Australia’s energy transition
The anti-windfarm movement – who’s financing it?
How do they detract from an an eroded hill?
Did you know that when the sun is behind them the rotating blades of wind turbines produce a flashing light that affects the brains of pelagic fish, triggering seizures that diminish their sexual drive, leading to their extinction?
OK – I made that one up. I know nothing about fish brains or fish sexuality, but such ignorance has not stopped others from joining “environmental” protests against all forms of renewable energy, particularly offshore wind turbines.
These protests have been effective. In response to protests by people who allege that the wind turbines will ruin their views and harm the marine environment, the Spanish firm BlueFloat Energy has asked the Commonwealth to pause the assessment of its application for a permit to build an offshore windfarm near Wollongong until after the election.
Dutton, naming concerns for the environment and tourism, has promised to scrap planned windfarms in the Bunbury, Southern Ocean, Illawarra and Hunter offshore windfarm zones.
There is a reason those trying to stop Australia’s energy transition target offshore windfarms. They are an important component in Australia’s renewable energy plan, because although they are more expensive per kWh generated than solar, they take advantage of the land-breeze-sea-breeze effects, which can be strong around twilight, when electricity demand is high and solar panels stop generating.
Steve Cannane and Kevin Nguyen of the ABC describe in detail an anti-windfarm campaign in the Illawarra region, which has been organized by a body known as Responsible Future Illawarra (RFI): The offshore wind debate could influence this federal election and it's already an “absolute blood-fest”.
In a Trumpian-style campaign, windfarm opponents have turned up at a meeting to heckle the prime minister, have loaded social media with US-sourced misinformation about whales killed by windfarms (including gruesome images generated by AI), and have spread conspiracy theories about windfarms. Engineering experts from the University of Wollongong who try to counter lies and misinformation have had their integrity attacked. Thousands of anti-windfarm submissions have been made to the Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, claiming to come from local residents, but most seem to have come from a few specific sources.
There is no suggestion that RFI is a Coalition-front organization, but they seem to fill the role Lenin called “useful idiots”. Coalition members of Parliament and aspiring candidates, including the opposition leader, have posed for photographs with RFI organizers.
Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, one of the more conservative Green parliamentarians, wants to know who is backing RFI:
The Senate received very troubling information through the inquiry's submissions process that key Australian groups opposing offshore wind rollouts are not in fact the grassroots community movements they claim to be.
Rather, they are linked to political, organised and well-funded global campaigns to undermine renewable energy.
Rachel Williamson of Renew Economy reports on a similar campaign against a solar-battery project near Gulgong in New South Wales: Long distance objectors pile in against small solar-battery project in regional NSW.
Out of 88 submissions concerning the project’s planning application, 87 objected to it, but only 8 of them came from people in the Gulgong area, and 3 of them were from the same household.
Some of the claims made by anti-renewable protesters are laughable – for example RFI’s claim that offshore turbines interfere with fresh water quality. But as Williamson points out, the most common misinformation spreading in Australia is the superficially plausible claim that a transition to renewable energy leads to higher power prices -- a textbook case of a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Jill Hopke of Chicago’s DePaul University, writing in The Conversation, points out that the decision by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to end its fact-checking program, will see the spread of more misinformation and disinformation, as organized anti-renewable energy campaigners flood social media: Climate misinformation is rife on social media – and poised to get worse.
That all leads to the question “who’s funding and organizing these campaigns?”. Our political donation laws are too weak to shed light on the campaigns’ benefactors. The Australian fossil fuel industry, while it is not particularly enamoured with the Coalition’s gas policy, or its nuclear fantasies, has a long-term stake in seeing the Coalition go through with its promise to stop the expansion of renewable energy.
The main state actor in disinformation about renewable energy is Russia, a country with a weak economy and a strong stake in the survival of a global fossil-fuel market. According to NATO’s Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment, Russia is the main driver of organized disinformation about climate change.
It would be surprising if ASIO did not find Russian resources behind some of our well-organized “environmental” anti-renewable movements.
The Coalition’s Trumpian approach to our safeguard mechanism
While much of our attention is on domestic energy prices, we should be aware that Dutton has announced his intention to “review” the measure known as the “safeguard mechanism”.
This policy, introduced by the Turnbull government and strengthened by the Albanese government, caps the emissions of 219 large polluting establishments and lowers their limit by about 5 percent every year.
Dutton has never been enthusiastic about the scheme. The Coalition was prepared to live with it while it provided easy ways for companies to ignore the cap, but it voted against the government’s moves to make the caps non-negotiable.
Energy Producers Australia, which represents much of Australia’s gas industry, would like to see the scheme weakened. Industry groups representing firms subject to the caps, however, are more in favour of keeping it in place. Their acceptance of the policy does not mean they necessarily like it, but as policymakers and business scholars know, corporations value policy and regulatory certainty. Having adjusted their technologies, investments and commercial arrangements to adapt to a regulatory system, businesses don’t welcome the uncertainty of “on-again-off-again” policies – a point not understood by people like Trump and Dutton who have little knowledge of real businesses that actually do things rather than engage in paper transactions.
Felicity Deane of the Queensland University of Technology has a Conversation contribution Under a Coalition government, the fate of Australia’s central climate policy hangs in the balance, and the ABC’s Tom Lowrey describes the Coalition’s policy in a post Australia's key climate policy faces an uncertain future. Both cover the same basic ground. Deane goes more into the economics of the policy and Lowrey covers more of the responses of interest groups.
The Coalition’s gas reservation idea – it won’t bring electricity prices down
The government’s plan for our energy transition combines a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions with a steady fall in energy prices.
Some say that the plan to shift our electricity generation to 83 percent renewables by 2030 and eventually to 100 percent causes electricity prices to rise: that’s a deliberate lie. Some others, more reasonably, warn that we aren’t moving in that direction quickly enough.
In the election campaign one of the main concerns is about the Coalition’s gas reservation plan, and whether it would bring down prices.
Nick Toscano and Mike Foley, writing in the Sydney Moring Herald, explain why it won’t bring prices down: “Hard to see how lower pricing will emerge”: Experts doubtful of Dutton’s gas plan.
Some may be sceptical about their explanation because Toscano and Foley quote from gas exporters, who are understandably unenthusiastic about domestic reservation.
But their dismissal of the idea is confirmed by more detached experts. The ABC’s Daniel Mercer quotes energy expert Tim Buckley of Climate Energy Finance, who says we lost the opportunity for gas reservation years ago: More gas and lower prices “years away” as experts poke holes in Coalition's gas reservation policy.
On Late Night Live the Australia Institute’s Mark Ogge goes into detail – as much detail as can be gleaned from the opposition – about the Coalition’s gas reservation idea: Does Peter Dutton's gas policy stack up?.
Ogge’s answer goes into the complexities of Dutton’s ideas. The short answer is that the policy doesn’t stack up. It would be impossible to implement it in the short term and in the long term it would result in gas prices remaining high. His explanations have to do with the powers we have given away to foreign gas companies, and the increasing cost of developing new gas reserves and pipelines.
His main point is that gas is an expensive fuel and is likely to remain so. Because the most expensive source of energy tends to set the price of electricity (remember those economics lectures “price = marginal cost”), any mix of supply in which gas makes up a significant proportion will keep electricity prices high.
In any event we have enough of the stuff for now and into the future. Richard Denniss, also of the Australia Institute, has a short (3-minute) video – Peter Dutton debunks the gas industry’s myth? – explaining that we have enough gas, but in his promises to the industry he has shown he is prepared to bargain away our national interests in order to make his political point about the Labor government not having reserved gas.
Because we have enough gas Albanese has been able to tell ABC’s Jake Evans that we don’t need any new policy to secure gas supply: Albanese willing to direct gas exporters to supply Australia “if needed”.
Perhaps if we use gas to provide “base load” electricity as the Coalition proposes, we may need more supply, at a high price. But we should have an abundance of gas if we use it wisely. That means using less of it, because it’s expensive and it contributes to GHG emissions.
Rewiring Australia has just produced a report The Electrification Tipping Point, demonstrating the substantial savings ($4000 a year by their conservative estimate) when a household goes all electric. We don’t need gas for cooking our meals or for heating our homes and water. If we electrify our vehicles – “batteries on wheels” – we add to the grid’s ability to deliver dispatchable electricity, lessening its dependence on gas. Reducing these demands for gas helps to keep its price down so that it can play its small role in firming electricity generation – a need that will be with us for some time.
The ultimate pettiness
We learn from the ABC’s foreign affairs reporter Stephen Dziedzic that Dutton has promised, if the Coalition is elected, it will scrap the government’s plan to co-host a global UN climate meeting with the Pacific.
To look on the positive side, if we don’t hold such a conference there is no risk that some climate-denying politician will make an idiotically offensive joke about the Pacific islands’ plight of rising sea levels.