Labor wants to waste $100b to make Australian energy 50% renewable, more expensive, by 2030

The Coalition in Australia must be thrilled that Bill Shorten wants to make the next election about “climate change”. What a gift from Labor.

Just before the last election Labor had a plan to spend $60,000 dollars per person to try to change the weather by 2050. Labor lost nearly a quarter of their seats. Bill Shorten’s new election vision is to repeat the same mistakes. Like the G7 leaders, he wants symbolic and unachievable promises — only, unlike them, he’s making pie-in-the-sky, uncosted plans for 2030, not 2100. Five of the seven G7 nations are increasing their coal use. Get with the game Bill, other countries are winding schemes back and putting off the promises til long after most people alive today will be gone.

Shorten is pushing a dead dog. The sweet end of the wind and solar power deals have already been done and the numbers get uglier from here. As more and more of the grid is taken over by a massive erratic and unreliable supply, the marginal returns shrink, prices go up. The carbon “savings” falls. Full baseload back up must be maintained regardless, whirring away inefficiently on standby. The Labor Party are making a big miscalculation electorally, fooled by inept surveys that show everyone “likes” the environment and “worries” about climate change. Better studies show almost no votes hinge on this topic, nobody wants to spend much, and pandering to the green religion will hurt things people do care about — electricity prices, manufacturing and employment. US voters rank “climate change” last in environmental polls, and they rank the environment below nearly every thing else. In the UK, polls show 62% don’t believe in a man-made climate disaster. There’s  a long list of environmental climate polls showing skeptics are everywhere, and many believers are bored and unmotivated. In the US Tom Steyer threw $74 m at the election on climate change and lost nearly every seat he tried to influence. Fully 92% of Swiss Voters said “No” to a carbon tax.

Just what the country needs?

Green “renewables” schemes push up the price of electricity, make the world 0.0C degrees cooler, and increase unemployment. Every green job created means a loss of 2 – 5 other jobs.

Bill Shorten to unveil 50% renewable energy target at Labor conference –– Sydney Morning Herald

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten is set to unveil a bold climate policy goal requiring half of Australia’s large-scale energy production to be generated using renewable sources within 15 years.

Fairfax Media has learnt that despite Labor’s humiliating 2013 election defeat caused in part by voter contempt for its carbon tax, Mr Shorten will use this weekend’s ALP national conference in Melbourne to announce the even more ambitious goal, dramatically beefing up Labor’s renewable energy target.

The policy shift is designed to recover green support, sharpen the contrast with Prime Minister Tony Abbott over climate change and make global warming the defining battleground of the next federal election

As Andrew Bolt points out, it’s “not costed, not modelled, and not effective”.

Only in Labor economics can we add more expensive suppliers and pretend the prices won’t rise dramatically. It’s “free energy from the sun” after all. It’s like the Labor Party believe the bumper stickers.

How much global cooling does $100 billion buy?

Australians emit 1.16% of human emissions, which total just 4% of natural ones. Co2 doesn’t appear to have warmed the world in the last 18 years despite rapid rises in human emissions — one third of all human emissions ever since 1998, and no warming.  The Australian impact is 0.00064 of nothing.

We need another 10,000 wind turbines?

Adam Creighton, The Australian, on energy prices, and the cost of the Labor 50% renewables plan:

ACIL chief executive Paul Hyslop said: “If this were met by wind power it would require 10,000 to 11,000 additional turbines … with capital costs for the turbines alone of $65 billion.”

He suggested such a move would undermine productivity.

ACIL said the total capital cost would be in the order of $100bn — about three times the cost of the National Broadband Network.

“Basically, we’d be spending another $65bn on turbines to effectively get no more output,” Mr Hyslop said.

Australia will need about 300,000 GWh total in 2030 according to ACIL — We’d need another 92,000 GWh of “renewables”:

The ­Coalition and Labor agreed in May to trim the RET from 41,000 GWh a year by 2020 to 33,000 GWh, to allow for the fall in electricity demand that was projected to lift the share gener­ated from renewables to 26 per cent by 2020, rather than the 20 per cent envisaged. The new RET is forecast to provide 23.5 per cent.

ACIL estimates a total power demand of 300,000 GWh in 2030, of which half would come from renewable sources under the Labor plan. The firm believes 25,000 GWh would come from rooftop solar systems, with another­ 16,000 GWh from existing hydro-electric plants, leaving 110,000 GWh to be provided by large-scale renewable projects — or 92,000GWh more than existing capacity.

In terms of carbon emissions, wind turbines are almost the last choice on Earth. They cost $50 – $100 per ton of carbon, seven times more than the Coalition’s Direct Action plan. No one who cares about the environment would want to waste money doing something so inefficient when they could spend the same money and achieve a lot more.

Australian electricity prices are rising much faster than inflation.

The big leap in electricity prices in the graph in 2012/13 below is due to the carbon tax, but some of the rise before that is due in part to other policies to “green” our electricity.

Source: Parliamentary Library

 The electricity price is rising much faster than inflation. The Rudd Labor government was elected in November 2007.

Modeling shows the RET scheme cost up to $28 billion and lost 5,000 jobs. The current scheme is 23% RET (Renewable Energy Target). Labor want to make that 50%.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Kate Carnell said it was disappointing the ALP was advocating significant changes on renewable energy because bipartisanship was critical for long-term investment certainty.

“A 50 per cent RET will put jobs and growth at risk,’’ she said. Modelling undertaken last year by Deloitte Access Economics showed the existing RET pushed up electricity prices, costing the economy up to $28 billion and a net loss of 5000 jobs, she said.

Bill Shorten doesn’t argue with economics, it’s a herding thing:

To support its argument, the opposition points to the targets of a range of other places: Denmark, 50% by 2020; California, 50% by 2030; Germany, 55-60% by 2035; Sweden, 63% by 2020; New Zealand, 90% by 2025; and Norway, 114% by 2020.

— Michelle Grattan on The Conversation

And which of those countries is flat, dry, 4,000 km wide, and its major exports are energy-intensive commodities, coal, and gas?