The business case for wind and solar rests entirely on subsidies, which rest entirely on political sentiment. With punishing power bills causing increasing anger amongst the proles’, it’s getting harder for politicos to justify their delusional renewable energy/net-zero carbon dioxide gas emissions targets.
That shift in the political mood feeds directly into the dreaded ‘sovereign risk’ that terrifies wannabe investors (by which we mean profiteering rent seekers).
The cost of constructing industrial wind turbines has gone through the roof, which is why dozens of very large-scale projects are being scrapped or scaled back overseas. And which is why wind power outfits are struggling to get their projects past first base in Australia.
Bear in mind that the subsidies to wind and solar all hinge on the notion that power will be delivered to customers (presumably on demand) and the power generated won’t generate carbon oxide gas emissions, in the process. However, neither of those presumptions pass muster.
If wind and solar can’t deliver power on demand (and they can’t) and if their hopeless intermittency means that carbon dioxide gas emissions across the electricity generation sector actually increase (and they do), the basis for subsidising wind and solar becomes even more tenuous.
And this is where nuclear power generation becomes the killer app. Available around-the-clock – 24 x 365 – irrespective of the weather, with no need for batteries or backup, nuclear power is the only stand-alone power generation system that does not generate carbon dioxide gas in the process.
Wherever nuclear power generation is an option, wind and solar don’t stand a chance.
And that is why Australia – with its idiotic twenty-five-year-old ban on nuclear power generation is one of the last places where renewable energy rent seekers still congregate in numbers.
But, even here, the smart money has decided that there is way too much risk in a political environment where affordable and reliable power is the only game in town.
As detailed in the wrap-up by Eric Worrall below, the fact that Australia’s Federal Liberal/National Opposition is talking up nuclear power generation has evidently spooked the renewable energy rent-seeking crowd.
As Eric notes, Ted O’Brien – the Opposition’s Energy spokesman – is already signalling that large-scale nuclear power generation will be front and centre in their political campaigning at the next Federal election, due 18 months from now. Whether or not the Opposition wins office in 2025 is neither here nor there; the fact that there is no longer rock-solid bipartisan support for an all-wind and solar-powered future will be enough to kill off any further investment in new wind and solar generation. That is, sovereign risk will bring the whole subsidised wind and solar scam to a shuddering halt.
Has Australia’s Nuclear Debate Killed Renewable Energy Investment?
Watts Up With That?
Eric Worrall
15 December 2023
Expectations that the next Aussie administration will back nuclear over renewables appears to have wrecked attempts to attract private renewable investment.
Coalition opposes Australia tripling renewable energy, backs nuclear power pledge at Cop28
Ted O’Brien declares global climate summit ‘the nuclear Cop’ despite only 11% of nations backing the pledge
Adam Morton in Dubai @adamlmortonSun 10 Dec 2023 09.41 AEDT
The federal Coalition has declared at the Cop28 climate summit that it will back a global pledge to triple nuclear energy if the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, becomes prime minister, but will not support Australia tripling its renewable energy.
Speaking on the sidelines of the conference in Dubai, the opposition’s climate change and energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, also said a Coalition government would consider supporting Generation III+ large-scale nuclear reactors, and not just the unproven small modular reactors it has strongly touted.
The statement at the global summit confirmed the Coalition was on a markedly different path to Labor. The Albanese government last week joined more than 120 countries in backing a pledge to triple renewable energy and double the rate of energy efficiency by 2030, but did not sign up with 22 countries that supported tripling nuclear power by 2050.
…
Opposition backing for nuclear energy appears to have triggered a desperate Aussie government attempt to rescue their Net Zero dreams by bankrolling them with government money. But the current green Aussie government has no hope of providing the level of funding they anticipated would be provided by private investors.
Industry and states welcome Albanese government’s plan to jump-start stalled renewables investment
Albanese government’s expansion of investment scheme is designed to attract financial investment in new wind and solar farms
Peter Hannam Thu 23 Nov 2023
The Albanese government’s plan to turbo-charge the development of renewable energy has been described as a “landmark” policy for the nation’s transition away from fossil fuels and has been broadly welcomed by industry and state governments.
The energy minister, Chris Bowen, revealed a capacity investment scheme originally aimed to support 6GW of batteries and other storage would be expanded to 32GW. Of that total, 23GW would be for new wind and solar farms, with 9GW for storage.
The scheme’s cost is uncertain. Tenders held every six months over four years will set strike prices. Should market prices exceed a ceiling, the commonwealth could make money, and if they fall below a floor, taxpayers would have to make up the difference.
…
To add to the farce, there is growing evidence Australia’s grid is falling apart, due to instability created by the renewables which have been installed to date. Residents of NSW, Australia’s most populous state, have just been told to ration electricity (h/t observa)
‘What a farce’: NSW residents told to ration electricity
…
“We are asking households and businesses to think about what they can defer between 5pm and 9pm tonight,” NSW Energy and Climate Change Minister Penny Sharpe said during a media conference.
“If you can turn your air conditioning up a little bit, over about 24 is fantastic.”
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What are we to make of this?
I’m appalled by Australia’s mainstream conservative opposition pandering to climate crisis narratives. I don’t think talking up nuclear Net Zero is doing Aussie conservatives any favours at the ballot box. Even a nuclear Net Zero push would add to the cost of energy, at a time Aussies are already reeling from skyrocketing energy bills. The left-wing greens who currently run the government might have won by promoting wildly inaccurate assurances about how renewables would reduce energy bills, but at least they understood that the core voter priority is reducing energy bills.
But Aussie conservative opposition support for a nuclear energy future has wrecked government attempts to attract private renewable investment. Private renewable investment makes no sense, if opposition politicians, who have a real chance of winning the next election, have committed to destroying the value of those investments by prioritising nuclear energy when they win government.
The opposition success in collapsing the Australian Government’s hopes for private participation in green energy programmes is a lesson we can all learn from.
Could US Republicans use a nuclear push to wreck Biden’s private green investment dreams, without copying Australia’s shameful pandering to Net Zero narratives?
There is a way.
At the time the plan was shot down by regulators, and also attracted lukewarm responses from libertarian organisations which were discomforted by yet another energy market intervention.
But resurrecting this policy, at least in principle, would have an immediate chilling effect on all Biden’s green energy programmes – especially if there was also an announced intention to investigate green federal loan guarantees, and whether they were granted improperly by the Biden administration – and a promise that if guarantees were improperly granted, banks would be liable for any losses.
A 90 day resilience requirement, if implemented, would make renewables impossibly expensive – any wind or solar installation would have to be backed by 90 days of battery capacity, or have an ironclad agreement for 90 days of replacement power with a hydro, gas or coal plant, including demonstrable fuel reserves. Renewable operators would have to buy lots of coal to fulfil this requirement.
Even the threat of such a regime in the near future would stall Biden’s green energy plans, just as Australia’s green energy private investment plans have been stalled by opposition threats of a switch to nuclear.
If the Republicans commit to sabotaging Biden’s green energy transition by announcing energy policies which would kill renewables, they might save the United States a heap of federal money which might otherwise still be squandered by the Biden administration under existing programmes put in place by the previous Democrat congress.
Watts Up with That?
STOP THESE THINGS 
It is most unlikely that the nuclear power debate has set back the wind industry at this stage because the reality of nuclear power is over a decade away. Their immediate problem is elsewhere, partly with the surge of rooftop solar during the day that is eating their lunch and also with the lack of transmission to get their lousy intermittent product into the grid.
The Coaliton still has no real energy policy to speak of, apart from the distant possibility of nuclear power. Their succession of scientifically illiterate climate alarmist energy ministers have all been committed to net zero and the development of wind and solar. They have not had the capacity or the willingness to take the overwhelming case for coal to the public with robust arguments.
Nuclear power should never have been banned, thank the international communist campaign that was fully successful in Australia thanks to the teachers’ unions who distributed propaganda in classrooms.
However there will be no nuclear power in the grid in my lifetime and the immediate priority is to build more coal capacity. We will have to burn coal for decades to come but too many of the nuclear campaigners are pink/greens who are using it as a trojan horse for their campaign to get rid of fossil fuels.
I remember when Dutton said that he supported SMRs as a “backup” to renewables!
Common sense is lacking on both sides of the aisle.
If we go nuclear – go big! Then we won’t need the farcical “backup” as well.
In general, politicians are the lowest of the low. They prove it every day.
The supply of reliable base load electricity in a least twelve hour blocks is a necessity if we are to have a reliable supply of base load electricity.
At present the AEMO mixing of Batteries, Biomass, Black Coal, Brown Coal, Gas, Hydro, Liquid Fuel, Solar and Wind. All bidding in 5 minute blocks, has allowed the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to give priority to spot generators and consumers are just seen as cows to be milked, the more the merrier.
Forcing the generators to bid to supply reliable base load electricity in twelve hour blocks would soon force out the generators who are only in it for the subsidies.