Its time we stopped blaming the conflict in Europe for the high cost of energy.
Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen recently told an energy conference of the investments required to deliver on the emissions reductions he has pledged to the UN. The minister said we would need to install 40 massive wind turbines each month until 2030 – more than a wind turbine a day for eight years!
In terms of solar we still need to install 20,000 500-watt panels every day.
This means building in enough 2.4m x 1.2m solar panels to stretch, end to end, more than 52km, every day!
Minister Bowen wants to fund and approve 28,000km of transmission lines to link up renewal energy projects throughout the country. One can imagine the delays, protests, damage to landscapes and the cost!
Once again, when we consider these regulated profit-making assets will be encouraged to provide electricity, that cannot be stored and therefore must be backed-up by an equivalent amount of ‘dispatchable’, generation we can see this transition will not happen as currently set out by the minister.
These projects have been attempted in many countries and places and all of them have ended up in an energy cost and supply crisis.
We need to look no further than Germany, Spain, Britain and California as countries that have had to resort to dispatchable back-up from fossil fuels.
The only countries where renewal energy is successful is in the hydro-electric powerhouses of New Zealand, Norway and Tasmania. These countries have been able to make renewables plus storage work.
The problem we have is the government, Greens, teals, climate activists, public broadcasters, and Liberal ‘moderates’ all pretend our problem is Russian imperialism in eastern Europe.
We are an energy-rich nation. Our globally significant coal, gas and uranium resources constitute our greatest economic advantage and make us the envy of most other countries.
Unfortunately, we have decided to surrender our natural advantage by embracing energy poverty while exporting our energy resources for others to enjoy.
What other country would indulge in self harm like this! We are now face to face with damaging electricity prices and actual shortages of supply in eastern Australia.
The zealots in our leadership including the politicians in charge of our Treasury benches do not understand the madness in their ideological goals and declare that we should double down on the renewables that have created this fiasco.
We now have to think ‘outside the square’ and if we think we can wait on Minister Bowen and his cronies to come up with the solution we are heading for trouble.
Perhaps we could start to think about new technology for example:
A Rolls-Royce SMR power station will have the capacity to generate 470MW of low carbon energy, equivalent to more than 150 onshore wind turbines. It will provide consistent baseload generation for at least 60 years, helping to support the roll out of renewable generation and overcome intermittency issues.
See more on this subject in part 2 of, 'Its our own fault'...
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