When the lights went out last week for 500,000 Victorians, it wasn’t all bad.

Most still had natural gas to turn to for cooking and some for hot water.

But gas connections to new homes are banned in Victoria from 2024. Clearly, the great fortune of being part of the Lucky Country, blessed with dual energy supplies, was too great a first-world burden for the socialist-left Allan state government to handle.

It means that for these new homes, the next time the lights go out, everything goes out.

However, Victoria’s diabolic blackout might be the best double-edged sword the state’s future could have ordered.

What happened last week may have been the first time many youngsters couldn’t charge their mobile phones, laptops, or other electronic gadgetry. Their lives and their lifelines also went flat.

Until then, they had been removed from reality. Until then, it was someone else’s problem…

Only now might they think about the importance of the essential service of electricity, and better still, the importance of cheap and reliable energy. One day they will have to pay the bills.

And so it is that there may be more power in a flat phone battery than we think.

Only now might the Net Zero zealots begin thinking about the real world, just as theirs shatters into texting and tweeting oblivion.

The blackouts, with the promise of more to come, might just be the real-life lesson in understanding the old saying that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Schooled in Net Zero nonsense, the younger generations and their educators have largely applauded the direction of phasing out coal and pursuing a renewables nirvana.

With eyes wide shut, they believe they are saving the world one poppycock plan at a time. They have skipped school and rallied for the cause. They have spent school hours making placards and writing letters to Ministers. Some have voted for the cause and more will follow.

Little might they think that their increasingly battery-led lifestyle, pumped up by power, is not the life that their childhood counterparts in the Congo are living.

Little might they think of the trees being pulled down in order to put up wind farms, or the interruption to whale migration at sea. Little might they think about what a romantic sunset could look like in years to come with industrial love on the horizon.

Little might they think of the increasing plethora of coal-driven power, mining, and industrial operations elsewhere in the world, while Australia’s decision-makers pull the plug on ours.

They are in the dark more than they might want to realise.

For first-time power blackout sufferers, it won’t be the temporary death of their fridge or freezer worrying them. These days, most order-in a solution to their food problems or go to a local supermarket – backed up by diesel generators – to get a tub of ice cream on demand.

No, it is only the absence of mobile phones, iPads, and the like that might make the younger generations understand what nobody else is telling them: reliable energy is really important.

When they can recharge their phones – and their lives – they should google the following: nuclear energy, reliable energy, low-cost energy, and underground powerlines.

Then they should google future job prospects in Australia.

But it’s a bit hard to find the buttons in the dark.

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