Senator Calls Australia’s Renewable Energy Debacle a National Emergency

Whether it’s the looming threat of mass blackouts and load shedding this coming summer, the 140% increase in the number of homes disconnected from the grid (families unable to pay power bills increasing at 20%, year-on-year) or thousands of pensioners freezing in the dark, Australia’s decade-long dalliance with sunshine and breezes just got serious.

Hitherto oblivious to their constituents’ plight, a few politicians have recently started to wake up to the scale and scope of the damage being done by massively subsidised wind and solar power. The Johnny-come-latelys, join others like Federal Liberal MP, Craig Kelly, who have been alive to the greatest rort of all time, from the very beginning.

Another with his finger on the pulse is Malcolm Roberts – a Federal Senator with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Malcolm is an avid STT follower, gleefully re-tweeting and reposting our posts on his Facebook page and elsewhere.

What’s notable about this piece from The Daily Caller’s Andrew Follett is not that Malcolm Roberts gets it (he clearly does), it’s the fact that Australia’s self-inflicted energy calamity is being covered in the US of A.

Senator Claims Green Energy Is Causing A ‘National Emergency’
Daily Caller
Andrew Follett
25 July 2017

Australia is facing a “national emergency” of extremely high power prices due to green energy, according to an Aussie senator.

One Nation Sen. Malcolm Roberts, a former coal miner, claimed 60,000 households in the state of New South Wales needed government help to keep their electricity on due to the expense of green energy. He called for the government to scrap renewable energy targets (RET) scheme.

Electricity prices rose to 200 cents per kilowatt-hour during a widespread power outage last September. That’s roughly 20 times more expensive than the average U.S. power price.

The average Australian currently pays about 25 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity, according to parliamentary research. Major businesses in South Australia have already threatened to suspend operations entirely until the price of power comes down.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has blamed high power prices on South Australia “distorting the national energy market” by putting too much emphasis on generating electricity from wind farms.

The Australian state invested heavily in solar and wind power, but those power sources were incredibly expensive and placed a massive strain on the state’s power grid.

“This has been very much a Labor obsession, to set these heroic renewable energy targets,” Turnbull told a radio station in October. “They assume that they can change the composition of the energy mix and that energy security will always be there and the lights will stay on, and that has been brought into question.”

High prices aren’t the only reason to be worried about green energy in Australia: The country is also risking blackout.

Officials concluded that “violent fluctuations” in the supply of wind power caused a blackout affecting 1.7 million people in South Australia in September. The Australian Energy Market Operator blamed the blackout on a wind farm that suddenly stopped providing 200 megawatts of power, destabilizing the grid.

Despite the blackout, South Australia wants to invest another $100 million into green energy.

Unstable wind power likely caused other state power grids to cut off energy flow to South Australia, collapsing the grid. For a moment, the state looked more like North Korea than Australia.

Independent experts believe the ability of an electrical grid to absorb green energy becomes increasingly more difficult at scale. South Australia’s reliance on wind power makes large blackouts more likely because the amount of electricity generated by a wind turbine is very intermittent and doesn’t coincide with the times of day when power is most needed.
Daily Caller

Malcolm Roberts: calls RET disaster a ‘National Emergency’.