You’ve got to admire our government’s ability to ignore the obvious. It’s clearly not in their own interest. Nor anybody else’s for that matter. And yet they stick to their guns on renewable energy regardless.
How far can politicians go in their green dream delusions? How long until they hit a wall built by physics, reality and power bills?
Actually, the reckoning may pop up somewhere surprising. And long before the lights go out too.
It’s state governments that are leading the fight back against renewables. That’s how the renewables transition is falling apart in the US. It’s how things are falling apart in the EU now too.
I wonder if we might learn from this Down Under?
The good news is that it’s a highly entertaining process. The Financial Times had me spraying coffee all over my keyboard last week:
‘Norway campaigns to cut energy links to Europe as power prices soar
‘Country’s energy minister describes “shit situation” as domestic prices hit highest level since 2009
‘Norway’s two governing parties want to scrap an electricity interconnector to Denmark, with the junior coalition partner also calling for a renegotiation of power links to the UK and Germany, as sky-high prices trigger panic in the rich Nordic country. A lack of wind in Germany and the North Sea will push electricity prices in southern Norway to NKr13.16 ($1.18) per kilowatt hour on
Thursday afternoon, their highest level since 2009 and almost 20 times their level just last week. “It’s an absolutely shit situation,” said Norway’s energy minister Terje Aasland.’
To be clear, cutting power links is direct sabotage of the EU’s energy policy. It relies on Nordic electricity getting shuffled around central Europe to function.
Swedes don’t like being outdone by Norwegians. And they also know who to blame for their own power chaos. At one point, electricity prices in southern Sweden were 18,000% higher than in central Sweden!
The Swedish Prime Minister gave the German energy policy an absolute pasting as a result:
‘I realise that nobody is happy when I say that “if we hadn’t shut down half of nuclear power, we wouldn’t have these problems”. But it’s true and it needs to be said.’
‘I’m furious with the Germans’, the government’s energy minister added. Just in case the Germans didn’t know who the Swedish PM was referring to.
The Swedes aren’t just hurling insults though. And they didn’t just have the foresight to stick with and expand their own nuclear power while the Germans shut down theirs.
Sweden also rejected a new power interconnector cable with Germany in June. Specifically, because the German electricity market is a mess thanks to renewables.
No doubt the Swedes are laughing about the Norwegians’ delayed realisation as much as me. But now that Norway is considering giving Europe the snip on its highly reliable hydropower too, what happens to the countries relying on it?
They may find out the hard way.
And the same chaos may be coming our way here in Australia too.
Our own politicians are busy building interconnector grids across the country.
But some states are pursuing the renewable energy transition a lot faster than others. Power bills and reliability are diverging as a result.
As H.L. Mencken said, ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard’.
But thanks to the vast transmission grid rollout, the incentives and consequences might not be so aligned much longer. Eventually the renewable energy chaos of South Australia threatens to hammer into my power bill in Queensland too.
Will Australian voters put up with it? Will Queensland power bill payers be willing to shuffle their power south when it’s cloudy? Will they be happy to pay for other states’ green dreams on their own power bills? While being lambasted in the press and national parliament for their fossil fuel heavy grid?
Or will they behave like the Vikings and give southerners the snip?
Nuclear and renewables don’t mix
Some of you are hoping the Coalition’s nuclear plans will fix all this. But Sweden’s experience makes the precise point I’ve been trying to articulate for months now. Attach some nuclear power plants to an interconnected grid that is dominated by renewables, and you still get plenty of chaos.
Nuclear is a solution that doesn’t fit the problem which renewables create. I compared it to bullets that don’t fit into a barrel — a very embarrassing historical experience for the Irish.
The instability of renewables is not well countered by nuclear because of its high fixed costs. Nuclear is only cost efficient if it’s running at full capacity. But renewables are built to the point of overcapacity. This means everything else on the grid must cycle up and down to adjust for renewables’ perfidious nature.
There’s been a lot of controversy about models that assume Australia’s potential nuclear power plants will only run at 60% of their capacity. 90% would be fairer.
But if you are planning on adjusting nuclear output for the intermittency of renewables, who knows what capacity nuclear will run at?
You’d have to ask the weatherman. And he gets enough blame as it is.
In addition to this, the key benefit of nuclear is that it doesn’t need the absurdly large grid and transmission infrastructure projects that a renewables-based grid does.
But if we are going to build a lot of renewables and we’re going to build grid infrastructure for them anyway, then what’s the point?
That’s what the Swedes and Norwegians must be asking themselves now. They got their own energy policy more or less right. And built vastly expensive interconnections to other countries. But now Germany’s ridiculous decisions are blowing up Scandinavian electricity bills as a result.
The political incentives which interconnectors create are wacko.
Some states in Australia must be looking at certain other ones and wondering why they’d want interconnector cable links to those places. Why allow some states to import your on-demand power and export the costs of their bad energy policy? Why should some states pay for the green dream delusions of others?
Because that’s how the green dream works at its very core. It reshuffles problems around to places that aren’t included in the modelling, so they don’t exist.
Everyone presumed they can import clean renewables from somewhere else whenever needed. You just assume away the challenge of intermittency by moving it outside your model’s remit. Now Europeans are discovering where this leaves them as a whole: in a hole.
It seems to me that moving to a nuclear dominated system makes sense. Then you don’t need batteries, renewables or an electricity grid that amounts to the largest infrastructure project in history by a large order of magnitude. There are no unpredictable swings in power supply and costs are stable.
But nobody is proposing that. It’s bizarrely fashionable to declare that the energy transition needs to feature a diversified mix of power sources.
If diversified energy sources are great, then why not add wind, solar, hydrogen and hydro power to your car?
Because the costs are too high.
It’s as if our politics are controlled by financial interests in a long list of power industries that all want a cut. The rent-seekers are all going to get a piece of the taxpayer’s pie.
We’re all too busy thinking about subsidies, projects and jobs to acknowledge the French elephant in the room. A nuclear based grid that performs well.
Anyway, if you believe politics has some hope of stopping the renewable energy juggernaut, you now know where to look. In coming years it’ll be up to state governments trying to protect their voters from the consequences of other state governments’ energy policy to do the job.
Democracy works by competition between governments, not within governments. And it’s going to be hilarious to watch that play out.
Unfortunately, it’ll be an expensive form of entertainment for all of us. Which means you’ll be needing the money to afford it.
Regards,
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Nick Hubble,
Editor, Strategic Intelligence Australia
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