Paul Murray: Futile bid to hit unachievable net zero target continues to cost households

West Australian

4 days ago

Anywhere you choose to look, evidence that Labor's renewable energy transition policy is a failure is mounting.
For those who don't give primacy to abolishing fossil fuels, the crippling increase in power bills — when we were told renewable energy would make them lower — is enough proof.
But for people on the net zero bandwagon, this week has been full of other disappointments.
One of the architects of Labor's first attempts at climate change strategies, Professor Ross Garnaut, proclaimed on Monday that the Albanese Government will fail to hit its 2030 renewable energy targets 'by a big margin'.
That's because the rollout of new wind and solar projects hit the wall last year, right at the time they needed to be supercharged to meet Labor's policy goal of 82 per cent renewables by the end of this decade.
To meet that target would require adding an extra 14GW of wind and 11GW of solar capacity per year. About 7GW was expected to be installed last year.
To put that more simply, we would have to install more than 11 wind turbines every day and 3000 solar panels every hour to December 31, 2029.
But investment in new renewable energy projects last year was the lowest since 2017. Not one new wind farm has come on stream this year.
Labor has put almost all its eggs in the one basket, Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen's capacity investment scheme (CIS) through which taxpayers underwrite renewables projects.
The scheme seeks to take the risk out of the projects by guaranteeing revenue streams for some $73 billion of needed investment by 2027. The eventual cost of those guarantees is unknown, but potentially massive.
This week Bowen increased the target under CIS from 32 gigawatts to 40, despite the clear evidence that it isn't working at attracting sufficient new capacity.
Garnaut says the CIS distorts the market, arguing the best solution was to introduce a carbon price — what most people regard as a tax — having convinced former Prime Minister Julia Gillard to do just that in 2011.
And we all remember how that ended.
'The underwriting falls far short of the levels necessary to reach the 82 per cent target,' Garnaut said. 'The big gap on the current trajectory is growing wider now that demand for power through the grid is growing again with electrification and data centres.'
Which seems to make the heavy political focus on these targets pretty dumb if they can't be met.
Into this scenario of failure to hit any of the targets rides the head of the United Nations' climate change agency, Simon Stiell, who was a speaker at the same renewables talkfest as Garnaut.
Stiell is exactly the sort of person who gives the UN its bad name, a second-rate politician from a tiny Caribbean island nation advanced well beyond his capacity with a penchant for exaggeration.
He told the conference run by the Smart Energy Council — a lobby group funded mainly by people selling Chinese solar panels — that unless Australia set itself an even higher renewables target for 2035 we would be responsible for very dire consequences.
'The change is working,' Stiell said. 'Now consider the alternative: missing the opportunity and letting the world overheat.'
So a nation that contributes just over one percent of global carbon emissions would be responsible for cooking the planet unless it sets a new unreachable target, having missed the existing one by a country mile?
This sort of moral blackmail has characterised the climate change debate for decades and clearly is as useless as the targets Stiell envisages for Australia. It got worse.
'Mega-droughts will make fresh fruit and veg a once-a-year treat,' he warned. 'Australia has a strong economy and among the highest living standards in the world. If you want to keep them, doubling down on clean energy is an economic no-brainer.'
Stiell obviously is unaware that Australia's standard of living has toppled since 2022 by the biggest amount of any developed nation, according to the OECD's measure of household income per person.
What fools like him will never accept is that the reckless push to adopt renewables quickly has inflated the cost of electricity, one of the main drivers of that loss in living standards.
But he believes the dystopian 'alternative' he presented is redeemable merely by Australia setting a new, higher target for cutting emissions.
And there's the rub. The idea that an unachievable target has merit because it lifts ambition and effort is hollow. What it really does is distort economic reality and inflate costs.
But in the climate change game, these targets are the currency for buying political power as we see being played out within the Liberal Party.
An opinion poll emerged this week claiming that support for the transition to renewables is growing, up from 53 to 58 per cent since April.
The SEC Newgate Mood of the Nation survey of 1855 respondents found 64 per cent backed the 2030 target and 59 per cent endorsed the commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
That result is unsurprising given that most Australians have been comprehensively misled about the reliability of renewables and their ability to meet demand in a post-coal world.
And many climate change opinion polls have found that support levels crash when questions are asked about the cost that respondents are willing to bear, something absent in this one.
The idea that wind and solar can meet peak power demand without massive support from gas turbines appears to have some public support.
The media has to take its share of the blame. We still get reports about new wind projects, for example, which routinely contain claims that they 'will be able to power 170,000 homes.'
What does that mean? That the wind farm can meet all the daily power needs of those homes 24/7 for 365 days a year?
If not, what? Because if it is based on the average power use of a home divided into the output of the wind farm, it is fairly meaningless.
Those 170,000 homes need to be powered continuously, especially at times of highest demand which is always when the sun isn't shining strongest — if at all — and often when the wind isn't blowing.
The reports usually say the farm has a capacity of, say 250MW, but the reality is that they operate on average at below 30 per cent of that maximum output and in some parts of the year, known as wind droughts, they can produce nothing for days on end.
But the effect of these repetitive claims is that many people get an unwavering belief in renewable power sources at odds with reality, which is something those considering the Liberals' net zero policy need to keep in mind.
The next WA State election will be held on March 10, 2029. That's locked in. With the size of Labor's majority in Canberra, there will not be another Federal poll due until the year before.
So the idea that the Liberals should come up with a new net zero carbon emissions policy in a hurry is simply ludicrous.
The Liberals don't have to scrap a commitment to achieving net zero, thereby making themselves a target for another Labor scare campaign.
By demonstrating the now-obvious inability of Labor's policy to hit its targets, they can argue for a more realistic timeline and a different way of getting there.
Scrapping further rounds of the CIS would be a good start.
And they must do a better job of convincing the public that the power bill burden householders have carried in recent years is a direct consequence of Labor's renewable energy policies.
Renewables are good at producing power at times of average demand, but can't provide guaranteed supplies at affordable prices at peak hours.
Those peaks just happen to coincide with the sun coming up and going down, meaning the big quantities of power from rooftop solar is not available. And if the wind isn't blowing strongly at those times, even the recourse to very expensive big battery power will not be enough to avoid system failure.
That essential weakness is where the Coalition's policy focus should go.
The failings of Labor's policies will be starting to bite in 2027 as coal continues to be retired, gas prices rise thanks to demand pressures, wind turbine prices continue to soar and the shortfall in new renewables capacity combine.
Labor has been allowed to paint renewables as affordable and reliable, which they aren't.
Anthony Albanese escaped any penalty for breaking his 2022 election promise that power prices for the average home would be $275 lower by this year.
The focus on the Liberals' internal wrangling over a 2050 net zero target should not be a distraction from the fact that Labor's policy has made electricity more expensive and potentially less reliable.