Climate self-sabotage in Oz

In July 2014, the Abbott government abolished the carbon tax, saving the average household about $500 a year. In early 2015, we reduced the Renewable Energy Target from 28 to 23 per cent. It wasn’t enough, but it was the best that we could get through the Senate. My cabinet always had some ministers focused on jobs and cost of living; and others more concerned with emissions reduction, even though our contribution to global emissions was barely one per cent.

Inevitably, our Paris agreement to a 26- to 28-per-cent emissions reduction was a compromise based on the advice that we could achieve it largely through efficiencies, without additional environmental imposts, using the highly successful emissions reduction fund; because, as I said at the time, “the last thing we want to do is strengthen the environment (but) damage our economy.”

At last year’s election, the government chose not to campaign on power prices even though Labor was promising a 50-per-cent Renewable Energy Target (requiring a $50 billion overbuild of wind farms) and a 45-per-cent reduction in emissions by 2030 (requiring a new carbon tax). After a net gain of 25 seats at the previous two elections, when we had campaigned on power prices, we had a net loss of 14 when we didn’t.

And subsequent events have made the politics of power once more the central battleground between and within the two main parties. Although manufacturing, agriculture and transport are also large carbon dioxide emitters, the politics of emissions reduction has always focused on power generation because shifting to renewables has always been more saleable to voters than closing down industry, giving up cars and not eating beef.

As a badge of environmental virtue, the South Australian state Labor government had been boasting that, on average, almost 50 per cent of its power was wind-generated — although at any moment it could vary from almost zero to almost 100 per cent. It had even ostentatiously blown-up its one coal-fired power station.

In September last year, though, the wind blew so hard that the turbines had to shut down — and the inter-connector with Victoria and its reliable coal-fired power failed too. For 24 hours, there was a state-wide blackout. For nearly two million people, the lights were off, cash registers didn’t work, traffic lights went down, lifts stopped, and patients were sent home from hospitals.

Throughout last summer, there were further blackouts and brownouts across eastern Australia requiring hundreds of millions in repairs to the plants of energy-intensive industries. Despite this, in a display of virtue signalling, to flaunt its environmental credentials (and to boost prices for its other coal-fired plants), last March the Frenchgovernment part-owned multinational, Engie, closed down the giant Hazelwood coal-fired station that had supplied a quarter of Victoria’s power.

The Australian Energy Market Operator is now sufficiently alarmed to have just issued an official warning of further blackouts this summer in Victoria and South Australia and severe medium-term power shortfalls. But in yet more virtue signalling, energy giant AGL is still threatening to close the massive Liddell coalfired power station in NSW and replace it with a subsidized solar farm and a much smaller gas-fired power station relying on gas supplies that don’t currently exist.

Were it not rational behaviour based on irrational government policy, this deliberate elimination of an essential service could only be described as a form of economic self-harm.

Hydro aside, renewable energy should properly be referred to as intermittent and unreliable power. When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, the power doesn’t flow. Wind and solar power are like sailing ships; cheaper than powered boats, to be sure, but we’ve stopped using sail for transport because it couldn’t be trusted to turn up on time.

Because the weather is unpredictable, you never really know when renewable power is going to work. Its marginal cost is low but so is its reliability, so in the absence of industrial-scale