In any other field, the final collapse of Labor’s much-hyped vision of endless vistas of turbines in offshore wind farms powering homes and industry, as happened in mid-July, would result in a review of the entire approach to using renewables.

The withdrawal of BlueFloat Energy from the proposed $2 billion wind farm off the Gippsland Coast in Victoria also comes after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared, in May, that the ambitious clean, green, all-renewables grid planned by Labor would still require backup, preferably from gas-powered generators.

At last! After years of energy realists being derided or just ignored for pointing out that renewables alone simply will not power a national grid, the government has partially acknowledged this reality. One good result from Labor’s emphatic election victory is that the Prime Minister may now feel strong enough to stand up to the crazies of his own party who still insist that fossil fuels will not be needed.

Labor also used the need to fuel these mostly non-existent gas generators as one reason to ram through approval of an extension to Woodside’s enormous Northwest Shelf gas project, which has been held up for six years. The issue proved to be a flashpoint during the election campaign, with environmental groups dead against it and the West Australian government and industry groups all for it.

However, the declaration that gas will still be required is only a small victory in the campaign to maintain a power grid that delivers energy when families need it, not just when the weather permits. Another victory is the collapse of hopes for offshore wind, with BlueFloat simply abandoning the Gippsland project, without even trying to sell its interest in it to another party.

The announcement was hardly a surprise. As noted in this column when the offshore wind projects were first announced (‘Gone with the wind’, 15 July 2023), Australia entered the field just as the offshore wind industry in Europe and the US was demanding yet more subsidies to cope with rising costs, simply for existing wind farms to stay in business. Tenders for new areas were not attracting any bidders. The industry outlook has not improved.

But now that offshore wind power is out of the picture and the build up of renewable projects of all types is falling well short of expectations, that leaves gas power. However, no one is building gas generators either, for the good reason that such generators would be unprofitable on a renewable energy grid.

State and Federal governments aim to have perhaps 70 to 80 per cent of Australia’s power coming from renewables by some date in the future (targets vary). As the output from renewable sources can vary enormously, this means that for long periods, perhaps 100 per cent of power will come from renewable sources (assuming that enough of them are built), and at other times, very little or nothing at all.

The problem of wind droughts, where the wind dies over a wide area and turbines don’t operate, has been discussed at length in this column (‘Transition loses traction’, 9 July 2022). As is widely acknowledged, these droughts can last anywhere from a few hours to, in extreme cases, days or even weeks at a time. The timing and duration of these periods are difficult to forecast. Solar has proved to be of limited use in powering grids, despite the billions spent on the technology, and solar panels obviously don’t work at night.

Attempts to create sufficient storage to tide the grid over such droughts have amounted to very little. One such attempt, the Snowy 2.0 scheme, may now cost $20 billion, as opposed to the original estimate of $2 billion, all to hold a paltry 12 hours’ worth of power for the east coast grid.

Another project of a similar size, the Pioneer-Burdekin pumped-hydro project in Queensland, was abandoned by the state’s Liberal National party government before work started. That leaves a few smaller pumped-hydro projects as well as batteries, all of which amount to a few drops in the energy supply bucket during a wind drought, particularly if the drought is combined with a series of stiflingly hot, overcast days.

That leaves gas plants. However, as noted, the nature of renewables is such that any new plants will be idle much of the time, meaning that they will not be earning money, and the east coast grid will need a lot of them. Public comments by the Prime Minister and other senior Labor figures indicate that they believe the grid may need, perhaps, an additional gas plant here and there. Nope! They need to build sufficient gas plants to power much of the east coast grid for days at a time, or to accept the consequences of voters being plunged into darkness for varying periods.

As this is being written, the 660-megawatt Kurri Kurri gas turbine plant in the Hunter Valley is nearing completion, with a final cost of just under $1 billion. Kurri Kurri will join the likes of Energy Australia’s year-old Tallawarra B (440 MW) and older Tallawarra A plant (320 MW) near Sydney in powering the grid. There are plenty of other gas plants ready to operate as Australia’s coal plants fade away, but not enough to power the entire grid, and crucially, only one other gas plant has been approved – the 300 MW Reeves Plain plant near the Adelaide-Moomba gas pipeline in South Australia. There is some doubt about the level of investor commitment to this plant.

This adds up to a possible train wreck of prolonged periods with little or no power on the grid. Fortunately, Queensland’s Liberal National party has at least postponed the inevitable reckoning of the cost of green obsessions by scrapping state Labor’s plans to phase out the state’s many coal-powered plants.

Although Labor has finally agreed that gas plants are a necessary evil, they have not taken the next step of making gas plants economically viable. The main approach to date has been to lift price caps on power so that power plants can charge a lot more when the wind is not blowing. However, this does not appear to be providing a sufficient incentive to investors. One solution would be the creation of a capacity market, similar to those that operate in Europe and the US, but such a market is still a long way off.

None of this will be affordable or easy. The battle is now not to deliver cheap power, but to ensure that power is available to families at all times, regardless of the ideological obsessions that govern the party in power.