Claimed threats of violence, abusive phone calls, former friends not speaking anymore, allegations of greed – welcome to the Aussie green energy revolution.
The video is available to view here.
The Four Corners video provides some additional context to a recent WUWT story, with a video interview of the people pictured in the story below.
My biggest objection to the four corners program is the introduction, which falsely claims wind energy is necessary to meet Australia’s Net Zero goals.
This is nonsense. France successfully decarbonised much of their economy using nuclear power, and still still derives just under 70% of their electricity from zero carbon nuclear.
Having said that nuclear energy would likely also be divisive, though the land footprint required to supply all of Australia’s needs with nuclear energy would be a lot smaller than an equivalent renewable installation.
The program poured scorn on claims that offshore wind harms whales. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest the whale killing claim is true.
The program dubiously claims nuclear is “double” the cost of an equivalent renewable energy system, but this claim appears to ignore the unaffordable cost of battery backup.
As WUWT has frequently pointed out, wind droughts can affect the entire continent of Australia, so weeks, possibly months of battery backup would be required to smooth out these failures, along with significant overcapacity to charge the batteries during good times.
Lets do a little math.
In 2022, Australia used 273,265 GWh of electricity or (divide by 52 weeks per year) 5255 GWh per week.
Obviously this would vary by season, during very cold weeks people would use a lot more home heating. But let’s keep it simple.
Batteries currently cost around AU $1200 / kWh.
5255 GWh x 1000000 = 5255000000 kWh of electricity.
5255000000 x $1200 per kilowatt hour = $6,306,000,000,000 – $6.3 trillion dollars
Even if you get a bargain basement discount cost for your batteries, say an 80% discount on the household kilowatt cost, that is still a very serious sum of money. There are battery technologies which might bring that cost down significantly, I’ve seen claims of $40 – $80 / kWh for sodium ion batteries. A $40 / kWH battery would reduce that cost from $6.3 trillion to $200 billion. But betting $200 – $400 billion ($40 – $80 / kWh) on a very recent technology commercialisation would be quite a gamble.
Let’s also not forget these batteries also have to be regularly replaced – especially if the batteries are abused, say by draining them heavily during continent wide renewable energy failures.
The alternative to battery backup is fossil fuel backup, but this is a very expensive solution – this requires keeping enough gas turbines or coal plants or whatever on standby to completely replace renewable energy when renewable energy output collapses.
Australia has a gigantic pumped hydro project, the Snowy 2 pumped hydro project, which is supposed to provide a “big battery”, but every time I look at that project the estimated cost has gone up by another billion. Is that Snowy 2 tunnel digger still stuck in the dirt? And there are serious questions about the throughput efficiency of the system, how much electricity will be lost charging and discharging the pumped hydro system.
Oops I forgot something – aren’t we supposed to electrify everything, replace all our gasoline vehicles and gas cookers with electricity? How much would this additional electrification capacity add to my estimated costs?
In my opinion, despite an effort to give air time to both sides of the debate (learn BBC), the apparent biases in this Four Corners episode are disappointing.
I grew up watching Four Corners, a hallmark of Four Corners episodes was a genuine attempt to be objective. WUWT has praised previous Four Corners episodes, such as their excellent recent expose of alleged carbon credit fraud.
The failure of this Four Corners episode “Inside the communities fighting against renewable energy | Four Corners” to mention battery backup costs when comparing renewables to nuclear, the quick dismissal of claimed impacts on whales from offshore wind turbines, no mention of the impact of onshore wind turbines on bird life, and a failure to provide proper estimates of renewable costs which include the cost of battery backup, all this in my opinion falls far beneath the usual standards we Aussies have come to expect from Four Corners.
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