Wind and Solar Energy Never Will Power an Industrial Economy

The Spanish Inquisition literally roasted heretics alive, these days it’s anyone who dares question the mantra that wind and solar power are our only salvation from imminent climate doom.

No country has ever powered itself on sunshine and breezes; no country ever will. The simple daily occurrence of sunset and calm weather provides the logical retort to those who suggest otherwise. Batteries are mythical pipe dream and pumped hydro a costly wet dream.

While Australia continues to merrily chug away on coal-fired electricity, those that inhabit the rarefied realm of Australia’s National Broadcaster, the ABC happily ignore the rocketing power prices and mass load shedding and blackouts that are the inevitable consequence of pinning your power hopes on the weather.

As the renewable energy rent seeker’s well-paid front man, Kane Thornton has been spouting nonsense about our ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future, for years.

SkyNews’ Chris Kenny delivers a timely sideswipe over an ‘interview’ [read ‘propaganda opportunity’] with Kane on climate cult central, your ABC.

Sky News host Chris Kenny says “the trouble with religious zeal” around climate change is “it makes people blind to inconvenient realities”.

Mr Kenny pointed to ABC Radio National Breakfast host Hamish McDonald, who he said did not question what increased renewable energy target would do to prices and reliability of energy supply during an interview with Clean Energy Council Chief Kane Thornton.

Chris Kenny: Back over on the so called serious parts of the ABC, they have a great deal of trouble dealing with climate change and renewable energy. Despite their charter, there is a corporate view on global warming and it’s pretty straightforward and easy to summarise. Global warming is an alarming threat to all of us and renewable energy apparently can save the planet. It’s as simple and as silly as that and they broker no dissent.

This plays out in all kinds of ways such as an interview with Clean Energy Council Chief, Kane Thornton on Radio National on the occasion of Australia meeting its renewable energy target of 33,000 gigawatts. RN Breakfast Host, Hamish Macdonald was a bit like Oliver Twist. He just wanted more.

Hamish MacDonald: Isn’t there a lesson in that then that if you can actually get political agreement on a target, then the sector will probably deliver it? And that if you had have set the target at 41,000, kept it there rather than reduce it to 33,000, the market may well have delivered on that?

Chris Kenny: Yes Hamish. If you set a higher target that would provide fresh demand, guaranteed returns and effective subsidies for more renewable investment, the industry wouldn’t just meet it, they’d fall over themselves to soak up the risk-free cash. That’s how this sort of market intervention works.

The question is, what would that do to prices and the reliability of supply? And we’ve already seen that on the way to the current target with dispatchable coal and gas plants shutting down, forced out by wind and as a result, reliability and affordability have suffered big time. Yet Thornton, a spruiker of course for the renewable industry had this to say about getting more renewables into the grid.

Kane Thornton: What we know is that old coal generation is coming out, that there’s an inevitability about that and if we don’t ensure that we get a steady flow of new generation coming into the market, then reliability is going to be under threat and our prices are going to go up.

Chris Kenny: Extraordinarily, Macdonald did not challenge that. More renewables will help our energy, reliability and affordability, the exact opposite of our lived experience and the exact opposite of what logic tells us would happen. But thou shalt not challenge renewables or their advocates. That’s the trouble with religious zeal. It makes people blind to inconvenient realities.

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