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By Jo Nova
It’s all so unfair. They just wanted to save the world and be treated like heroes, but nothing is working out.
The CSIRO has suddenly stepped back from promises of a Green Utopia. Only last week the AEMO (which manage the grid) admitted we’d need to keep coal plants running ’til 2049. Now, in a double shock, the CSIRO says we won’t reach a 100% renewables grid, because eliminating the last 10% of emissions is too expensive.
Don’t miss what a huge backflip this is:
— Suddenly, the CSIRO experts are saying that fossil fuels are an essential part of the Australian grid, in order to reduce costs.
— Suddenly gas is not just a short bridging fuel to get us to the land of pure renewables.
— Just like that, Net Zero Electricity is dead. If the land of the baking sun and roaring forties can’t make it work, who can?
They don’t specify what the last 10% of non-renewable energy is, but without nuclear power, it has to be fossil fuels, doesn’t it? They just can’t bring themselves to say “10% fossil fuels”. Holy green electron!
If only they could have told us that a few years ago before we wasted all the money, or even in April before we had the election?
Either they didn’t know — an astonishing failure of foresight — or they did know, and chose not to tell voters before the election. Their excuse is that costs have “unexpectedly” risen. Building gas plants is now 32% more expensive, they say, “amid soaring turbine technology costs”. And this comes on top of the seismic 55% rise in transmission costs which the AEMO — coincidentally — announced four weeks after the election.
Funny how the Blob agencies don’t seem to notice the bad news in time to alert the voters?
Who could have imagined that the whole world would want cheap fossil fuels again, and Australia would be left begging for gas plants, because we ruined our manufacturing base when we threw away the cheap coal power we used to have. I mean, apart from almost all the engineers in the country, who knew?
But it doesn’t make sense anyhow. They say the price of gas plants went through the roof, but if the grid was pure renewables, we weren’t supposed to need any gas? So they’ve slid that in there, the excuse that never was, hoping we don’t notice. And if a 10% fossil fuel grid is OK because it’s cheaper, why wouldn’t a 15% or 20% proportion be fine too? This could be just the first baby step out of the ideology.
Green energy transition faces an upheaval as investment stalls and costs rise
By Perry Williams, The Australian
Australia faces a blowout in the cost of gas needed to back up a renewables-dominated electricity grid, while the prize of fully greening the system by 2050 is undermined by challenging new economics that make it difficult to stack up.
A joint report by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and market operator AEMO concludes that achieving 100 per cent zero emissions from electricity generation is more expensive than a framework that targets 90 per cent emissions reduction from electricity, and relies on abatement for the rest.
They find decarbonising power generation is economically compelling, just not at maximum intensity. That is because expelling the last 10 per cent of generation emissions comes at a high cost.
The bill for building gas power plants has soared by 32 per cent over 2025-26 amid soaring turbine technology costs, the science agency found in its draft report, with gas costs not projected to return to normal levels until 2035.
Ominously, they are not even pretending renewables will reduce electricity costs anymore. Instead there is word salad about returning to a “normal cost path” — whatever that means in a technology that’s still developing and has never been rolled out en masse. There is no “normal”, only models that pretend they know the answer:
“Our current view is that it may take longer than 2030 for technologies to return to a more normal level of costs … if a technology has not already started to show strong signs of recovery it will not return to their normal cost path until 2035. This includes technologies such as onshore wind, coal, gas and nuclear,” the report said.
The most interesting point, which they don’t have the honesty to say, is what really shook them into the realization that 100% “renewables” wouldn’t work? Was it the utter failure of the hydrogen gas plants; the pathetic progress of Snowy 2; the deaths of two transformers at the Waratah super battery, or the collapse in investor interest in building wind farms, or the organized resistance of farmers to stop the high voltage transmission lines, or all of the above, plus the Spanish blackout?
Or was it the shocking price rises of the last two years which proved that everything they said about renewables being cheaper wasn’t true?