It’s often claimed the major supermarkets would prefer to see tonnes of fresh food be dumped rather than sell less than ‘perfect’ fruit and veggies in their shops or some landlords keep perfectly good homes vacant so they can rent them at exorbitant prices for short periods to holiday makers on websites. Economists will tell you that these are examples of ‘the market’ making rational decisions.

There is also a ‘market’ in the electricity generation industry. This market believes it is rational to burn fossil fuels to generate ‘baseload’ power during the day while we are turning off solar farms, rather than storing the solar produced energy for use in the late afternoon peak. A frequent claim of those that do not support the change to renewable energy is renewable sources of electricity cannot be relied upon to produce baseload power. They are right – but not for the reasons they claim. The actual definition of baseload power is the generation of the minimum amount of power required to keep the turbines spinning in a coal powered power station. Unlike solar, wind, hydro or gas, it takes a considerable time for the restarting of a coal fired power generator should someone hit the off switch. It also takes a considerable time to turn them off.

Some that reside on the Coalition benches in Federal Parliament will tell you that we need baseload power, and if we can’t get it from burning coal, we need nuclear electricity generation. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton seems to be on board, spruiking nuclear power whenever he gets the opportunity – although his reluctance to actually suggest where these plants should be located indicates there he still has to convince most Australians of their worth. Writing on the ABC’s website, Annabel Crabb suggests that the reason Dutton is attempting to market nuclear power is that he has to offer something to the conservative flank in his party room

And while large parts of the Australian energy sector remain temporarily addicted to coal (even in Victoria, around 70 per cent of base load power comes from burning brown coal), the hard-core climate deniers of the Coalition are in the process of kicking the habit. Their methadone equivalent? Nuclear.

In terms of the culture wars, nuclear enrages the greenies in the same satisfying way that coal does. So, for your hardcore Sky After Dark watcher, it delivers the same political high.

The reality is there are a number of alternatives to coal or nuclear electricity generation. Writing in The New Daily, Richard Dennis from the Australia Institute observes

Indeed, in a real-world trial, a major building in Sydney shifted 800kWh of electricity demand from late afternoon to the middle of the day by simply lowering the air conditioning target temperature by 1 degree early in the day. A battery big enough to shift that much electricity would cost around $500,000. Similarly, small changes in the NEM rules could give buildings much greater incentives to utilise other forms of energy storage and interact with the grid far more efficiently.

It’s not hard to come to the conclusion that Dutton is attempting to ‘pick winners’ that satisfy the extremely rusted on conservatives that inhabit or support some parts of the Liberal and National Parties. At the same time he is criticising the government for attempting to ‘pick winners’ in industries that support the government’s stated ambition of net zero by 2050.

While governments in general don’t have a great reputation when it comes to ‘picking winners’, arguably they are no worse than other large organisations. The difference being that other large organisations don’t have to publicly report their failures. We do however have some evidence that the Coalition has extremely poor form in ‘picking winners’ in recent times.

The Rudd and Gillard ALP Governments between 2009 and 2013 implemented a program of converting the existing communications system around Australia to a high-speed digital system that involved replacing most of the copper communications cables with fibre cables. The program was called the National Broadband Network and was destined to install fibre connection to most homes in the country. Rudd lost the 2013 election for a number of reasons, one of the claims made against the ALP Government at the time was that the NBN was unaffordable and a waste of money. The incoming Prime Minster, Tony Abbott and his Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull scaled back the program so that fibre cable was installed to ‘nodes’ and then the existing copper phone cable would connect individual homes in a system known as Fibre to the Node.

The NBN recently reported that they had lost around 65,000 customers between June 2022 and April 2024. It is understood that the majority of these customers migrated to ‘fixed wireless’ or satellite communications plans where there is reduced cost as well as a faster internet connection. While

The Coalition’s communications spokesman, David Coleman, said this month the decline was a “troubling sign” for the company and the government had questions to answer. But others blame the Coalition itself.

In February, the company’s outgoing chief executive, Stephen Rue, told Guardian Australia those shifting away from the NBN were largely customers on fibre-to-the-node – the Abbott-Turnbull-era technology that uses legacy copper phone lines, where speed and quality decreases the further away your home is from the node.

“The main reason for that is service and a desire for faster speed … customers who are at the end of the FttN line … they get 25 megabits per second, but they can’t experience a faster speed and obviously there are some copper lines that have unreliability,” he said.

Ironically, NBN has commenced a program to convert the Fibre to the Node system to Fibre to the Premises, broadly implementing the plan initiated by the Rudd Government in 2009

The company has projected that 5m premises will be upgraded by the end of 2025. Over 200,000 premises have already been upgraded in these parts of the network to improve speeds and to keep customers on board, but the effort has not yet halted the decline in customers.

No wonder the NBN is considered to be expensive. They are currently re-working the connections to around 5 million premises due to the Coalition’s posturing and political point scoring over the past decade.

The cost of solar, wind and hydro are far cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear. Only the Coalition and vested interests are arguing otherwise. No one in ‘the market’ was silly enough to take up the Morrison Coalition Government’s generous offer to build a new coal fired power station in the Hunter Valley a few years ago. ANSTO, the government agency responsible for operation of the Lucas Heights (Sydney) nuclear reactor has been looking for a solution to waste storage for the low volumes of waste produced as a by-product of medicine production for a number of years.

Given the problems storing nuclear waste and decommissioning obsolete nuclear facilities are far greater, take a lot longer and cost considerably than reworking internet connections – do we really want to back the Coalition’s understanding of technology and risk again?