Claimed threats of violence, abusive phone calls, former friends not speaking anymore, allegations of greed – welcome to the Aussie green energy revolution.
The video is available to view here.
The Four Corners video provides some additional context to a recent WUWT story, with a video interview of the people pictured in the story below.
My biggest objection to the four corners program is the introduction, which falsely claims wind energy is necessary to meet Australia’s Net Zero goals.
This is nonsense. France successfully decarbonised much of their economy using nuclear power, and still still derives just under 70% of their electricity from zero carbon nuclear.
Having said that nuclear energy would likely also be divisive, though the land footprint required to supply all of Australia’s needs with nuclear energy would be a lot smaller than an equivalent renewable installation.
The program poured scorn on claims that offshore wind harms whales. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest the whale killing claim is true.
The program dubiously claims nuclear is “double” the cost of an equivalent renewable energy system, but this claim appears to ignore the unaffordable cost of battery backup.
As WUWT has frequently pointed out, wind droughts can affect the entire continent of Australia, so weeks, possibly months of battery backup would be required to smooth out these failures, along with significant overcapacity to charge the batteries during good times.
Lets do a little math.
In 2022, Australia used 273,265 GWh of electricity or (divide by 52 weeks per year) 5255 GWh per week.
Obviously this would vary by season, during very cold weeks people would use a lot more home heating. But let’s keep it simple.
Batteries currently cost around AU $1200 / kWh.
5255 GWh x 1000000 = 5255000000 kWh of electricity.
5255000000 x $1200 per kilowatt hour = $6,306,000,000,000 – $6.3 trillion dollars
Even if you get a bargain basement discount cost for your batteries, say an 80% discount on the household kilowatt cost, that is still a very serious sum of money. There are battery technologies which might bring that cost down significantly, I’ve seen claims of $40 – $80 / kWh for sodium ion batteries. A $40 / kWH battery would reduce that cost from $6.3 trillion to $200 billion. But betting $200 – $400 billion ($40 – $80 / kWh) on a very recent technology commercialisation would be quite a gamble.
Let’s also not forget these batteries also have to be regularly replaced – especially if the batteries are abused, say by draining them heavily during continent wide renewable energy failures.
The alternative to battery backup is fossil fuel backup, but this is a very expensive solution – this requires keeping enough gas turbines or coal plants or whatever on standby to completely replace renewable energy when renewable energy output collapses.
Australia has a gigantic pumped hydro project, the Snowy 2 pumped hydro project, which is supposed to provide a “big battery”, but every time I look at that project the estimated cost has gone up by another billion. Is that Snowy 2 tunnel digger still stuck in the dirt? And there are serious questions about the throughput efficiency of the system, how much electricity will be lost charging and discharging the pumped hydro system.
Oops I forgot something – aren’t we supposed to electrify everything, replace all our gasoline vehicles and gas cookers with electricity? How much would this additional electrification capacity add to my estimated costs?
In my opinion, despite an effort to give air time to both sides of the debate (learn BBC), the apparent biases in this Four Corners episode are disappointing.
I grew up watching Four Corners, a hallmark of Four Corners episodes was a genuine attempt to be objective. WUWT has praised previous Four Corners episodes, such as their excellent recent expose of alleged carbon credit fraud.
The failure of this Four Corners episode “Inside the communities fighting against renewable energy | Four Corners” to mention battery backup costs when comparing renewables to nuclear, the quick dismissal of claimed impacts on whales from offshore wind turbines, no mention of the impact of onshore wind turbines on bird life, and a failure to provide proper estimates of renewable costs which include the cost of battery backup, all this in my opinion falls far beneath the usual standards we Aussies have come to expect from Four Corners.
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Wishful thinking in action?
From what I can understand, there are more show-stopper realities in getting wind and solar to permanently produce most of a modern society’s electricity needs than there are in getting nuclear plants up and running.
It’s their pure dumb ideology that keeps renewables advocates from accepting the physical, scientific, meteorological, engineering and mathematical realities that keep raining on their religious fantasies.
To answer one of your questions, pumping up the water to the reservoir is 50% efficient so a 50% loss in energy. Using the water turbines at 50% also loses the energy. So the net is a 75% loss to store this excess power!
Will be a boon for COAL fired power, because that is what will be used for the pumping…
… and the coalies will be able to run at higher, more efficient levels and not throttle down.
Higher, more efficient levels for coalies? Are you sure? Coal-fired power plants have a 33% thermal efficiency.
But they won’t have to throttle back as much to make way for erratic wind and solar.
They will be used instead for charging the pumped hydro.
When they are forced to throttle back, they run less efficiently..
… and can often put out as much CO2 as when running at 80-90% of rated power.
Zero times any overbuild is still zero.
https://joannenova.com.au/2024/06/20-billion-in-wind-power-across-australia-can-only-guarantee-as-much-power-as-two-diesel-generators/
If you want the Snowy2 tunnel dug cheaply just pepper the tailings with opals
Genius, but isn’t the correct term “salt.”
Perhaps, if talking about White Opal but you could pepper it with Black Opal and start a frenzy
Isn’t the big borer stuck again ??
… still
Hard to keep track of which cm it is up to !! 😉
Story tip – New report: ‘Biofuel’ industry outpaces oil refineries for pollution, by large margins – American Thinker
From the ABC Four Corners transcript:
ANGUS GRIGG: For Nowakowski the only answer to protecting high conservation areas … is nuclear. That would require extending ageing coal plants, while building a nuclear industry estimated to cost double that of renewables.
Angus Grigg is an ABC reporter and he is merely repeating the false claims made in the recent CSIRO GenCost Report described by the Institute of Public Affairs as misleading by relying on ‘the discredited levelised cost of electricity methodology to calculate energy system costs‘.
It must be obvious to any reasonably thoughtful person even at the CSIRO that a simple comparison of the production costs for continual base-load power vs variable wind omitting the necessary added storage transmission and environmental costs is misleading.
‘Misleading’ is a polite way of saying deceiving swindling defrauding and cheating.
Of course nuclear is twice the price of renewables. You can prove that easily – just compare electricity prices in nuclear-powered France with wind-powered Denmark. See? Double the price!
Oops … it’s wind-powered Denmark that has double the price. Actually, more like 2 1/2 times the price. Obviously we mustn’t compare electricity prices that way. Better to just keep saying renewables are cheaper and hope no-one notices.
France is fine with everyone else spouting nonsense about nuclear, they make a heap of money backing up everyone elses renewables.
When I saw “Four Corners,” my mind immediately went to the place in the U.S. where the corners of
Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico come together.
https://th.bing.com/th?id=OSK.HERONsqGz6A-IFccP0NP-4yLibpUoot-G81gjp5eYxclADk&w=312&h=200&c=15&rs=2&o=6&pid=SANGAM
Me too, and I’m Canadian.
Very nice Eric.
We are not in a climate crisis, CO2 is not the control knob for our climate, we are not going to reach a tipping point and suffer irreversible global warming therefore there is no need for Net Zero. Let us stop including it in our discussions of our energy needs. Net Zero is unimportant therefore wind and solar are unimportant. Let’s get busy talking about generation that is affordable, reliable, long lived and does not disrupt the grid. You know the really important stuff.
When I wrote this, I was discussing what was wrong with the Four Corners episode, not what controls our climate.
This four corners episode did everyone a disservice including people who think CO2 is important. That environmentalist Steven Nowakowski who is teaming up with conservatives to stop renewables, he’s a climate believer- yet the program dismissed his concerns without exploring his evidence in depth.
Having said that the Four Corners episode did show the disunity renewables are causing, so
I applaud them for showing how renewables are dividing communities.
“My biggest objection to the four corners program is the introduction, which falsely claims wind energy is necessary to meet Australia’s Net Zero goals.”
This in itself is a huge problem. Net Zero is problematic. Decarbonizing will have a huge negative impact on vegetation. Basic botany… CO2 is required for photosynthesis.
More CO2 in the atmosphere has been very good for life on earth; to lower our CO2 levels concerns me greatly.
Wouldn’t worry about anyone lowering atmospheric CO2.
China, India, Asia and soon Africa are on a COAL boom !!
Nothing the moronic Net-zero nonsense will do will make one iota of difference to atmospheric CO2 levels..
Only thing that will happen will be a decrease in living standards in Western Society….
Which is, of course, the ultimate aim.
Well said.
Indeed. Climate change stopped being about climate 30 years ago or more. The globalists are still pushing away at their ultimate goal of the destruction of individual sovereignty and capitalism to install a world government.
You got to hand it to the political elites, unelected globalists and the Marxists.
By weaponizing the planet’s climate against humanity, replacing objective science with political ideology, then drip feeding the catastrophic doomsday scenario into every aspect of human existence, thus instilling fear and guilt and censoring individual reason & skeptics, it’s straight out of the totalitarian handbook.
More and more people are waking up to this putrid, underhanded and deceitful ideology.
Yet still we have mindless trolls that support it…
The question is… WHY do they do that ???
I doubt they are being paid, because they are too incompetent and ignorant to be worth paying.
They will suffer along with everyone else…
… probably more-so, because of their complete lack of self-worth and intelligence.
They would just grovel down and take it !
Because they’re mindless!
Some kind of Marxist inspired “reset theory” perhaps, a delusional belief that if they can destroy the existing society, then what follows will magically reorganize itself around them with them becoming “the elite”.
I understand that it’s all a charade. However, it is important to push back on such stupidity. Eventually a few of those that unquestionably believe that CO2 is bad will actually look into photosynthesis and understand that net zero’s a sham.
I’m no hearing climate cultists saying net zero isn’t good enough. We’re gonna have to LOWER current CO2 levels- back to what it was a few centuries ago.
“We’re gonna have to LOWER current CO2 levels”
And yet, I have never gotten an answer to “what is the correct CO2 level?”
About 280 ppm- just before the industrial revolution- when life was awesome for everyone. Most people lived happily on the land. And there no extreme weather events. /s
Green renewables failed miserably as a replacement for fossil fuels on all counts – cost, reliability, environmentally, footprint and utility – you can’t make windmills or solar because you can’t make steel, refined metals, silicon, glass (panels for solar, fiberglass for wind blades).
This is why Western manufacturers of ‘renewable’ generators went broke rather quickly and left this much hyped ‘100s of thousands of good -paying jobs’ to the Chinese. They unabashedly used coal to manufacture the materials and Western taxpayers were kept in the dark about this very non-green tech.
The Chinese also enjoyed windfall profits knowing there couldn’t be any competition from the West’s self-crippled industrial capability at twice and thrice the price.
To the amazement and amusement of the once mighty west, who invented the technicalogical and scientific modern world. They couldnt stop giving life support to a dead horse.
“all this in my opinion falls far beneath the usual standards we Aussies have come to expect from Four Corners.” But not below the standards of bought and paid for mouth-pieces dancing to the tune of rich ecco nuts.