Speaking about electricity, I’d like to apologise for South Australia as we have been free-riding for a long time on the dreams and schemes of electric vandals with an extension cord running out to coal-fired stations in NSW and Victoria. It looks to me that we are about to see the complete death of the energy industry in Australia. For the longest time there have been boasts of a green revolution, of ending carbon pollution, and of saving the world. The enthusiasm for wind-generated power goes back decades. It’s a bit more than 20 years since I realised the climate crisis was a con. The geological record shows that over Earth’s ancient history, the climate has changed and the temperature has risen a number of times. This increase in temperature was always followed by an increase in CO2. It seemed to me that the vandals had it all back to front.

Wind turbines have numerous issues. They are large and produce a significant wake in the surrounding air. This limits how densely they can be placed together. Bird strike is a common occurrence. The blades are non-recyclable and typically end up being buried after use. The electricity they generate is not suitable for baseload requirements and places extra demands on the rest of the grid to make up for its failings.

You can tell that there are too many staffers and not enough engineers in Canberra when you consider the grid.

Supply is required to match demand. Connecting a generator that cannot respond to demand is a recipe for disaster. That single issue should have seen the whole subsidised sector go down in flames. Being politicians, they decided that more money would fix everything. I hate to be the one to tell them, but wasting taxpayer’s money is not a solution to anything. Adding electricity to the grid is not like adding petrol to a can. Electricity must have the correct voltage, amperage, and frequency. Dealing with those issues and transforming it into electricity suitable for the network is another burden. This burden is paid for by reliable generators.

The tragedy of Australian power is that we are watching the orchestrated destruction of our power grid under the nose of AEMO. The reason being that states can destroy their own grid as has been done in SA and then shift the blame somewhere else whenever there are issues. Avoiding responsibility is a much-loved pastime of politicians but a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Eventually, total failure will descend.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton faced up to the coming disaster when he declared he would build nuclear-powered stations in Australia. I believe the only real choices are coal or nuclear. Because we are in such a disastrous position, I’d build coal or re-equip coal-fired stations. It is faster than nuclear due to the anti-nuclear laws as well as the time required to build up a workforce to operate them. I am talking less about the tradesmen and more about the nuclear engineers and technicians who require specialised training that takes a long time. The average time to build a nuclear power station is seven years. Some have raised the average due to legal delays. These are likely to occur in Australia, so perhaps it takes ten years to build one here. I am not sure how many of the seven proposed can be built simultaneously. We are a highly regulated country and building one might take all of the people with the required skills. That’s before you ask the bureaucracy to sign off on the many requirements. So we don’t know how long it will take to build one, but it isn’t anything like the length of time the green lobby claims.

The parliamentary report into the closure of coal-fired power stations shows a number of stations that are due to shut soon and are operating beyond their closure dates. Using the back of an envelope, I pondered what seven nuclear power stations might achieve. The average size of a nuclear station in America is one gigawatt or 1,000 MW. These are older plants and the size of newer plants is often much larger. Let’s assume 1.5GW for each one. Eraring is 2.8 GW, Bayswater 2.6 GW and Liddell 2.0 GW. 7.4 GW between them and NSW, Victoria, and Queensland have eleven stations that are 1.3 GW or larger. The calculations start to get interesting at this point. Coal-fired plants have a reliability of 85 per cent. This sounds bad but by having additional capacity they can shut some down for upkeep and keep the power on. Nuclear reliability is 95 per cent. 1 GW of nuclear can cover slightly more than one Gig of coal. Seven nuclear power stations will make a good-sized dent in the Australian energy grid, but expect more reactors to be put on the seven sites.

This is where my argument goes. Base load power is the all day every day power. It has to maintain output all the time. Only coal and nuclear fit in this space for the Australian market. Without base load power you don’t have a grid, you have a high school experiment. Not even a science experiment in this case an experiment in social manipulation. Each day there are peaks in electricity demand. This is a space filled by gas. It fires up fast and can be turned up and down to match demand. It is the nimble player on this team.

Where do the subsidised players fit in? Not into power generation. They exist to drain subsidies from foolish politicians. In my opinion, if they vanished from the grid we would all be better off. The other sources of energy are better for the grid and cost us less. That is why nuclear is so derided by the environment lobby, it competes spiritually with the claim that subsidised generators do not produce CO2 at the point of generation. From cradle to grave they are responsible for a lot of CO2 but none or very little where they work. Nuclear destroys that argument. It paints the environmental lobby not as environmentalists but as rent seekers and it provides society with the energy society must have to survive.