Consider the scale of the transition that’s required here. To meet the government’s legislated 43 per cent emissions reduction target (let alone the higher targets of most states), coal will have to drop from supplying 60 per cent-plus of our power needs to under 10 per cent within eight years. And renewables will have to rise from supplying about 30 per cent now to more than 80 per cent. Plus 28,000km of grid will have to be constructed to cope with this new decentralised power generation, to be used, on average, only 30 per cent of the time.
In practical terms that’s 28,000km of poles and wires with the trained trades to erect it, and necessary access to farming land and property across the country.
In a moment of candour, Energy Minister Chris Bowen recently said achieving the government’s goal would require the installation of 40 large wind turbines every month and 22,000 standard solar panels every day for the next eight years. We will need, Bowen said, “to mine, move and manufacture immense volumes of material, energy and equipment … and to train and mobilise hundreds of thousands of skilled … workers” in a “collective endeavour that is almost of unprecedented scale”.Because lowering emissions is now a religion, there’s just this blind assumption that somehow, as with the loaves and the fishes, or water into wine at Cana, it will all just happen. Only – what if it doesn’t? In Victoria, new wind farms can take up to 51 months to be approved. The cost of the 360km HumeLink power line to connect Snowy 2.0 to the NSW grid had reportedly blown out by mid-last year from the original estimate of $1.35bn to $3.32bn. The project, first put forward in 2018, is still nowhere near final approval, let alone starting construction. As well, at roughly $10m a kilometre for HumeLink, given the higher costs now for steel, construction and environmental offsets, Labor’s estimate of $80bn for the extra 28,000km of transmission lines needed looks out by a factor of nearly four.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/speeding-ever-faster-to-renewables-w...A fit of manic gigantism, akin to Hitler's dream of transforming Berlin into a utopian Germania.
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