s problem or anything to do with net zero. The debts run up after the GFC and Covid dwarf net zero expenditures.
Abandoning net zero is fine if you believe that humanity can go on pumping emissions at the same rate without consequence, but I do not believe that and if we do not take action we are rabbits in the headlights do nothing to lessen a bad future for our kids. That said it makes sense to take action in the most cost effective way and excluding nuclear energy the most powerful tool we have is insane. The World led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was able to control CFCs and stop the Ozone Hole expansion. Controlling CO2 will be much more difficult, but humans are smart.
Sounds like you are fanning the flames of alarmist economic fear of emissions reductions efforts in defense of fossil fuels to me, with nothing credible in place for emissions reductions or otherwise addressing the climate problem.
I think the doubt, deny, delay crowd who keep opposing and obstructing efforts to bring down emissions are the real alarmists in this, so overcome with their self generated fears of climate action as to be paralyzed in the face of global warming.
As long as the best the RE Doomists can offer for climate action is insincere promoting of nuclear-not-renewable - the truly economically unworkable option, so much more expensive than fossil fuels that it presents no long term threat to them - people who do take the climate problem seriously cannot take them seriously.
When the leading 'proponents' of nuclear-not-renewables are climate science deniers (and/or politically with them) and their clear intention isn't to stop emissions better or cheaper but to impede efforts by others to do so the glaring insincerity looks more like feature intended to reassure climate science deniers they aren't serious than flaw that makes them unable to convince the climate concerned.
The question is not so much individual beliefs in climate change, but the realities of what is going on driven by the financial markets.
Financial markets have been speaking. That is not my opinion. It is fact. Fossil fuel investment is going through the roof. Banks are fleeing the NZBA. It is fact. Countless renewables projects are falling over because the commercials do not stack up. The massive blow outs in transmission need to be paid for. They are being grown to support RE expansion. Therefore it would be disingenuous to suggest that renewables are the cheapest form of energy when the extra investment in storage and transmission to connect them to the grid are exploding 5-10x initial estimates.
Take GE Vernova, which has an offshore wind (OSW) business that has lost $13 billion over 40 straight quarters. 10 years. The CEO said back in December that the nuclear and gas businesses have never "had so much fun" because of the data centre boom. His words. Further, they are not pursuing more OSW orders. His words.
I am a proponent of nuclear power. I live in a country that had an accident and they will introduce new SMRs and modern reactors.
Nuclear in Korea has averaged 5c/kWh over the last 20 years, at least 1/2 of every other source. The build cost is at least 1/3rd the CSIRO GenCost modelling.
Korea has the nuclear track record which blows the biased CSIRO analysis to smithereens. It is hard to take them seriously as a government agency when they could have spoken to the Australian Embassy in Seoul to arrange a meeting with half government owned KEPCO (Korea's largest electricity generator) to get the facts. Instead they relied on third party research.
If the government is so supremely confident that nuclear power is a dead duck, they should be the first to propose a lift of the moratorium to put the matter to bed. They won't because they know the true answer.
Our energy grid transition is directly behind our shabby economic performance. Whether bankruptcies, lower productivity or falling per capita GDP even the RBA governor was suggesting 2 percent GDP growth was redlining it.
90% of the Paris Accord signatories missing their own self imposed deadlines to provide NDCs (nationally defined contributions) in Feb 2025. Fact. China recently completed an 1800km railway dedicated to coal fired power supply. Fact.
Our government is not disclosing the amount being spent on the Capacity Investment Scheme in the budget. Why not be transparent? The ultimate irony is that the cost below outs behind the obfuscation will be borne directly thru tax, our energy bills or most likely both.
Although for a government that has an effective mandate in both houses, it is curious to see the amount of hysterical content published (and wildly misleading)so early into a second term. The reality is unfolding right before our eyes.
Our electricity prices are going only one way - up. Germany is the blueprint for our government and it is suffering from some of the most expensive energy prices in EU and its manufacturing base is being hollowed out. Brands like VW are closing factories.
In closing, political dogma will never supersede physics. Yet political ideology is why the transition is failing so abjectly.
Bulls-eye: Mike, you are absolutely on-target. In fact, you’ve hit so many targets in this single report that it looks like carpet bombing! It is hard-hitting, and should be heavily and permanently bruising in certain sectors. Every voter in the country should read and understand this statement, but what is the point when the voting options are shabby and next to worthless? Still, we can only hope for seriously beneficial change, sooner or later… can’t we? A special thank’s to Chris for hosting commentary of this quality.
Graeme, thank you for the kind words. Having worked inside the public service (albeit briefly) I have seen first hand how environmental policy is set by people with generally no commercial or technical understanding. It’s political before being feasible.
Thank’s Mike, and your experience also illustrates how the design, construction and operation of our electricity system has been taken out of the hands of highly-skilled engineers. A politician (and ex union lacky), is now chief architect of an entirely unproven remodelling of the electrical system. Sad, and doomed.
All so stupid. Of course living standards collapse when you pump up land prices to infinity via near zero interest rates for years and refuse to use cheap coal and gas. Net zero is a religion like a slow motion Jim Jones cult.
Kudos for researching diligently the composite failures of the multiple branches of the government and corporate behemoth that comprise the net zero fantasy. The crunch when this lurching, out of control, careering jalopy hits the wall will deliver a resoundingly heartwarming surge of schadenfreude.
Worth the read for this alone: ‘Major financial institutions—JP Morgan, HSBC, UBS, Mitsubishi UFJ, Goldman Sachs, and Macquarie, to name a few—have had their Spartacus moment.’
Further inquires might try to discover and unravel the causes of this remarkably wide spread frenzy of me-too insanity.
One factor that fired the blaze to uncontrollable heights: mandating renewables as the primary measure to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (!!), thereby shifting the cost onto energy consumers, who then bear the risk with no recall if failure ensues.
Previously, new ventures were funded with private capital (or government bonds in times of war), and if development was successful the product was sold to consumers happy to switch to a proven, less costly option.
That ought to be enough for politicians to muster sufficient opposition to turf out those who have forced this pipe dream on everyone. Yet … that is not happening to any shapeshifting degree. How high do energy bills have to rise before the majority of people begin to wonder if they’ve signed on to a dud?
The core problem: a persistent majority belief that the climate change hypothesis is real. Pop that illusion, and the house of cards will fall. Until then … the crazed decommissioning of the power grid, and massive build of an inferior substitute will continue.
History shows that outbreaks of social crazes occur periodically. But the CC one is a doozy, more widespread, more costly, and funny were the damage not so serious.
Andrew - I agree with nearly everything you have said. However, we already know the answer to your statement:
“Further inquires might try to discover and unravel the causes of this remarkably wide spread frenzy of me-too insanity.”
In your list of factors you have missed the major driving force of the ‘Renewables’ juggernaut - namely that it is a huge financial scam engine and there are many bloodsucking financial and political parasites feeding off it.
The Australian public will understand and respond to that line of argument if it is exposed as such. Trying to defeat the scammers by explaining the falsity of the ‘scientific’ basis of the Net Zero juggernaut will not work in a country like Australia with such a dumbed-down education system. Rather what needs to be exposed is that the ‘$cience’ is deeply corrupt and a powerful parasitic class is feeding off it.
When the black outs and brown outs begin, this net zero rubbish needs to be rapped around the necks of Albo, labour, the greens and that moron Bowen!!!
Absolutely!!
Great piece Chris thanks!
I don't think the connection between energy and debt is well understood. Debt is contingent on the assumption that future production will increase to cover both the principal and interest. This is not possible with lower productivity (lower EROI) energy sources that provide less surplus energy to the economy.
Support for the wind and solar transition should collapse like a punctured balloon when people regularly check the dashboard of the local grid at sunrise and sunset, or breakfast and dinnertime.
This is Texas, ERCOT https://www.gridstatus.io/live/ercot
Britain https://grid.iamkate.com/
Aust https://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/RenewEconomy/
This will signal the number of occasions when the meals will have to be served cold if we depend on RE to heat them.
If you are not a breakfast person, just think about your first coffee of the day, on the way to an electric train to get to the lift to access your office.
SOMEONE GET TO THE POTUS AND PERSUADE HIM TO WRITE AN EXECUTIVE ORDER THAT INSTRUCTS ALL WEATHER REPORTS TO INCLUDE THE AMOUNT OF RE IN THE LOCAL GRID AT THE TIME.
Trillions of dollars have been spent around the world rolling out wind and solar infrastructure and in return we have more expensive and less reliable power with catastrophic environmental impacts.
The elephant in the net-zero room is the wind droughts or dunkelflautes that the Australians Anton Lang and Paul Miskelly described over a decade ago.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-late-discovery-of-wind-droughts
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/we-have-to-talk-about-wind-droughts
Wind droughts become an existential threat to thousands or tens of thousands of people when the wind drought trap closes on a windless night during extreme weather conditions coinciding with outages of conventional power. See Texas February 2021.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/defusing-the-wind-drought-trap
Thanks for those links, Rafe - you are a champion!
Below Congo, Zimbabwe and the Ivory Coast in attractiveness.? Mind blown !
Peter, the senior execs in the NSW Gov't department responsible were warned repeatedly over three years that the suite of policies signalled little intent to attract investment from North Asian investors. As bureaucrats, self appraisal trumps actual feedback.
Seeing this play out in my country with my own eyes and paying for electricity through the nose which until the last the last 10 years was perhaps the cheapest in the world is depressing.
But why and for what? As I see it our actions are actually contributing to the release of more carbon emissions in the atmosphere not less. By not consuming our own coal and gas we are actually lowering demand, hence the cost of these resources for China to buy and consume much more than they otherwise would. And, what do they do with this abundant cheap energy, they waste much of it on non market driven boondoggles: ghost cities, highways to nowhere and its military. Let alone the energy used in all its industrial capacity with hazardous environmental standards. As the saying goes, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ Not sure about the good intentions though!
Brilliant article, Mike. There is nothing more powerful than entrenched stupidity, and you have described a bunch of it. I am an Alaskan, and have seen the social costs of drinking the Green Kool Aid. Keep up the good work! Eventually sanity will win out!
Thanks, Patrick. Hopefully sanity prevails before the money runs out.
The money has run out in Australia and the loonies are doubling down and trying even harde:)
Mike Newman precisely encapsulates Australia’s greatest crisis in the following passage:
“The net zero gravy train in Australia has been a powerful magnet, drawing in every conceivable type of wannabe to the climate space—from government departments, universities seeking grant funding, rent seekers, and even those wanting to sound sophisticated at Surry Hills cocktail parties. Corporates, not wanting to be seen swimming against the tide, felt compelled to hire productivity-sapping chief sustainability officers, who advised boards on the imperatives of enforcing paper straws and branded keep cups at work, to comfort shareholders in annual reports that they were committed to saving the planet.”
All the people named in this passage are either complete half-wits or parasitical economic bloodsuckers who need to be exposed as such. They can easily be defeated by exposing them for what they are. So where is the near useless Liberal Party in this? The answer is that it has joined this club of half-wits in its slide into political oblivion.
Much of this applies to Canada. Sadly we have 'green' groupthink firmly entrenched.
After a decade of ruinous Liberal policy under Trudeau, Canadians elected Mark Carney expecting change that will not come.
The key persons behind the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) are largely tied to its parent organization, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which was launched by Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, and the COP26 presidency in April 2021. Mark Carney is a central figure in the creation and leadership of GFANZ, which convened the NZBA under its umbrella.
As one can see, we have elected the chief wizard, the grand master of green.
Our neighbours to the south are doing some impactful and interesting things under Trump.
Trump's move to counter the UN green initiatives will allow the USA to keep its electrical grid functional and stable.
In addition to helping to keep people from freezing in the dark, there will undoubtedly be increased foreign investment.
That is the best article I have ever read about the utter idiocy of Net Zero protaganists and helps confirm for me that ,at last,there is some light(electric) at the end of the tunnel.
It’s been a punishing process and scared my grandkids and cost all of us so much money.
It will continue to do so but there is an end time now.
A most apt head line & insightful Op Ed thanks Mike. Couldn't agree with you more.
Perhaps the one thing I find missing here & in other like editorials is a direction, a way out of this unholy quagmire that's been created to solve, what essentially is a non-problem.
Net Zero might make sense IF there were empirical evidence proving the case against CO2, BUT there isn't. CO2's an invisible, minuscule, odourless, tasteless atmospheric trace gas necessary for life on planet Earth. With out it we'd be dead.
As a way forward, how about campaign for adoption of a sensible Energy Policy. One that's fair too all concerned, including the unreliables, is market driven and;
• Is technology agnostic;
• Removes current anti-competitive subsidies favoring the unreliables;
• Requires industry to comply with clearly defined QOS (Quality of Service) standards of reliability & availability (i.e.; 99.98% reliability per current AEMO specs);
• Invites industry to commit by way of auction (a week or a month in advance of the offered opportunity) to deliver reliable 24/7, base load power at their best competitive price(s);
• Imposes SUBSTANTIAL financial penalties for failure to deliver in accord with mandatory QOS obligations (Force Majeure notwithstanding eg earth quakes, floods, bushfires, tornados etc);
• Requires a substantial bond to restore the environment (i.e. recycle aged solar-PV’s & wind turbine blades etc as is already commonplace in the coal mining industry);
• Repeals anti-competitive CO2 legislation (i.e., the Safeguard Mechanism, LRET, RET etc).
Thus, let market forces prevail on a level playing field.
Doubtless, some will invest in perceived market opportunities associated with the unreliables plus ‘firming’ (back-up by way of batteries etc, but at THEIR cost) to meet mandatory QOS reliability obligations.
Whereas others might be more circumspect. Investing in proven, reliable, base-load (fossil fuel) technology.
Longer term, in nuclear (assuming the current ban is repealed) & providing it's cost competitive Vs competing technologies, not least fossil fuels. Easy IMO.
Thanks for the feedback,Jim,
On the solutions, I agree with you. It all boils down to numbers too. I did a speech to an Exec MBA class after the devastating bushfires by examining the data and pairing it with the hysteria that it was all climate change related.
It was about ensuring they didn’t cherry pick data to suit their hypothesis but go out of their way to disprove their own beliefs.
We used publicly available data which showed that contrary to media reports, fire dept budgets rose $1bn across 8 agencies. Instead of spending it on equipment and back burning, it revealed that most was spent on more staff (especially admin) and higher salaries.
It’s the same for Net Zero. Rudimentary analysis of the emissions data and the ridiculous costs of transition speak for themselves. All pain for no gain. But we live with ideology that seeks to shame and belittle people who question the basis of their assumptions.
I’m a big nuclear advocate. I live in Japan and went through Fukushima. I used to tell my clients that the further away from the reactor one was, the more hysterical they became. Japan is not only reopening reactors but leaving it king hard at introducing new plants especially SMR. It is cost competitive regardless of CSIRO maths, which cherry picks data to suit an agenda.
For energy resource poor nations, they must be pragmatic. The retroactive application of the Safeguard Mechanism and our ever overreaching regulatory framework is driving international investors like Japan and Korea away from investment here.
Agreed, sensible policy on energy would be to have a mixed generation fleet with reliable baseload. That our political and bureaucratic classes have painted us into a corner on energy means the only solution to them is introducing more regulation and higher subsidies to pay for their vanity projects which mask failure which has such long term implications for our economy.
As far as nuclear moratorium goes, if Mr Bowen believes he is in possession of the best intel, he should be the first to push to repeal the ban on civilian nuke and allow the market to decide. If he’s right, there will be no change. Haven spoken to nuclear players in Japan and Korea, they can’t wait to get involved.
Mike
Hi Mike - Yep, the sooner Australia can repeal that ban on nuclear the better.
However, that's not going to happen any time soon. If the pundits are right, with another Labor win in 2028 (Yuckko - hardly bears thinking about), earliest 2031 assuming a conservative Govt regains power. That's a very long time between drinks as it were.
Meantime, we've got to maintain reliable base load power that's simply possible via the unreliables.
Only real option is coal and/or gas for the foreseeable future, with hydro (just another battery) where it can provide base load until the water runs out.
Difficult times ahead for the land Down Under, not helped by the Quockerwodgers within our ranks.
Your 7 dot points nail it.
Smallest manufacturing sector in the OECD.
The investment stats re: Zimbabwe etc would be hilarious if not true.
Not great for my blood pressure but a very very good article.
You are conflating too many issues with an ambition for net zero. Our sclerotic industrial relations systems is a much bigger cause of our economic performance and we have been going backwards since ré regulating the system after Kevin07. Australian house prices have been too high for a long time before net zero policies were introduced. Stock markets all around the world are losing companies to private equity, including in America. It is not just Australia’s problem or anything to do with net zero. The debts run up after the GFC and Covid dwarf net zero expenditures.
Abandoning net zero is fine if you believe that humanity can go on pumping emissions at the same rate without consequence, but I do not believe that and if we do not take action we are rabbits in the headlights do nothing to lessen a bad future for our kids. That said it makes sense to take action in the most cost effective way and excluding nuclear energy the most powerful tool we have is insane. The World led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was able to control CFCs and stop the Ozone Hole expansion. Controlling CO2 will be much more difficult, but humans are smart.
Sounds like you are fanning the flames of alarmist economic fear of emissions reductions efforts in defense of fossil fuels to me, with nothing credible in place for emissions reductions or otherwise addressing the climate problem.
I think the doubt, deny, delay crowd who keep opposing and obstructing efforts to bring down emissions are the real alarmists in this, so overcome with their self generated fears of climate action as to be paralyzed in the face of global warming.
As long as the best the RE Doomists can offer for climate action is insincere promoting of nuclear-not-renewable - the truly economically unworkable option, so much more expensive than fossil fuels that it presents no long term threat to them - people who do take the climate problem seriously cannot take them seriously.
When the leading 'proponents' of nuclear-not-renewables are climate science deniers (and/or politically with them) and their clear intention isn't to stop emissions better or cheaper but to impede efforts by others to do so the glaring insincerity looks more like feature intended to reassure climate science deniers they aren't serious than flaw that makes them unable to convince the climate concerned.
Ken,
Thank you for your comments.
The question is not so much individual beliefs in climate change, but the realities of what is going on driven by the financial markets.
Financial markets have been speaking. That is not my opinion. It is fact. Fossil fuel investment is going through the roof. Banks are fleeing the NZBA. It is fact. Countless renewables projects are falling over because the commercials do not stack up. The massive blow outs in transmission need to be paid for. They are being grown to support RE expansion. Therefore it would be disingenuous to suggest that renewables are the cheapest form of energy when the extra investment in storage and transmission to connect them to the grid are exploding 5-10x initial estimates.
Take GE Vernova, which has an offshore wind (OSW) business that has lost $13 billion over 40 straight quarters. 10 years. The CEO said back in December that the nuclear and gas businesses have never "had so much fun" because of the data centre boom. His words. Further, they are not pursuing more OSW orders. His words.
I am a proponent of nuclear power. I live in a country that had an accident and they will introduce new SMRs and modern reactors.
Nuclear in Korea has averaged 5c/kWh over the last 20 years, at least 1/2 of every other source. The build cost is at least 1/3rd the CSIRO GenCost modelling.
Korea has the nuclear track record which blows the biased CSIRO analysis to smithereens. It is hard to take them seriously as a government agency when they could have spoken to the Australian Embassy in Seoul to arrange a meeting with half government owned KEPCO (Korea's largest electricity generator) to get the facts. Instead they relied on third party research.
If the government is so supremely confident that nuclear power is a dead duck, they should be the first to propose a lift of the moratorium to put the matter to bed. They won't because they know the true answer.
Our energy grid transition is directly behind our shabby economic performance. Whether bankruptcies, lower productivity or falling per capita GDP even the RBA governor was suggesting 2 percent GDP growth was redlining it.
90% of the Paris Accord signatories missing their own self imposed deadlines to provide NDCs (nationally defined contributions) in Feb 2025. Fact. China recently completed an 1800km railway dedicated to coal fired power supply. Fact.
Our government is not disclosing the amount being spent on the Capacity Investment Scheme in the budget. Why not be transparent? The ultimate irony is that the cost below outs behind the obfuscation will be borne directly thru tax, our energy bills or most likely both.
Although for a government that has an effective mandate in both houses, it is curious to see the amount of hysterical content published (and wildly misleading)so early into a second term. The reality is unfolding right before our eyes.
Our electricity prices are going only one way - up. Germany is the blueprint for our government and it is suffering from some of the most expensive energy prices in EU and its manufacturing base is being hollowed out. Brands like VW are closing factories.
In closing, political dogma will never supersede physics. Yet political ideology is why the transition is failing so abjectly.