Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is on a mission. The mission is to get the keys to the PM’s office at the next election. To achieve the objective, he will do or say whatever is necessary to garner as many votes as possible. The business plan is to say whatever he thinks is necessary – with his fingers tightly crossed behind his back.
We have recent experience with Dutton’s promise anything to get a vote strategy. On 9 September 2023, Dutton promised (assuming he is elected at the next election) to hold a second referendum on the recognition of first nations peoples in Australia, somehow getting done what the Albanese Government attempted to do without the malice and hatred. By 16 October 2023, conveniently a few days after the referendum failed, he (in that terminology so loved by the media to describe what is in essence a lie) ‘walked back’ the promise and was quoted as saying Australians were ‘probably over the referendum process for some time’.
The Dutton shadow cabinet has been highly vocal about wind turbines in general and in particular offshore wind farms. Some of the claims made are that marine animals will become disoriented because of the poles in the ocean, the poles will be damaged due to impacts with large aquatic mammals such as whales and they will be a blight on the coast line. If that were to be the case, why are these ill-effects only caused by wind turbines and not for example bridge pylons, oil rigs or jetties? The obvious answer is the claim is bollocks and similar to demonstrably false claims made by the only ex-president of the USA that is a convicted criminal. To make the claims even more laughable, guess who put the legislation through the Australian Parliament that allows for the installation of offshore wind turbines? Hint – it wasn’t the ALP. Angus Taylor (then Energy Minister) went as far as to say
An offshore electricity industry in Australia will further strengthen our economy. …Offshore generation and transmission can deliver significant benefits to all Australians through a more secure and reliable electricity system, and create thousands of new jobs and business opportunities in regional Australia.
Was Taylor wrong then or is Dutton wrong now?
Which brings us to Dutton’s nuclear future. Dutton and his shadow ministers are serving up claims that the government has no interest in the reduction of the cost of living for ‘ordinary Australians’. Apart from not defining ‘ordinary Australians’ so meaningful comparisons can be made, they were in power when a lot of the decisions were taken that created the current problems. However he is actively spruiking nuclear power as a better, cheaper and more reliable alternative to a ‘net zero’ future than renewable energy. The problem is that it isn’t.
Let’s look at cost. according to Peter Martin writing for The Conversation, respected magazine, The Economist recently produces a special edition that discussed the dawn of the solar age, arguing that solar energy production is growing exponentially. In fact
Installed solar capacity is doubling every three years, meaning it has grown tenfold in the past ten years. The Economist says the next tenfold increase will be the equivalent of multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight, in less time than it usually takes to build one of them.
To give an idea of the standing start the industry has grown from, The Economist reports that in 2004 it took the world an entire year to install one gigawatt of solar capacity (about enough to power a small city). This year, that’s expected to happen every day.
Energy experts didn’t see it coming. The Economist includes a chart showing that every single forecast the International Energy Agency has made for the growth of the growth of solar since 2009 has been wrong. What the agency said would take 20 years happened in only six.
Ironically, the group that made the best estimate of the growth of solar energy is Greenpeace – although they also woefully underestimated the shift.
OK – so renewables are cheaper – how about reliability? Certainly solar panels are useless when the sun isn’t shining and wind turbines don’t do much when there is no wind
But the efficiency of batteries is soaring and the price is plummeting, meaning that on one estimate the cost of a kilowatt-hour of battery storage has fallen by 99% over the past 30 years.
In the United States, plans are being drawn up to use batteries to transport solar energy as well as store it. Why build high-voltage transmission cables when you can use train carriages full of batteries to move power from the remote sunny places that collect it to the cities that need it?
And why not move trainloads of batteries around? We’ve been moving coal, flammable fuels, oil and dangerous chemicals by rail and road for decades, with minimal risk. Australia is also investing in pumped hydro. This is designed to make money at night by supplying power when renewables can’t. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (an investor in pumped hydro) responds to the opposition’s claims here.
Ok – so renewables are cheaper and reliable – is nuclear better? Not really. Apart from having to safety store the life-threatening waste from nuclear plants for a extremely long time using extremely well built and secure storage sites, there is the cost of establishing a nuclear industry in Australia. The recent experiences of the UK and USA who already have the processes in place to manage nuclear power generation are telling. The USA’s Voglte power plant is 6 years late and $33Billion over budget. If that’s concerning, it’s nothing in comparison to the UK’s Hinkley Nuclear power station is currently 13 years late (originally expected online in 2017 – now possibly 2029) and $55 Billion over budget. The cost of the power generated is expensive in comparison to renewables as well.
If all of the problems above are surmountable, the killer blow is that nuclear power doesn’t work well with rooftop solar – despite Nationals Leader David Littleproud’s apparently support
The Nationals, he said, were not against renewable energy, only large-scale projects such as wind farms and transmission lines that were “tearing up the environment”.
Quite the opposite – the National Party wanted as many Australian households to get solar and batteries as would have them.
Like coal fired power stations, nuclear power stations work better and more efficiently if they are running at a constant rate. They are expensive to build, operate and maintain. It’s the real meaning of the term baseload and explains why power traditionally has been cheaper at night or on the weekend when the coal stations are still running and the power retailers have to find someone who will purchase the product. In contrast, installing solar panels is very quick, relatively inexpensive and can be used to store energy in a battery. But energy production is variable and depends on the environmental conditions on the day. The problem is explained by the ABC like this
… there are times in South Australia when rooftop solar alone can account for more than the entire demand for electricity in the state.
To ensure South Australia’s electricity system doesn’t blow up, virtually all other generators have to pare back their output to a bare minimum or switch off entirely.
And even then, South Australia’s surplus rooftop solar generation has to be exported to other states or wasted.
Rooftop solar can do this because it’s largely uncontrolled and flows simply by dint of the sun shining.
It was partly for this reason that South Australia’s only base-load coal plant retired in 2016.
Of course, there are many more times when rooftop solar provides precisely 0 per cent of South Australia’s power needs.
Which does nothing for the economics of a coal or nuclear power plant which operates best at a constant (flat out) rate.
In short Dutton cannot be trusted. His support for the second referendum evaporated almost before the claim was made. He would have been sitting around the Cabinet Table when the legislation to allow offshore wind turbines was discussed and approved and he is now making claims that he will sort out Australia’s transition to ‘net zero’ after the election proffering a solution that doesn’t stack up environmentally or economically.
Dutton wants to burden the country with an uncosted, untried energy system that is many times more expensive than the logical alternative, while harping about the cost of living. Talk about champagne tastes on beer budgets!
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