There is an ethereal tone to the Australian debate on energy.

The government is focused on what it regards as an inevitable transition to Net Zero emissions. This means replacement of coal by wind and solar and eventually by ‘green’ hydrogen from water. While ‘green’ hydrogen has suffered terminal judgements on its viability with proposed projects cancelled all over the world, including Australia’s largest green hydrogen project, the $12.5 billion plant and pipeline in Gladstone, the nation’s three energy regulators, acronymed as AEMO, AER, and AEMC, devise paths by which Net Zero based on wind and solar may be achieved.

For its part, the Opposition remains in pursuit of a watered-down version of Net Zero and has used considerable political capital in promoting nuclear power – a source of energy that in most of Australia, even without our thickets of regulation, would always be more expensive than coal-derived electricity.

Other than in Europe, where energy policy as in Australia is hollowing out industries, Net Zero-based approaches are less favoured. From June 1 this year, China completed a shift to phase out renewable energy subsidies, while India, alongside other rapidly growing third-world nations, never had many to begin with.

The major change comes from the US where the Trump Administration has reversed the Biden era’s policies that sought to replace coal and gas with wind and solar. As well as through administrative changes, this is a central focus of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) which, having proceeded through the US Congress, sounds the death knell for subsidised renewable energy.

BBB had proposed that, rather than receiving subsidies, new wind and solar facilities would actually face a tax of up to 11 per cent. Even without subsidies, those facilities in the US, as in Australia, could never be commercial. News of the US proposals saw plummeting share prices of renewable energy businesses across the world.

Alaska’s Senator Murkowski and two of her Republican colleagues successfully insisted on removing the proposed wind/solar tax and partially deferring the provisions for dismantling the subsidies. This resulted in an immediate boost in share prices – 10 per cent in the case of Vestas, the world’s leading wind turbine manufacturer. Doubtless Senator Murkowski and her allies will receive considerable benefit from this.

But abandoning of Net Zero policies cannot now be reversed under a Republican Presidency.

Notwithstanding slogans that renewables are the cheapest form of energy and spurious estimates of different energy costs, the ongoing call for renewables subsidies is a dead giveaway. Nor can claims that the rising prices are due to ageing coal plants’ unreliability. Respected consultancy, WattClarity has shown that the reliability of coal plants has actually increased over the past quarter of a century.

Further proof of the high cost of renewables is seen in the great many estimates of prices across countries that show the higher the share of wind/solar the higher the electricity prices. And in addition, we have seen electricity grid collapses in Chile, Texas, Spain as well as at home in South Australia and Broken Hill, made vulnerable to blackouts by the dominant role of intermittent energy with its lack of the ‘grid inertia’ that cushions coal, nuclear and gas systems from sudden losses of supply.

For Australia the clamour against rising energy prices can no longer be countered by claims that this is due to the war in Ukraine, since global prices of gas and oil are now back to their ante bellum levels.

The crisis is most evident in energy-intensive industries that are no longer able to compete now that cheap coal-based electricity has been denied to them but not their overseas competitors some of whom rely on the Australian coal that regulatory measures deny to value-add to domestic raw materials. Smelters in Townsville, Boyne Island, and Newcastle are reportedly seeking assistance to continue operation.

But the concerns about high energy costs are common to all businesses facing overseas competition.

Australia is also seeing vocal local opposition which even led some Teal politicians to oppose offshore wind which might affect the electorates they represent or have sought to represent.

But the strongest opposition is from people in rural areas where wind and solar facilities are being promoted. In Victoria their voices have largely been unheeded and the Victorian government has passed laws that facilitate compulsory permitting of transmission lines crossing private land.

A target area for renewables VNI West, where the transmission system is to be built by levying the cost onto consumers, has recently seen a 2-year delay in its timeline.

This is partly due to local opposition. Activists, who have canvassed landowners, maintain that about 70 per cent within the VNI area and others close-by oppose wind, solar and transmission developments on their land; at least a further 10 per cent of the VNI area comprises towns and protected areas of high-quality biodiversity.

Australia’s economy is facing a crisis fuelled by the requirements of renewable energy. This is aggravated by a crimping of living standards caused by higher household energy costs and higher energy-driven prices of goods and services. Such wider impacts are amplified by growing disaffection of those impacted by the and extensiveness and visual intrusion of wind and solar facilities.