The current state of the Renewable Crash Test Dummy Transition
Everyone who can add up in Australia knows it can’t work, but the climate of fear stops them saying so. Last month a senior energy industry executive told the Australian Financial Review quietly that everyone believes [the 2030 target] will be missed, but nobody wants to say it. Apparently, even executives are being coerced into silence for fear of retribution. The insider referred to the “discretion” Ministers have on project approvals. It’s like a national mafia racket: “Nice business you have there — shame if you couldn’t get the permit”. So the Labor Party sets itself up to fail by silencing the people it could be listening to — as if the electricity will still be there when the turbines stop turning.
To put the size of the moonshot in perspective, even Federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen himself said the nation must “install 22,000 500-watt solar panels every day for eight years along with 40 seven-megawatt wind turbines every month”. In toto, we are supposed to build 44GW of “renewables” by 2030.
Instead of this frenetic pace, renewable energy investment ground to a near halt in the last quarter in Australia. What was a rolling $1.2 billion quarterly commitment slipped back to just $225 million as we run out of land near interconnectors, and approvals are delayed for new transmission lines. We “need” some 10,000 kilometers of high voltage lines, but farmers are angry the giant metal towers will devalue their properties, make it harder to farm, ruin their views, and increase fire risks. Other people are starting to wonder if we should carve up national parks with tower lines too. The real cost of all the infrastructure that unreliable low density energy needs is just starting to burn.
Then to top it all off, an expert analysis has spotted a $60 billion dollar hole in the magical Renewable fairy plan, which, if correct, amounts to about $5,600 in costs for every household in Australia that no one has budgeted for.
Way off the pace’: Just four green energy projects reached sign off
Angela Macdonald-Smith, AFR
Only four renewable energy projects reached financial close in the three months to the end of June, extending a dearth in commitments to new wind and solar farms just when the buildout is supposed to be accelerating to allow polluting coal generators to shut down. The low level of project go-aheads – for reasons including planning approval delays and grid bottlenecks – came after no wind and solar projects at all reached financial sign-off in the March quarter, the Clean Energy Council says.
The addition of just 348 megawatts of capacity into the development phase in the April-June period …
According to Rystad Energy analysis, between 3.5 gigawatts and 4 GW of new utility solar, wind and storage needs to start construction every year to reach the 2030 target.
But new financial commitments slowed to $225 million of projects, well down from the rolling quarterly average over the past 12 months of $1.3 billion.
They wouldn’t need to be bullies if it wasn’t such a bad idea…
Meeting Energy Targets close to impossible
Angela Macdonald-Smith and Mark Ludlow, AFR, July 10th, 2023
…others are much more blunt behind closed doors: “Everybody believes [the 2030 target will be missed] but nobody wants to say it because of what might happen – people are too frightened of some kind of retribution,” one senior energy industry executive said, pointing to the level of discretion ministers have in decisions on east coast gas activities, for example.
JPMorgan analyst Mark Busuttil calculates that only 628MW of new renewable capacity came online in the first half of 2023, including only 53MW of solar capacity in the June quarter.
The $60billion dollar black hole arose from the “Sunk Cost” Accounting Trick where costs were calculated “after 2030” assuming all the pumped hydro, batteries and transmission lines were built and paid off already:
$62bn black hole in Labor energy plan
By Jesse Malcolm and Geoff Chambers, The Australian
According to new analysis conducted by Australian Resources Development executive director David Carland, Labor has failed to bake in $62bn in budgetary spending required to lift renewables from 20 per cent of the nation’s energy production to the government’s stated 56 per cent target.
Mr Carland’s figures estimate that a range of projects – including Snowy 2.0, Tasmania’s “battery of the nation” plan and various transmission expansion projects — would be significantly more expensive if they were costed correctly, taking into account annual government subsidies and projected cost escalations and delays.
The Sunk Cost Trick was a way to hide costs that will be added to electricity bills by stealth:
Opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien used the analysis to attack Mr Bowen for misrepresenting the GenCost review, which the Energy Minister has used to support his claim of renewables being the cheapest form of energy.
“Labor is either wilfully lying to the Australian people about the true cost of its transition or it has absolutely no idea how Australia’s energy system operates. It’s time for an honest debate about the true cost of Labor’s radical energy experiment,” Mr O’Brien said.
“Renowned energy experts have revealed that Chris Bowen has purposefully buried a $60bn black hole in its energy plan that … Australians will ultimately pay for through higher energy bills.
For a bargain we could spend 0.0001% of this to audit the foreign UN committees that say we have to spend $5 Trillion to “fix” the weather. Scientists are behaving very badly: hiding data, declines, history, adjustments and methods.
Expert climate modelers don’t want their own pensions bet on climate models, why should yours be?
Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay