Recently I moved from an ‘on-grid’ rural property near Melbourne to an ‘off-grid’ rural property in Central Victoria. I was going to ‘do my bit’ for the environment, and hopefully would also save myself some power bills. As this chilly winter arrived I was in for a rude shock.
The solar and battery system in my new cottage is quite large but is aging, being about 15 years old, however, I thought I knew a thing or two about off-grid living and ‘renewables’ and was told the system would be sufficient for whatever needs I might have. On the strength of that belief I installed two small reverse cycle heater/coolers that my electrician assured me would easily be run by my system.
However, one night a couple of weeks ago I was sitting watching television with my reverse cycle heater on when suddenly I was plunged into darkness. All the lights had gone off, along with everything else. There was no power; the system had completely shut down. After days of cloudy skies the batteries were depleted, so I had no other option than to go to bed (without my electric blanket!) It was freezing. The power didn’t come back on again until 9.30 the following morning, after enough sun had come out to reinvigorate (but not fully charge) the batteries.
I haven’t been able to use the reverse-cycle units since, and I can forget about ever running an oil-filled heater overnight, or even during the day. Now I have to undergo an expensive upgrade to my whole off-grid system and install a 6kva diesel back-up generator to charge up my batteries when the sun isn’t shining (which recently has been most of the time). Even so, this upgrade will still not allow me to live the same (warm) lifestyle I had on my previous ‘on-grid’ property. Now my only option for heating is to collect and chop tons of (increasingly unavailable) firewood and to be daily cleaning up the messy dust a wood fire leaves throughout the house. This sucks.
I might not be paying a monthly power bill, but my upgraded inverter and generator will cost me $8,000 and new batteries which shall be needed in a couple of year’s time will cost a further $10,000. On my previous on-grid usage that’s almost 18 years of power bills – up front! People just don’t realise how expensive this stuff is.
What has happened to me in my cold off-grid nightmare is a microcosm of what is currently happening to Australia as a whole. I’m no energy expert but I do understand the basics of what’s going on here. It’s not that difficult, yet most people have absolutely no idea at all how the electricity system actually works (kind of like where milk comes from – the supermarket – and who cares, as long as it’s on the shelf and available when I want it).
Just like my micro-system, larger macro ‘renewables’ obviously only generate power when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing and must be used immediately or stored in sufficient batteries, that we don’t have and never will. Operators of now uneconomical coal-fired power stations are reducing costs or shutting down because they must generate power all the time which they cannot sell (for a profit) in competition with (heavily taxpayer subsidised) renewables on sunny or windy days. Their massive generators cannot just be turned on and turned off at will, so they are losing money, whereas gas-fired power stations can at least turn on and turn off more easily, so can start up at peak times of demand. However, gas is much more expensive than coal, and coal produces more energy per unit, so even a transition to gas will cost us more money for less energy produced per unit, meanwhile we leave all that coal sitting in the ground (except for the mega-tonnes we export overseas to China) and make our own domestic electricity even more expensive and inefficient. Are we nuts or what?
The problem is that we already have too many (unbelievably expensive and inefficient) ‘renewables’ that don’t work most of the time (at night or at windless times) leaving us with no base-load power. We are told we need MORE renewables, but more renewables are NOT the solution as we will NEVER have enough renewables to provide this country with the base-load power it needs – it’s just not physically or economically possible, yet the ideologues will never admit this.
And to make matters worse, to distribute this intermittent unreliable ‘renewable’ power will now require $80 BILLION dollars of new poles and wires infrastructure, and who do you think is going to pay for all that? Consumers of course! Not to mention the fact that all the new poles and wires will spend most of their time not transmitting any power at all, so how inefficient is that? So much for cheaper renewable energy – it was always a con.
All of this was and is utterly unnecessary. The ‘climate change’ scam and rush to ‘renewables’ has destroyed this country’s power system and will continue to do so because we can never store the excess power that ‘renewables’ generate, leaving us with nothing at night and in peak summer or winter demand. Small ‘off-gridders’ have known this for decades, and any fool years ago could have predicted this self-inflicted idiotic disaster. But no, our politicians and bureaucrats walked us right into it.
And right on cue, the ABC now blames the greedy fossil fuel power companies ‘gaming the system’ (whatever that’s supposed to mean) rather than sheeting home the blame to where it properly belongs – the impractical unrealistic ideologically driven ‘climate’ policies of both major political parties over the last two decades that will keep us cold and in the dark, literally. And as we are already seeing in the UK, these policies are costing people their lives as they freeze to death, unable to heat their homes.
Will the elites ever admit they got this wrong? Of course not. They will persist with the definition of madness, continuing to do the same thing expecting a different result! Sure, keep playing around with solar panels and windmills if you like, but unless some new base-load coal, gas or nuclear power stations are quickly constructed, Australia is going to run out of power. Yet Tim Flannery’s Climate Council states that “All gas and coal expansion must stop”! Are they nuts or what?
We are no longer ‘the lucky country’; we are without doubt ‘the stupid country’ which has been hoodwinked by inefficient and mind-numbingly expensive ideologies that will NEVER work! I repeat, the current trajectory of Australia’s so-called ‘net zero emissions energy policy’ will NEVER work. It cannot ever provide the supply required for Australia’s current or future energy needs, no matter what Chris Bowen or Albo promise.
At least the Chinese are not fooled by any of this as they continue to build more and more coal-fired power stations and sell us more solar panels! They’re laughing all the way to the bank, rapidly enlarging their economic capacity and military might, all the while as we destroy our economy, our energy grid, and make our population poorer and colder as we move back towards the freezing dark ages.
I for one will move back on to the grid (what’s left of it) as soon as I can, but even that may not be enough; I may just be moving out of the frying pan into the new fire.
Dr David Barton (a proud Celtic man) is a writer, researcher and social commentator who lives in Central Victoria.
