Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Aussie Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has just pledged to spend $1 billion of Australian taxpayer’s money, on renewable schemes which are struggling to raise their own finance on the open market.
Turnbull’s climate change boost defies Abbott
MALCOLM Turnbull will keep two climate funds that Tony Abbott went to the 2013 election pledging to abolish.
The Prime Minister says clean energy is a vital part of his plan to boost innovation and create jobs beyond the mining boom.
The prime minister will announce today that a $1 billion Clean Energy Innovation Fund will be set up in July, jointly managed by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and Australian Renewable Energy Agency.
The two bodies will jointly manage the fund from July in order to finance products such as large-scale solar.
Mr Turnbull, a previous supporter of an emissions trading scheme, has been toning down criticism of clean energy financing since ousting Mr Abbott in September.
However, many Coalition members remain sceptical about the value of spending too much money on climate-related projects.
…
“We are promoting innovation and new economic opportunities, enhancing our productivity, protecting our environment and reducing emissions to tackle climate change,” Mr Turnbull said in a statement.
He said projects could include a large-scale solar facility with storage in Port Augusta, South Australia.
“By offering innovative equity and debt products, the Clean Energy Innovation Fund can accelerate the availability of new technologies to transform the energy market, and deliver better value for taxpayers.”
…
Former treasurer Joe Hockey described the CEFC as a “giant $10 billion slush fund”.
Why does ex Goldman Sachs (Australia) chairman Malcolm Turnbull think that providing public finance, for green projects which private finance won’t touch, is a prudent use of taxpayer’s money?
Given the long string of green bankruptcies and failures – Solyndra, Abengoa (on the verge of a $30 billion bankruptcy), and too many others to list, given disappointments like the ongoing Invanpah solar power generator debacle, perhaps the market is onto something, when they refuse to put private money into new renewable ventures.
The Turnbull green finance announcement marks a substantial break from the policies of former Aussie PM Tony Abbott, who yesterday claimed Turnbull was seeking re-election on the basis of Abbott policies.
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By subsidizing renewable energy, they are stifling innovation and ultimately killing it.
This is nothing more than crony capitalist welfare.
It’s not even capitalist welfare – capitalists want nothing to do with this non-innovative technology.
Wind power is 2000 years old and was killed by motor driven power.
In 2011, Tim Flannery told Andrew Bolt on 2GB that, if ALL carbon dioxide emissions could be stopped, it would take hundreds of years, maybe a thousand, before there’d be any measurable change in the Earth’s temperature.
Another billion dollars down the gurgler. Thanks a billion, Mal.
Brian Wilshire wrote: In 2011, Tim Flannery told Andrew Bolt on 2GB that, if ALL carbon dioxide emissions could be stopped, it would take hundreds of years, maybe a thousand, before there’d be any measurable change in the Earth’s temperature.
He said that temperatures wouldn’t drop for that long. The point he made is that if we don’t cut emissions, temperatures will continue to rise.
So it’s not quite correct to say there wouldn’t be a measureable change. There’d be a measurable change from the warming we are seeing now to a remaining at the steady state temperature that corresponds to the atmospheric CO2 concentration at the time we stop emitting CO2.
Why do you ALWAYS talk from the point of MANIFEST ignorance.
Are you a far-left socialist/greenie?
Seth,
AndyG55 is right.
This short video is interesting……….
Just once, wouldn’t you like to hear some politician, any politician, address his constituents and
say that renewable technologies wind and solar are unreliable and expensive means of producing too little power, and require enormous environmental footprints to boot. We now are in sight of a new generation of nuclear reactors (molten salt) that not only eliminate any and all fears people now have (no matter how ungrounded) of nuclear power, but can also provide cheaper power than any other power technology in existence, and can essentially burn up nuclear wastes, rendering them low radiactive , easilly stored and returning to harmless background radiation levels in just a few generation. These reactors extract 40 times more power from uranium than current technologies, which means 1) fuel costs are insignificant,
2) uranium can be extracted from seawater and still provide essentially free fuel (which will never be exhausted). This reactor technology is being developped by three major players and is just around the corner, which is easily soon enough to lower carbon emissions and eliminate any global warming those emissions might be responsible for, and produce clean, clean power. Cleaner than solar panels, cleaner than wind.
Any bets on when such a politician might arise?
Turnbull’s next good decision will be lonely – when it eventually arrives.
Payment to the greens for supporting the electoral changes designed to rid parliament of those pesky cross-benchers. Carbon trading (GST on everything), here we come!
“The Prime Minister says clean energy is a vital part of his plan to boost innovation and create jobs”
Moving production of anything from an efficient process to an inefficient process does not make people better off!!!
How can you become leader of a country and not understand such basic economics?! By the same logic Australia should ban heavy equipment and let all earth movement be done with humans and shovels, after all, won’t that create jobs?
Nothing good can come from a leader with an elementary school understanding of the world.
Trudeau: Gerald Ford and Dan Quayle without the brains.
Those annoying adverts are still there. How do you turn them of? I didn’t ask for them.
ADBlock Plus at Cnet, it’s free..( get the right version , Chrome , Firefox or IE )
Let’s cut to the chase here. Rooftop solar is for populist vote buying, solar CSP is totally uncompetitive and largely limited to deluded leaders or dirty deals, and utility scale PV is the winner except for misdirected leaders and policies. Those misdirected policies include local content rules like Ontario and India, auction programs favoring smaller scale projects with uncompetitive players, and more nutty “demonstration” projects of large scale. We still live in a two-track world of renewables, competitive players driving ahead and the rest playing lobbyist games with politicians.
Resourceguy wrote:Rooftop solar is for populist vote buying
Rooftop solar has a lot of efficiencies because there’s no transmission lines, there’s no substations and there’s no transmission loss.
It’s economic on small scales because the generation at the home where its used. There’s sufficient reason to encourage it.
Resourceguy wrote:solar CSP is totally uncompetitive and largely limited to deluded leaders or dirty deals, and utility scale PV is the winner except for misdirected leaders and policies.
CSP is interesting because because it’s easy to implement thermal storage for a CSP plant.
Also, private homes do not generally have critical systems, which makes renewable drivers a viable option. The key is to avoid offering incentives that induce misalignments.
Rooftop is not competitive for the high labor costs, variable quality and competitiveness of the players, and mark up prices on the panels and other components compared to the economies of scale in best of breed utility scale solar. CSP is not interesting except for those proponents and policy makers stuck about 10 or 15 years out of date and still thinking in demonstration terms.
Unfortunately, we do not live in a world where a LCOE direct comparison of the technologies and applications within renewable segments is possible and there are plenty of special interests that would not like the comparisons if they were available for all to see.
At the rate at which China is buying Australia, it will soon enough be an oblast of China and it won’t matter what the local leadership thinks. (google “china buying australia”)
Thinking about why Australia has lost its unique ‘in your face’ self reliant character, it occurred to me that I saw a similar change in a milder form of Canadian character about 20 years ago. The ‘colonies’ always had a bit of an inferiority complex vis a vis mother Great Britain. Canada sort of got over this and Harper even outraged Europe when he admonished them for their fiscal and banking polices at the G8 a few years ago. He had the temerity to tell them what they HAD to do to save their economies and there was much huffing and puffing in their media!! (Although Canadian lefties, of course, as everywhere, continued singing from the UN-EU songbook on new world order matters).
I think as Ozzie ‘elites’ grew in number, their embarrassment over the naughty folksy Crocodile Dundee image of Australians in the world demanded a campaign to please and join forces with former ever so sophisticated colonial masters to bathe in their glow. The CO2 political sleight of hand provided an excellent pathway to achieve this ‘upgrade’, but, like the nouveau riche, Ozzies went at it with such gusto that they ended up with a caricature of their status – Dundee in a bowler hat. I haven’t done a survey, but from all the climate stuff that came from and keeps coming from there suggests possibly the world’s largest center of global warming action, unabated even though its started to cool off in UK and elsewhere in the EU. Com’on you blokes and shielas, give up this ruinous syndrome. We loved you and envied you the old way.
Crock Dundee? More like Priscilla the Queen of the Desert.
Let me get this straight Australia, you have so much natural gas that massive LNG projects are purely based on getting it out of the country. Are you saying you cannot figure out how to use combined cycle gas plants as backup to a grid run with utility scale solar PV during the peak demand hours of the day? That’s dumb. It does not take “emerging technologies” to figure this out!
Maybe skip the solar part – just an idea!
They certainly could for a good while with the right number of pipelines and PPAs with utilities in place. Otherwise there would be commodity price swings in the PPA contract span that carry a cost to mitigate.
Gary – right on.
I just talked to a friend in Waterloo who has $20,000 worth of newly installed panels on his roof. He is being paid CDN$0.345 per kWh, about 11 times the cost of baseline power from Pickering. 20 year contract.
I told him that when I am made Premier of Ontario I will do what the Spanish did: cancel all the contracts, force owners to remain connected to the network and hand them a bill for the full cost of the panels. Even then we will, like Spain, be left holding a multi-billion $ bag of debt, 29 bn Euros in their case, with no way to repay it.
Plus it cost them 2.2 regular jobs per ‘green job’. (Has that figure been updated in the past three years?)
Further, we still have to pay more than a billion $ for each of the three natural gas plant to take up the slack. They will have a duty cycle of not less than 50% (otherwise known as ‘night’) and its costs per kWh could be reduced by simply not connecting the PV panels to the network. We are not short of gas – it is burned to get rid of it in BC.
The PV panel manufacturers are losing money (dumping), the windmill companies are losing money (bearings and maintenance), consumers are losing money (huge subsidies), and jobs (‘green economy’ is mouldering) so the only winners are the banks. Quelle surprise.
“The 3rd Way” in a nutshell
I also think a renewable government, like what is on the verge of happening in the USA, is what is really needed in Australis for economic recovery, innovation and restoration of a once vibrant country. Also, I hope UK is not too subverted, fearful and tired to pull themselves out of the EU in April. Instilling fear of bold steps is the main policy of the lefty and EU, tools used to control outbreaks of sanity and freedom. They’ve pulled out most of the Lion’s teeth, but not all, I hope. Probably the terror in Brussels will give the Brexit vote a little more strength. Maybe lefties in UK are fed up enough, too.
Abbott is now recycled, “advising” Kiev’s gang… While Turnbull is implementing NATO’s China containment plans…
It’s the going rate for buying votes, not electrons.
From the link to “$30 billion bankruptcy”
“WELL this is awkward.
“A renewable energy company personally picked by US President Barack Obama is on the verge of collapse, potentially leaving international banks on the hook for around $29.6 billion.”
Yes, awkward that a company now ‘too big to fail’ is, and was always, economically unviable. Imagine, if they had poured that much money into education and training, support to commercial banks for lowering the cost of start-up funding, how much further they could have moved their nation for that kind of moolah.
I guess some other country will have to fill in the breach and move their economy ahead of the others. Maybe India or China is willing to accept the position. Someone has to lead. To lead you have to be willing to do what is needed and necessary. Throwing trunkloads of money at grasping green boondoggles is neither needed nor necessary.
Port Augusta had a perfectly good power station until recently, fully paid for, and with a nearby source of fuel, and a trained workforce. Now South Australia relies on green temples, whose arms rotate from time to time, with backup (for now) from the grown-ups in Victoria with their brown coal burners.
Yes, climanrecon. PR try-on: “ … SA is already the leading Australian state in non-hydro renewable energy, with about 40 per cent of annual electricity consumption now coming from wind and sunshine. … Our calculations show that SA does not need any base-load power stations, such as coal or nuclear.”
Inconvenient truth: Yet, contrary to Diesendorf’s claim, without the large fossil-fuelled gas plant at Torrens Island, SA would be in a permanent state of electricity crisis, characterised by high cost and unreliability of local supply. [ http://www.newsweekly.com.au/article.php?id=57177&s=BJCTNb ].
American readers will be pleased that it is not one billion of their dollars that are being wasted on rapidly bankrupting green ‘renewable’ energy projects…they have enough problems in California. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull loves to waste money on trinkets as it ingratiates him with his socialist cronies. As former Liberal treasurer Joe Hockey said, the CEFC is a “giant $10 billion slush fund”.
This is all hard to change, however, since, as Mark Twain said: “If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”
The question, as usual is: Can this particular national economy withstand expenditures made on technologies which require such immense public fiscal support to be profitable?
In America we call it stimulus spending to nowhere. Got any potholes? We do too, but they make a great sales gimmick at the podium.
This is a bit of a shock for the subsidy deniers.