We all remember al gores map of florida , completely under water by 2014.

How did that work out 

The legless green energy transition
Rafe Champion

Think of wind, solar, and batteries as the three legs of a stool supporting the Net Zero transition program.

The Labour governments of Australia, state and federal, are desperately accelerating the progress of these facilities to achieve legislated targets, with an undisclosed amount of money devoted to the Federal Capacity Investment Scheme and $34bn in NSW allocated to a newly created Investment Delivery Authority.

Apparently, nothing has been learned from the failed energy transition in Germany which was dead in the water in 2018 when an official review revealed that the Energiewende was failing on the three sides of the energy policy triangle; affordability, security, and emission-reduction.

Still, the Germans persisted with major offshore wind developments despite the serious wind droughts or dunkelflautes regularly recorded on oil and gas platforms in the North Sea for 60 years. Britain also went for North Sea wind, now both of these once-proud industrial nations are rapidly losing their power-intensive industries to China and the US.

Around the Western world, the Net Zero obsession has consumed trillions of dollars and everywhere the results are the same. Power is more expensive and less secure while catastrophic harm is being inflicted on forests and farmlands, with a looming tsunami of toxic junk when the facilities wear out.

In view of the amount of damage caused by the failing transition, it is surprisingly easy to explain why the three-legged Net Zero ‘stool’ will not stand up. Maybe the Coalition will get around to it sometime…

The solar leg fails every night. Without coal, power in the night will have to come from wind, plus some hydro and biomass, and very expensive gas, and batteries.

The wind fails during severe wind droughts when there is very little wind over the whole of SE Australia for periods up to three days and nights.

You might say, ‘What about battery and pumped hydro storage?’ You have got to be joking!


Look at Snowy 2.0. Malcolm Turnbull’s signature program has blown out from $5 billion to 20 billion (or more) with no end in sight.

As for batteries, Bill Gates is a student of storage technology, and even he blows up when he hears the word batteries because they are several orders of magnitude too small for the assignment.

lee wrote on Mar 9^th, 2026 at 6:10pm:




This big a battery.

250/500 MWh.

How do you think Canberra's going to stay off the grid?

The Amazon is seeing an average 2.7 million hectares of forest lost each and every year.

That's 12% of the world's source of oxygen removed in the past 20 years.

This is causing 177–266 Gt (gigatonnes) of polar ice melts in Greenland, with Antarctica losing 57–150 Gt annually.

you can pumped hydro to store solar power.

Of course there is no evidence to back it up.

aquascoot wrote on Mar 10^th, 2026 at 1:08pm:


I don't.