Neither renewables nor nuclear can save our grid

Donald Horne's idea of the "lucky country" postulates that, while other developed nations created their wealth using means such as technology, innovation, and their citizenry's hard work, Australia largely did not. Instead, Horne believed that our economic prosperity was largely derived from Australia's rich natural resources and from immigrant labour. Horne felt the country was being run by second-rate elites, and that, unless Australia lifted its game, its good run would not last.

Australia's attitude to coal, nuclear energy and "net zero" is consistent with a nation run by nervous second-rate elites, insistent on turning what was an energy powerhouse (with competitive heavy industry and minerals processing) into a post-industrial nation with a failing and increasingly expensive energy system. The stagnant per capita GDP of recent years is partly the result of this.

On the left, our politicians are intent on rushing to totally replace Australia's tried-and-proven coal-based electricity system with one overwhelmingly dependent on intermittent solar and wind. (The most extreme even want to ban most of our energy exports.) All of this is for seemingly doubtful environmental benefits.

Australia's left is no longer a working-class movement. Instead, it more represents middle-class university-educated elites (often in the public sector), who are commonly anti-business, and habitually have their hand in the taxpayer's pocket.

Net zero itself is a pipedream because solar panels and wind farms all have a substantial carbon footprint stemming from the energy required to make their constituent parts. "Renewables" (being intermittent) also need to be entirely backed up, and their hardware needs to be replaced periodically. Major extensions to electricity transmission infrastructure, required by geographically decentralised solar and wind farms, have their own additional but similarly ignored carbon footprint.

The lack of (all but very short term) energy storage, along with the high cost of "renewables", is at the core of problems that are in the course of breaking our electricity grid.

It has been suggestedthat every time we put up a large wind turbine about 900 tonnes of steel and about 2,500 tonnes of concrete are required. According to BHP, around 770 kilograms of coking coal is used to make each ton of steel required.)

Our so-called "conservative" politicians, when it comes to energy policy, are all over the place. The only skeptics questioning net zero and "renewables" are a few dissenting politicians like Senator Matt Canavanand some right-wing commentators. It was the Morrison Coalition Government (not Labor) that signed the Paris Agreement, and officially committed Australia to deliver (unachievable) net zero emissions by 2050.

At state level, the Libs in every jurisdiction support the transition to "renewable" energy, and there is little to separate them from Labor except for a slower rate of transition.

Put simply, there is no political commitment to change course, despite the recent call from Peter Dutton (drawing lackluster support) for the use of nuclear power. (Note that Dutton remains committed to the move away from coal but simply prefers nuclear power to solar and wind.)

Even if Dutton won the next election, and all the state Liberal parties eventually agreed to install nuclear plants, about a decade of lead time would be necessary before nuclear power could become a reality in Australia. We have been warnedthat our electricity grid will hit deep trouble well before then.

A look at Australia's historic attitude to nuclear technology is enlightening.

Initially, between 1952 and 1957 Australia (for defence reasons) allowed the British to conduct 12 major atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. Eventually, public opposition to the tests justifiably grew, and a moratorium on such testing began from November 1958.

Activists like Helen Caldicott from the 1970s opposed nuclear power, largely on (exaggerated?) safety grounds. In 1984, the Nuclear Disarmament Party was formed as the political arm of the Australian anti-nuclear movement. It's entire raison d'êtreseemed problematic because it is hardly possible to un-invent nuclear technology, and established nuclear powers were unlikely to unilaterally give up their weapons.

Australia introduced a legislative ban on nuclear energy via a Greens amendment in the Senate on 10 December 1998. The Howard Government at the time conceded to the ban as a means of getting legislative support for building a new nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights.

The only good thing that can be said about the ban is that it was largely immaterial at the time because coal generated power was so much cheaper than nuclear (and for Australia still is!). Cost, however, was never an impediment to governments from Rudd onwards promoting "renewable" energy, destroying almost all price signals to consumers in the process by means of massive subsidies and regulations favouring wind and solar. The extent of Australia's rooftop solar is almost entirely the result of high electricity prices, over-generous, but now reducing, feed-in tariffs, and extensive subsidies from government.

Malcolm Turnbull proposed Snowy 2.0 in 2019 as a means of overcoming issues with storing intermittent energy. It was supposed to cost about $2 billion and be commissioned by 2021. It got the go ahead without a market or engineering assessment, cost-benefit analysis or indeed even a feasibility study. The scheme had seemed a political "no-brainer" because it facilitated "renewables" and moved away from coal.

Snowy 2.0 (if now ever completed) will nominally have an energy storage capacity of 350,000 MW hours, with capacity to generate for up to 7 days at full capacity without refilling. For technical reasons, of the pumped hydro capacity promised by the project, less than half can actually be delivered A succession of cost blow-outs and time delays also mean that Snowy 2.0 is now estimated to cost at least $12 billion and will not deliver its first power until at least 2027. It is obvious that the project is totally uneconomic, and would have been scrapped several years ago, if political considerations did not prevail.

There was a related debacle with the contracted acquisition in 2016 of 12 French submarines at a cost of $50 billion. Essentially, opposition to nuclear power led the Turnbull government to reject buying the proven off-the-shelf French nuclear designs. Australia (at substantial extra cost) instead sought to dumb back a well-functioning nuclear design to a conventionally powered version. Eventually common sense prevailed, and the deal was cancelled at a taxpayer cost of about $5 billion. Australia now hopes to have eight nuclear-powered vessels in the water by the 2050s under the Aukus agreement.

A huge issue, largely overlooked in Australia, is that world-wide neither net zero nor even a reduction in CO₂ emissions look achievable into the future.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has modelled likely changes in emissions. By 2050, energy-related CO₂ emissions forecasts vary from a 2 per cent decrease to a 34 per cent increase compared with 2022. At country level, rapid growth in emissions from India and China are more than offsetting (now faltering) restraint in emissions in Western countries.

The main success story in reducing COâ‚‚ emissions has been the US. Since 1990, gross US greenhouse gas emissions have decreased by over 3 per cent. This has been mainly due to increased electricity generation from natural gas. Contrast the US with Australia, where use of natural gas has been discouraged and exploration curtailed. New household gas connections are now banned in Victoria and the ACT, and authorities seem stupidly reluctant to embrace gas-fired electricity, which can be fired up quickly to counter deficits from "renewables".

Australia contributes just over 1 per cent of global COâ‚‚ emissions. Former Chief Scientist Finkel was asked at Senate Estimates, what would happen if the world was to reduce its carbon emissions by an amount equal to Australia's rate of emissions. His answer was that the impact would be "virtually nothing". If net zero on the part of Australia would achieve virtually nothing for the climate, then why are we pursuing this objective at great national cost?

This all brings us to the question of why the Australian public has been so taken in by net zero and "renewables" ideology.

Perhaps the biggest contributor has been the unrelenting scare campaign about impending calamity. The predicted disasters never seem to eventuate, but people seem to swallow the scare, nevertheless. Global warming itself is well documented but has been far lower than climate catastrophists have predicted and is difficult to pin entirely on a trace element gas like COâ‚‚.

In Australia many people had been convinced by "experts" that our dams would never fill, crops would fail due to declining rainfall, weather events would become increasingly severe, our Barrier Reef coral was doomed, low-lying tropical islands would disappear under the sea etc. While we now know better, the "renewables" bandwagon continues.

The same "experts" had also told us that "renewable" energy would reduce our power bills, and that big batteries, pumped water storage, and green hydrogen would provide industrial scale energy storage. None of this has eventuated. At the same time the real risks of wind droughts lasting many days, and the issue that solar power can never work after dark get underplayed. There is also the issue that solar and wind infrastructure have limited lives and eventually need to be replaced at considerable monetary and environmental cost.

I think people want to believe that their good environmental intentions will make a big difference, even though the evidence generally indicates otherwise. Chief Scientist Finkel stated that cutting Australia's emissions to zero would have virtually no climate benefits. He later took the further position that "if all countries that have comparable carbon emissions took the stance that they shouldn't take action (because their contribution to this global problem is insignificant) then nobody would act, and the problem would continue to grow in scale".

I think Finkel was denying reality with this argument. The fact is that the world is not reducing emissions and climate change looks like taking its course regardless.

I would further argue that not using cheap coal electricity ourselves, and instead transferring Australia's heavy industry to countries like China and India, produces more net COâ‚‚. This is because we can place coal fired electricity generators right on our coalfields without the added cost in emissions of continually transporting coal halfway around the world.

All the talk of net zero also ignores that Australia has a huge comparative advantage in coal and gas energy (much like Saudi-Arabia with oil). It is easy for countries with little or no coal resources to volunteer to give up fossil fuels, but it is proving very costly by comparison for Australia.

Ten large coal power stations have closed in Australia since 2012. These included Hazelwood, which was producing as much as a quarter of Victoria's electricity at very low cost using brown coal. Due to its age, Hazelwood was, however, becoming expensive to maintain. One analyst suggested that the closure had doubled forward contract base-load wholesale prices in Victoria in six months, equivalent to an extra $1.8 billion a year cost burden to Victorian electricity consumers.

The latest datafor 2021-22 has Australian annual electricity generation at 272 TWH. Coal on average provided 47 percent of this or about 15 gigawatts each hour. Its past share had been as high as 80 per cent. In Queensland and NSW, coal is responsible for $4.5 billion each in annual royalties, and is the backbone of state budgets.

According to AEMO, 90 per cent of the current coal fleet will close before 2035 and the remaining rump by 2038. That will be a huge shock to the system, particularly as electricity consumption is forecast to nearly double by 2050. Additionally, we have been warned of gas shortages along the eastern seaboard. As gas supplies run low, the cost of gas-powered electricity (if we ever produce much) will soar.

So, what should Australia sensibly be doing? Might I suggest it is what most of our political and activist class regard as unthinkable.

Australia's highest energy priority should be to save our electricity system rather than making futile and unnecessary attempts to "save the planet" or please other countries. What the country should have been doing (from more than a decade ago) is replacing our less efficient older coal-powered electricity generators with modern high efficiency low emissions (HELE) equivalents.

Our older electricity power stations typically have thermal efficiency of 38 per cent. According to the International Energy Agency"High-efficiency, low emissions (HELE) technologies in operation already reach a thermal efficiency of 45 per cent, and technologies in development promise even higher values. A successful outcome to ongoing RD&D could see units with efficiencies approaching 50 per cent or even higher, demonstrated within the next decade".

Australia also needs to get cracking on gas-powered electricity. Where the gas will actually come from is not guaranteed at this point, as is its likely price. Victoria, which has substantial reserves of onshore gas that do not require fracking, is an obvious candidate (Victorian politics permitting).

Gas-powered electricity can be stepped-up without too much political fuss (because our activists are less emotional about gas). On the other hand, green groups might be expected to "go ballistic" if Australia started building new coal-powered generators, however efficient and low cost they might be.

At present nobody seems to care that the cumulative cost of “renewables” could exceed a trillion dollars (Dutton put the figure at $1.3 trillion).  This is a truly horrendous cost considering that our GDP in 2023 was only $1.7 trillion.  Australia looks like ending up with up with a very costly white elephantine electricity infrastructure, and the last of our heavy industry might close, before Chris Bowen is finished with his unworkable “renewables” mega-spend.

More pain on the part of Australian electricity and gas consumers is required before our population is forced to become realistic about energy policy. In the meantime, I can foresee a boom in sales of petrol and diesel generators in the not-so-distant future.