By Jo Nova
Finally, twenty years too late, Australian leaders are talking about the galactic cost of making a spare energy grid that might, maybe, hopefully one day reduce world temperatures by one thousandth of a degree. Sadly they are still not talking about why that’s a pointless quest, why CO2 feeds the poor, warmth is good, humans emissions are irrelevant, or how science has become a turgid swamp patrolled by dead sacred cows. But it’s a start!
We got the trifecta: Our car-crash energy bills, the revolution of common sense in the US, and the appearance of our own election on the horizon have set off the Air-raid sirens to wake a sleeping nation.
It’s only half a trillion dollars
The Minister for Energy says the cost of renewables by 2050 will be $122 billion (AUD). Not convinced, the Opposition commissioned a study that estimates it’s more like $650 billion. But what’s a half a trillion dollars when you have hope, faith, and a fantasy to make storms a bit nicer? It’s a horror show. The Labor Government wants every family of four to spend something like $100,000 on their wind and solar vision over the next 25 years. There goes the house deposit, the uni fees, the family holidays. There goes our lifestyle.
Australian energy is twice the price
Things are so bad here in Renewable Crash Test Dummy World, that the CEO of Glencore said Australian energy costs twice as much as in the US, Canada, China and India. Glencore, is the largest coal miner in Australia, the fifth largest miner in the world, and employs about 140,000 people. Gary Nagle went on to tell the Daily Telegraph that Australia has a bad attitude:
He argued that the negative attitude to coal in Australia was increasingly out of step with other parts of the world.
“Many stakeholders globally are now taking a more pragmatic view about coal,” Mr Nagle said.
It’s such a first world problem. Imagine being the world’s largest coal exporter nation every other year, and spending billions to undermine one of your two largest industries? How did we get here, standing on a plank, sawing the ship off?
Tricked by “free energy” scam
The electricity-fashion-queens chased a vision of fairy-energy so they could win cat-walk parades at the UN, but lose in every other race that matters. The wind and sun appear to be free, but cost us the Earth to collect, and the Universe to store.
All the politicians had to do was get scientists and engineers to debate in public and they would have realized that they can’t keep electricity in a shoe-box, or post it from the Simpson Desert to Sydney harbor. Instead, they employed the yes-men who agreed with the vision, and sacked, silenced or never funded the 1,000 engineers who could have told them it was stupid.
That, and they all watched the ABC:
Bowen, others should be ashamed of our $650bn renewables disaster
Robert Gottleibsen, The Australian
Since Federation, Australian ministers on both sides of the parliament have made major mistakes and misleading statements. But nothing in our history matches the looming renewable energy conversion financial disaster.
The Bowen calculations are based on “net present value”, or NPV, which involves calculating the final cost and adjusting it back to the current dollars. But commercial infrastructure projections work on what will actually be outlaid. Frontier have now done those outlay calculations to 2050 for the governments and now the public.
And of course, by 2050 all the windmills and sacred glass panels will be due to expire and we will need to find a very big hole to bury them in, and start again with the fire-hose from the bank account spraying direct to China.
The only hope, as Gottleibsen says, is if the protests from farmers and country towns have glued up the plans enough that we can pull the pin before we sink any more into this pit.
It only makes sense if imaginary “carbon credits” had some value:
So, the state and federal governments devised a system which I would call “rigging the books”. But they would justify it by saying carbon savings had a value which must be counted in the project.
And so, a transmission network hypothetically costing $100m would be given a carbon credit, which would reduce its “cost” substantially and justify investment. Frontier calculates that some $80bn of the $650bn came from these carbon credits.
And this half a trillion doesn’t include half the country (the Western half and the Northern Territory). The price can only rise.
Despite the blockbuster costs, Frontier Economics have almost certainly underestimated the true cost of converting Australia into a third-world nation. The direct costs are bad, but the secondary costs are existential. Once the factories and mines are gone, who is left to defend the green-god ideology?