The least efficient way to handle energy is to store it. Imagine a bucket with a mosquito net for a base. Now try using that to bail out the Titanic and you have some idea of the task Australia is undertaking with its ‘green energy’ agenda built on batteries.

If everything in the world were to go perfectly for the next 50 years… If material costs remained stable, local communities kept quiet about land acquisition, and production lines in China rolled along indifferent to neighbouring conflict zones – renewable energy would fail catastrophically long before it managed to replace coal as Australia’s baseload power.

The calculations on materials, technical limitations, and the scale required to approach ‘baseload’ breakdown rapidly.

This is not an opinion, it is an industry-wide truth. Even the European renewable contractors and electric vehicle manufacturers are getting worried. Rare elements required for construction are getting a bit ‘rarer’ while the projected price of Lithium for 2025 looks like your energy bill. Wind turbines are especially shaky. Old turbines are dying off at a rapid pace and the rushed technology of new ones has left the industry with a major spike in serious technical failures, replacements, and delays. Ever tried to recall a skyscraper? That is the magnitude of the problem.

Australia’s Pacific partners – who moan about ‘evil fossil fuels’ when the cameras are nearby – are busy building hundreds of coal-fired stations and nuclear power plants. They give lip service to the UN’s ‘rising sea level’ mantra in the hope of cash handouts and nothing more. Why else would they sell their fossil fuel and deep sea resources under the table to China (the biggest emitter in the world)? Yes, those are the same Pacific Islands that play-act with the United Nations, wandering out into the surf to pose for magazine covers. The political movement of Climate Change is theatre designed to swindle fortunes from countries like Australia who are nursing the remains of a white saviour complex. A little added Colonial guilt goes a long way to adding zeros to the cheque.

Meanwhile, Labor is blowing up old energy infrastructure instead of mothballing it ‘just in case’ as our European partners have done. What happens if a nation enters a period of global conflict and economic unrest with a few solar panels and wind turbines made by a communist aggressor? Is this Australia’s Stone Age moment?

National Security should always be the primary consideration in the government’s energy plan. Instead of prudence, we have been led by wishy-washy ideals of ‘virtue’ sold by an international bureaucracy chaired by the manufacturer of renewable energy. To call that a ‘conflict of interest’ would be generous.

It is not China’s fault for playing rough and dirty with the West, the fault lies with the excessive idiocy of the political class and so-called ‘expert advisers’ who spent far too many years cruising from super yacht to talkfest.

These are the politicians who lectured us on their ‘intelligence’ while skimming personal profit off the top of renewable energy deals. They were definitely ‘smart’ but that doesn’t mean they were doing the right thing for Australia’s interests.

Labor is not the only guilty party. The Liberals frequently indulged in the ‘green’ mantra. Indeed the biggest mistake the Coalition ever made was to allow MPs in blue-ribbon inner-city seats to validate the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Greens and Teals. It was their weakness that encouraged former conservative voters to embrace doomsday policy. What did these MPs think was going to happen? ‘Oh, we believe in the End Times, but we’re going to work more slowly than the Teals to save you…’ Apocalypse politics is absolute – it is a cult – it is a belief system that terrifies voters with the threat of imminent death. You cannot half-arse it.

Let us examine some true idiocy.

The Powering Australia project put out by the Australian government’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water insists that its focus is on ‘jobs, reducing energy bills, and reducing emissions’ – a trio of failures.

There are tens of millions of dollars on offer in this project, including $18.1 million to ‘strengthen the integrity of Australian Carbon Credits Units’ – those would be the same carbon credits that Australia voted against during the landslide Tony Abbott election. This stuff is Monopoly money for the parallel Woke economy and just like Monopoly, everyone will end up screaming at each other and kicking the board over in a few hours because each country wants to play by different ‘house rules’.

We also have $2 million to ‘help First Nations communities engage with hydrogen project developers’. I don’t know… if Senator Jacinta Price is calling for an audit on waste in the activist industry, maybe they should start with that.

And while Albanese won’t spare a few million to build boarding schools for desperate Indigenous kids, he has set aside $15 billion to establish the ‘National Reconstruction Fund’ with $3 billion put into ‘Powering Australia’.

You would imagine with all this public money washing around that we’d be saturated in energy instead of living through one of the worst energy shortages in our history. Indeed, this green energy transition has been so successful and so ‘cheap’ that the government has offered cash handouts to struggling families who can’t afford all this cheap energy.

Nowhere does Powering Australia discuss or address the concerns of handing the on/off switch of Australia’s energy grid to China. Nowhere does it address the extreme risk it places on Australia which will no longer be self-sufficient in power despite having some of the most generous energy resources on the face of the Earth. Nowhere does it offer quantifiable proof that any of this is even ‘green’ other than stating it over and over without evidence.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade proudly talks about the money on offer, stating:

‘For Australian and regional investors, low-emissions and sustainable technology needs will drive enormous growth in investment opportunities, with around A$4 trillion in green investment expected by 2030, potentially rising to A$15 trillion by 2050. With energy investment in Southeast Asia averaging around US$70 billion per year between 2016 and 2020, there is a significant financing gap that will need private sector support.’

Its nauseating discussion about Australia becoming a ‘renewable energy superpower’ misses the point that a nation cannot be a ‘superpower’ in anything if it is dependent on another nation for that technology. At best, it is a ‘customer’ and at worst, a dependent.

Then we can read allegedly serious articles in major Australian publications talking about the risk of getting Australia’s oil supplies through the volatile South China Sea before they go off on a tangent promoting Chinese-made solar and wind as the alternative. These technologies carry the same root cause of risk. I will not embarrass the journalists who penned these pieces but if they cared about Australia’s energy security they would at least mention nuclear and the expansion of our domestic fossil fuel supplies instead of wearing Net Zero beer goggles that render the obvious invisible.

I kid you not, while Australians watch the Labor government leave China squatting in the Port of Darwin – the single most important strategic Pacific port if war were ever to break out, our politicians are squabbling about the definition of ‘energy security’ and ‘national security’. They currently have no plan about how to handle a cutting off of oil supply – except to allow panic wash over the nation. They are probably hoping that America will save them, but Biden has trouble finding the microphone on an empty stage let alone his regional partners in the middle of the sea.

As one report critical of the situation correctly points out, ‘Defence is wholly reliant on the non-Defence support infrastructure to operate.’ An energy grid majority owned by foreign nations is a security threat politicians shrug off and ignore because they were born in a time of peace and do not take national security as seriously as they should.

Look at the state of the world.

Energy security is a problem. A big one. And while Albanese continues to obsess about these Net Zero targets, the Coalition needs to start raising hell on this issue or we’ll have to use those smoking ceremonies to boil our kettles.

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Flat White is written and edited by Alexandra Marshall.

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