Originally published by Rafe Champion of Spectator Australia
09.03.2026
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.
Do the arithmetic on the cost of batteries to ride through 16 hours of the night with little wind and no coal.
16 hours x 20 GW of base load power comes to 320 GWh (GW hours).
Reduce the demand to 200 GWh to allow for hydro, some wind, gas, and biomass, and to simplify the arithmetic.
Count the cost of the batteries required to store 200 GWh of power, at (say) half a billion per GWh. In round figures that is a hundred billion for a night and there may be three in a row. Moreover, the batteries will have to be replaced every ten years or so.
We are told that the cost of batteries is plummeting, and more four-hour batteries are on the way. Where is the evidence?
Pacific Green has been working on major battery projects, including four-hour batteries near the Heyward interconnector between SA and Victoria. At a conference in Brisbane in 2024, it was reported: ‘To make four hours work, it’s a high capital commitment … probably close to $600 million to $700 million per 1000 megawatt-hours.’
The calculation above used $500 million to allow for ‘plummeting’ prices, but as Bill Gates said, they are still orders of magnitude too large to be feasible.
Winter storms in the US have demonstrated the pathetic performance of wind, solar, and batteries. A severe storm in Texas in 2021 almost blacked out the entire state because the gas system was not winterised to the standard of the colder northern states. Gas, wind, and solar all struggled and Renewable Energy lobbyists effectively deflected criticism by pointing the finger at gas.
This year, another storm with extremely cold conditions struck Texas from January 19-26. With the gas system upgraded since 2021, gas, coal, and nuclear weathered the storm while wind, solar, and batteries went missing for days and nights on end.
This is a day-by-day account of the ‘natural experiment’ in Texas.
That should be enough to show that the transition to so-called Renewable Energy is not going to happen. Put it this way: wind and solar ain’t real capacity, because they are not there on windless nights. Install as much as you like, but it won’t help when the sun and wind are off duty. ‘Oils ain’t oils’ as the mafia boss said!
In Australia, we don’t have nuclear power or connections to other grids, so we will have to burn coal to obtain cheap and reliable power until nuclear power is on deck in a decade or three. Burn coal or die in the cold and dark!
