The Coalition: what’s wrong with them?

The Coalition:
what’s wrong with them?

Double?                or               Nothing?

by Anthony Cox

Recently the Coalition party room featured a major bout of dissent about the Renewable Energy Target [RET], a particularly odious bit of legislation which is a spin-off from the nation destroying CO2 tax.

In the end, however, the dissent against the coalition’s support of the RET was quashed by Abbott.

This is inexplicable. The RET is ghastly; it mandates that 20% of Australia’s power must come from renewable, which means wind and solar, by 2020.

Wind and solar do not work.

There are myriad examples to prove this, but the best example is summed up in one word: California.

California is the fountain of all things green, including green energy. California started investing in wind and solar in 1976, after the first oil shock. It has spent $billions over the last 38 years on the best R&D in the world; this is the home of Silicon Valley and the best scientific brains on the planet. And after all that money and time and research, how much power is produced in California by wind and solar? 

Five Per Cent! (5%)!

That is produced; that doesn’t mean used. With renewable there is a crucial difference between the Installed Capacity [IC], what the plant would produce if it were operating 24/7, and what they do produce which is a % of the IC and is called the Capacity factor [CF]. With wind and solar the CF, on average over a period of time, usually at least a ¼, more commonly, a year, is about 20%.

But even this 20% does not tell the whole story. Because wind and solar are intermittent from minute to minute there is no continuous power; at any one time the plant may be operating at full IC, the next minute, if a cloud goes over, or the wind ceases there is nothing. Apart from placing great strain on the grid through these surges, this intermittency means the power produced by wind and solar is effectively unusable.

The coalition must know this. It must know that the crippling electricity prices are entirely due to the CO2 tax because the so-called infrastructure expenses supposedly responsible for the electricity price hikes are in fact infrastructure expenses to do with connecting the growing number of useless wind and solar farms. These useless farms [sic] require new wiring and posts as well as extra sub-stations and surge protection.

In addition the Solar Panel Feed in Tariff which the O’Farrell government inherited is crippling NSW. When Robertson, the current opposition leader, who must have the hide of a Rhinocerous, introduced the feed in tariff, he claimed it would cost $362 million. Even the prior ALP government had the wit to realise that the scheme was in fact going to cost $4 billion and cut back the ridiculous 60c per KwH to 20c.

When O’Farrell got into government, because he had not said he would abolish the scheme all he could do was close it to new parasites. Even by doing that the scheme is still going to cost NSW somewhere between $1.75 and 1.9 billion.

That is money which every electricity user has to pay for; and for nothing because effectively none of that power is used; it’s too expensive and too intermittent.

But the real infrastructure cost has and will be through the government subsidisation of wind and solar via the government agencies, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation {CEFC] and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency [ARENA].

Between them the CEFC and ARENA have spent $3.2 billion and will spend another $10 billion on useless wind and solar projects.

The coalition must know that. So why do they prevaricate and pussy-foot around this obscene waste of taxpayers’ money which is not only raising electricity prices but which will also drive the economy into the ground as similar Green schemes have done in Europe?

Are there vested business interests they want to protect; after all a lot of finance, bank and sundry other spiv sections of the community are up to their necks in the trough of public money which is connected with renewable and AGW generally?

Is the coalition soft and, at the end of the day, going to be spineless about this?

Or does the coalition actually believe in AGW and the Chimera of renewable in stopping the world from exploding?

Part of the coalition’s policy is the Direct Action Plan, which although only [sic] costing $10.5 billion over 10 years, compared to the ALP/Green’s CO2 tax which will cost somewhere between infinity and eternity, has already been lampooned by the CSIRO for not being up to the job of carbon sequestration; not that criticism from the CSIRO in respect of anything to do with AGW has any credibility. However, the point is, the coalition are on the same page with the ALP/Greens in respect of CO2 emissions reduction targets.

Given this how can we believe Abbott when he says he will get rid of the CO2 tax when he believes in the science, which is still “crap”, and he has another worthless plan to solve the ‘problem’ which only has the advantage over the CO2 tax of costing less?