Malcolm Turnbull jumps on the anti renewable energy bandwagon
The lights go out in SA and Turnbull flicks the switch to peak stupid, Guardian 1 Oct 16 Lenore Taylor One big storm and our climate and energy debate is surging back to peak stupid.
Now Malcolm Turnbull has encouraged the campaign to use the South Australian blackout to slow the shift to clean energy, saying state renewable energy targets are “extremely unrealistic”.
Except all the evidence says the state targets are exactly what Australia needs to meet the promises the prime minister made in Paris last year about reducing greenhouse gases.
Of course it would be preferable to have a consistent national policy to reach those goals, but it’s not exactly the states’ fault that we haven’t got one. That vacuum was Tony Abbott’s proud achievement, with the abolition of the carbon price and the winding back of the federal renewable energy target, after a lengthy debate about whether it should be abolished altogether, which of course dried up almost all investment in renewable energy.
And consistent, credible national policy hasn’t been any more evident in the year since Turnbull took over either.
His own officials admitted in a Senate inquiry this week they had undertaken no modelling at all about how to meet the target Turnbull pledged in Paris for reducing Australia’s emissions out to 2030. That’s the target he is about to ratify, the target that will be Australia’s legal obligation.
But plenty of others have done modelling and analysis for him, and they all conclude that he won’t meet it, not with the Coalition’s current policies……..
Turnbull and his energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, absolutely should urgently consider how to make sure the electricity grid is better able to cope with increasingly frequent bouts of extreme weather.
But whatever Turnbull does has to involve convincing the climate sceptics in his own party that change – and some impact on power prices – is inevitable.
Backing in their belief that renewable energy can’t keep the lights on is a bad way to start. When Malcolm Roberts, the One Nation senator and former project leader of the climate-sceptic Galileo movement, tweets how great it is that Turnbull is “coming around to One Nation’s position” that’s not a good thing, not if the prime minister meant anything he said on this subject in the past or has any intention of keeping the promises he made in Paris.
And whichever way he does it, he will still have to shift electricity generation to renewables, at least as quickly as the state targets are suggesting…….https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/01/the-lights-go-out-in-sa-and-turnbull-flicks-the-switch-to-peak-stupid
1 Comment »
Leave a comment
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 
3rd October 2016
The Editor
The Advertiser
Electranet’s privately owned and run electricity transmission system is in a mess.
Electranet now wants the public to pay for new infrastructure. Electranet’s proposed investment will be rewarded with a handsome guaranteed return on the amount invested, which will be funded by all South Australian electricity users in the form of increased tariffs.
Why do we need such a high capacity transmission network? It is to service big electricity users to the north of Port Wakefield, like BHP. Getting everyone to pay for the new infrastructure is a huge publicly funded cross-subsidy to the mining industry. It is a publicly-funded disincentive for more efficient and reliable distributed generation. It is anti-competitive.
The windfall profits reaped by Electranet will then go offshore.
This is a win for Electranet and the big energy guzzling mining companies but, as usual, a huge kick in the guts for small businesses and the average South Australian.
Dennis Matthews
LikeLike