Coalition’s coal agenda will be the cause of the blackouts they wish on renewables

One of the single most frustrating elements of Australian energy discourse has been the consistently absurd relationship between generator technology types, blackouts, and climate policy.

As I wrote in my 2020 book Windfall, there is a terrible and deep political history to the broad issue of failure of electrical power to be delivered to end users.

The reality has always been pretty simple: as you would expect, most blackouts are caused by the intricate and complicated ‘distribution system’ of transmission lines at the final step of power delivery. And as I wrote here, even those are decreasing:

Perhaps more significantly, the number of blackouts caused not by this distribution network but by a failure for power generation to supply sufficient electrical energy is extremely tiny – something that still isn’t well recognised outside the world of energy nerds. This is known as ‘unserved energy’, and I depicted it in this chart:

As the proportion of wind and solar grows from nearly zero at the start of that time period to around 30% in FY2022-23, there has been no corresponding rise in unserved energy. This is despite years (maybe decades?) of media outlets treating AEMO’s annual ESOO report as a harbinger of blackout doom.

So, it matters then that the Guardian has revealed Coalition MP Colin Boyce as telling a meeting of climate change deniers that “I’ve said this many times to the colleagues, we have to probably adopt a ‘do nothing’ strategy, obviously fight the good fight…the ‘do nothing’ strategy is a tough love strategy where people will not understand what’s happening until the lights go out”

As I wrote in my book, this isn’t an unusual attitude, and I provide an example from Sky News Australia:

The tone here is ideologically consistent. It’s them trying to bring on an ‘I told you so’ moment. And while their generator-caused blackout apocalypse has never eventuated, there are still frequent power-line-related blackouts on power grids they can freely blame on climate policies and renewable energy.

The most incredible element of this attitude is that the Coalition actually is proposing a do nothing approach. The fundamental core of their energy plan is to simply sweat existing coal plants as long as possible, and hope that by the time 2040 rolls around everybody has forgotten their promise to build nuclear power plants.

As RenewEconomy has covered today, a new report from IEEFA shows that the chances of serious shortfalls in energy supply under the Coalition’s plan are far higher than reported, thanks to the sheer likelihood of coal outages at the clapped out, old plants.

“To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to around 2 million typical households without power”, said Tristan Edis, one of the authors of the report.

This is important. The threat of blackouts is real, it just comes from the party that has been most vocally ‘concerned’ about them. Boyce’s prescription of just ‘letting the blackouts happen’ is a cruel and unjust way to approach a problem like this: blackouts are actually bad and harmful. The only approach here is to prevent this before it happens, even if it means not being able to say ‘I told you so’.

The Coalition’s energy policy is a recipe for real disaster. Blend this with Dutton’s Trumpian approach to facts, engineering and science – an utter repudiation of these things in favour of building a weird alternate reality, buttressed by a social and traditional media propaganda ecosystem. It would be darkness in more ways than one.