If the Greens and the ALP were to be believed, Australia is just one solar panel away from banishing those nasty fossils fuels for ever. Electricity will come free from the sun, there’ll be no more bushfires and we’ll all hold hands and skip into the glorious green utopia.
It’s all a load of bollocks, of course.
The grim reality is that Australians are paying more than ever for less and less reliable power, while doing diddly-squat to slay the Sky Dragon.
Even the climate-besotted troughers in the national energy bureaucracy are tacitly conceding that Australia’s energy infrastructure is teetering. All it’s going to take is one really bad summer heatwave and the whole Kerplunk! game will go belly-up.
The red lights are still flashing on the energy security dashboard where it matters most.
Coal, the bedrock of Australia’s existing electricity system, is being crushed and forced out by weather-dependent renewables that cannot be relied upon to deliver.
The boom in wind and solar means the withdrawal of coal generation is likely to happen faster than had been anticipated.
The problem is that the “boom” is not a natural, market-based evolution. On the contrary, it’s entirely the consequence of a perfect storm of idiot ideologues in charge, moronic politicians and greedy troughers.
The bottom line, according to Energy Security Board chairwoman Kerry Schott, is the system now in place is no longer fit for purpose.
Networks are being squeezed by the phenomenal uptake in rooftop solar at a household level and the boom in construction of large-scale wind and solar.
A river of taxpayer’s money sloshing down the throats of shrieking climate troughers is distorting the energy market beyond reason and feasibility.
The ESB says continued innovation and the subsequent cost reductions in the likes of electric vehicles, hydrogen electrolysers, batteries and fuel cells have the potential to fundamentally reshape the future as these technologies are increasingly paired with solar and wind.
The Australian
Sure, and we’ll all ride on flying pigs.
Wind and solar are not and never will be the solution to replacing fossil fuels to power an industrial society. Intermittent and unreliable, they place enormous, sometimes catastrophic stress on fragile grids designed to run on steady, reliable input.
Worse, they’re an environmental disaster. The vast, toxic shitholes in China are testament to the poisonous legacy of Greens-voters’ smugmobiles. The battery capacity needed to prop up grids destabilised by wind and solar fetish-machines would lay waste to entire provinces.
But sure, those solar panels on your roof are going to save the planet.
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