UPDATE: Australians March On Canberra For Reliable Power – 6 February 2024

On Tuesday next, thousands of Australian advocates for reliable and affordable power will march on the Nation’s capital, Canberra (the rally starts at 10am).

One of the drivers of the March, Grant Piper recently gave this interview with Topher Field. Grant clearly knows the ground on which the battle has to be one: viz, attacking the utter pointlessness of heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar. And, after Tuesday, so will thousands of other Australians.

Reckless Renewables Rally on The Aussie Wire
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Topher Field and Grant Piper
23 January 2024

Grant Piper from the National Rational Energy Network joins us to discuss the destruction of prime farmland, and the upcoming ‘Reckless Renewables’ rally in Canberra.

Find out more about the rally here: https://www.facebook.com/RallyAgainstRecklessness

Follow Grant Piper on LinkedIn

Transcript

Topher Field: Well, the construction of renewable energy projects continues apace in this country. There are every year renewed claims that we’re getting closer and closer to net-zero, even though the percentage of so-called renewable energy may increase, the absolute amount of coal that’s being used worldwide and oil and other fossil fuels is increasing at the same time. It seems like we’re chasing our tails here, but if you drive through the countryside, you’re going to see an awful lot of wind turbines and an awful lot of very large industrial-scale solar farms. Now, that’s not necessarily a good thing if you understand how the grid works, and there are plenty of people who do, and there are some people who have had enough and saying, “Hey, it’s time to get to Canberra and let Canberra know what we think about these so-called reckless renewables.” And Grant Piper from the National Rational Energy Network joins me now. Grant, you guys are organising a Reckless Renewables Rally in Canberra soon. Tell us about that.

Grant Piper: Yeah, we’ve combined forces with the coastal groups, Illawarra and the Port Stephens Central Coast, and also the groups down in South Australia and Victoria, as well as the inland groups that are subject to this stuff. And we’re getting together for a rally to try and protest the poll process and the whole ideology behind the renewables push. We’ll use renewables. I hate the term because they’re not when you look at it from a technical point of view, and we just want to make it known that we’re not going to be… Life’s hard enough without imposing artificial hardship on people, and this is what this is. There’s nowhere in the world that’s powered by 82% renewables. No first world economy has done it. Probably no one’s done it since the 1700s probably, or back in the Dark Ages, which is where we’re heading if you do this.

And we know this, there’s plenty of technical people, there’s plenty of economics background people, historians who point this out, but we seem to have this government and the bureaucracy that is just pushing it through legislation and in every doorstop interview they do, and then the media reinforces it on every TV show, on every radio show, everything you hear is to say, “Transition’s got to happen. We’re doing it, yada, yada, yada,” but they don’t realise the cost on business, on individuals, and the environment, and it’s just all arse about, it shouldn’t happen.

Topher Field: Talk us through that a little bit, Grant, because you’ve got this rally coming up here. You’re saying that people are going to be coming from all over the place to support this rally, but for those that perhaps aren’t seeing it with their own eyes, what are the things that these people are experiencing that would cause them to want to come to a rally like this?

Grant Piper: Well, personally for up here, we’ve got land to be acquired for power lines, which wouldn’t happen otherwise if they weren’t trying to build a wind farm north of us. We are in a Central-West Orana Renewable Energy Zone, which are areas that they’ve dictated or mapped out to say, “This area is ripe for development and we want all the proponents to come forward and build this stuff in these renewable energy zones.” Now, that makes you a second class citizen straight away. What does that do to your land and your business future and your prospects? Now, this zone started with three and a half gigawatt installed. It’s about 200 kilometres by 200 kilometres, so it’s about 40,000 square kilometres or something like that, three and a half gigawatt, and now they’ve pushed four and a half gigawatt, and in the paperwork it’s going to eight or nine gigawatt with 20 gigawatt of installed capacity.

Topher Field: Wow.

Grant Piper: And that includes batteries as well. So, for a solar farm, you need about 25 square kilometres for a 50 megawatt. Turbines, we’re looking at over 1,000 out here, and I can’t remember the footprint per megawatt for the turbines, but it’s huge. It’s much larger than solar and all this has to be connected with massive power lines, and this is just a thin edge of the wedge. What we’re experiencing now, and we’ve been battling department of primary industries… Planning, sorry, and the proponents now for in excess of two years, power lines, four or five years. This is just the beginning. It’s not going to stop the next 20 or 30 years and even EnergyCo admit that the whole region will change from fundamentally agricultural to industrial in nature. They admit that, but there’s been no vote on it. There’s been no discussion on it.

Topher Field: Now, the nature of renewables is, as you’ve mentioned already, it’s advertised to us, it’s sold to us on the basis of being good for the environment, but the facts behind this betrayed that idea. What are some of the environmental impacts that we’re both observing and we can expect to see going forward as a result of this proliferation of so-called renewable energy?

Grant Piper: Well, there’s two ways to look at that. You can look at the local, which is really… Well, they don’t even look at the local. The local devastation to the farmland, obviously covering farmland with solar panels, they’re only going to last 15 or 20 years. There’s studies showing that they leach toxic chemicals into the soil and there’s these other problems, and then they’ve got a dispose of them. Disposal of the turbines, disposal of the panels, that’s all landfill type stuff. There’s no recycling in place at the moment. They talk about it, “In the future, we’ll do it,” and then there’s the knocking down woodland and in environmental areas in koalas and the tops of the hilltops that you’ve seen up in Queensland, all up and down the Great Dividing Range that’s going to happen. And that doesn’t get covered by the media and that isn’t counted as some sort of cost.

So, there’s buy an offset somewhere. So, there’s all that local environmental devastation which is quite visible to everyone, like when you drive around and I drive around, we see the solar farms, but there’s also the total environment and/or cost of the mining and the extraction and the manufacturing of the materials that go into the solar panels and the wind turbines. You’ve got to mine… The minerals and the fossil fuel energy companies are loving this because it all takes fossil fuel to manufacture it, transport, and install this stuff.

And so, because of the inefficiency of solar and wind, they consume more resources and they produce less power. So, the net result is you consume more resources and produce less power, which means you create more pollution, you need more materials and minerals and energy to process and you produce less power. So, if you think back the high school physics, that’s the first law of thermodynamics was you can only get out what you put in, and the second law is you can’t even get that. So because they’re so inefficient, you consume more. So, if you are worried about saving the planet or reducing emissions, the fact you’re pushing for these renewables means that we’ll consume more and produce less. We’ll create more emissions earlier than if we just burnt coal to make power 365 days a year or nuclear or gas or what have you. It’s an inefficient way to use those energy-dense resources to make turbines and solar panels.

Topher Field: Look, this is one of the great truisms of conservation. The most environmentally friendly thing that you can do is to keep using what you’ve already got. If somebody is driving a new car and they tell you that they updated their car because it was more efficient, they’re lying to themselves. They bought a new car because they wanted a new car, and they’re justifying it on the basis of efficiency. If you call yourself an environmentalist, I better see you driving a car that’s at least 20 years old. Otherwise, I’m going to start to question your credentials, and that’s exactly the same as what’s going on here. Now, this is an image by Jeffrey Grimshaw, and I’ve got another one here from him. He’s done a wonderful job of just graphically representing just the costs and the energy density involved, or the energy consumption involved and the environmental damage involved in creating the so-called renewable energy. Now, he’s actually one of the speakers who’s going to be at the Reckless Renewable Rally on the 6th of February, 2024 Parliament House Canberra. Tell us, who else is going to be there speaking?

Grant Piper: We’ve got a long… I won’t read through them all. We’ve got Professor Ridd, we’ve got Jacinta Price, Senator Ralph Babet, Rene, Dr. David Gillespie, Barnaby Canavan, Steven Tripp, Rob Parker, Alan Moran.

Topher Field: It’s a rockstar list.

Grant Piper: Kate Mason is talking. Say again?

Topher Field: It’s a rockstar list. It’s an incredible list, and it’s made me very jealous because unfortunately I’m going to be in America at the time, for work and I can’t be there, but I’m actually a little bit annoyed because I would’ve loved to have been there, tried to fight my way to the front row, and hear some of those incredible people speaking. Do you have any indication from communities as to what you can expect when it comes to people? I’m guessing really that’s anyone’s guess at this point in time.

Grant Piper: Yeah, it is. It’s hard to get a feel for. Momentum is building, interest is building, we’re getting more calls from various people now. We’re paying the insurance premium for 5,000 people, and I hope it’s 10 times that. That’d be really nice.

Topher Field: I’m right there with you. I tip my hat to you. It’s an enormous amount of work and an enormous cost in terms of time, in terms of opportunity, and other things you could do, and then also financially, there are costs involved in organising a protest, and I respect enormously the fact that yourself and the rest of the team at Reckless Renewables and the National Rational Energy Network… That is a bit of a tongue twister, by the way. I’ve got to say, that’s a tough name to say fast, but what you guys are doing is fantastic. I wish I could be there and I hope it’s a huge success. And to everyone watching, we’ll put the link for you to find out more information in the description of this video. Grant Piper, thank you so much for joining us here on The Aussie Wire.

Grant Piper: Thanks, Topher. We’ll be live-streaming as well, but we’ll get those details out.

Topher Field: Perfect.
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