SUBMISSION
To the Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy September 2025
KEY POINTS
Australian governments have formulated energy policies without using reliable information on wind droughts and the cost of storage.
At the same time, the public has not been told about wind droughts, storage problems and the full cost of the net zero program including the deindustrialization of the nation, the destruction of natural resources and the human cost in regional areas.
Rafe Champion B. Ag. Sci. M. Sc. History and Philosophy of Science.
Independent writer and researcher.
THE FOCUS OF THIS SUBMISSION
Misinformation and lack of information.
The failure of the appropriate agencies to make good use of information.
The failure to the responsible agencies to collect and disseminate information to plan and evaluate the outcome of energy policies.
It is interesting to note the amount of misinformation in the language of the net zero program.
“The sun and wind are free” and you could say the same about coal gas and oil, you just have to build incredibly energy-intensive machinery to extract the power.
Renewable, clean and green. The turbines and solar panels are not renewable because they have short life compared with conventional power facilities and the end of life disposal is becoming a serious concern.
They are not clean unless you demonise carbon dioxide, the breath of life on the planet.
They are not green when you realize the heavy environmental footprint of exploration for minerals, the mining required to extract them, the transport, manufacture and construction of the equipment and then the disposal of toxic waste at the end of the road.
The rocks that have to be processed in energy-intensive processes to build an electric vehicle!
THE CHALLENGE
Governments can only formulate effective policies if they use the best available information and revise their policies in the light new information including the unexpected and unintended effects of their interventions.
Similarly, the voters need to be well-informed to enable them to consider the comparative merits of the competing policy options when they vote.
Australian governments have not used reliable information on wind droughts and the cost of storage.
At the same time, the public has not been told about wind droughts, storage problems and the full cost of the net zero program including the deindustrialization of the nation, the destruction of natural resources and the human cost in regional areas.
THE STATE OF PLAY
Trillions of dollars and other currencies have been spent in the west to roll out RE infrastructure.
This expenditure has produced the following results;
Power is more expensive, causing domestic fuel poverty, closure of power-intensive industries and the diversion of investment to the US to take advantage of cheaper energy.
Blackouts are looming.
Massive damage had been inflicted on the environment both at home and abroad.
Rural communities have become bitterly divided.
LACK OF COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS
Large claims about the benefits of the net zero program are not backed by rigorous studies while the costs of major projects regularly blow out by factors from two to five and occasionally more. The benefits are hard to find unless you count the jobs created in the public sector and subsidised industries.
A FRAMEWORK OF ANALYSIS: THE ABC OF INTERMITTENT ENERGY
ABC is not an acronym, just three things that everyone needs to know.
A: The grid has to receive a continuous input to match demand, minute by minute.
B: The continuity of wind and solar input is broken at night when there is little or no wind.
C: Storage at the scale required to bridge the gaps is not feasible or affordable with current technology. Further, according to McBratney’s Law, you can build as much storage as you like but you will never charge it with wind and solar power.
A chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and the supply of electricity is only as good as the weakest point of supply. In a grid loaded with RE, windless nights are the weak links.
NEGLECT OF WIND DROUGHTS
We are told that Australia has marvellous wind resources, presumably based on average wind velocities, without considering the low points (the weakest links.)
The official meteorologists in the BOM did not issue wind drought warnings and the wind farmers apparently did not check the reliability of the wind supply. That is quite unlike the practice of dirt farmers who will very carefully check the reliability of the water supply including long term rainfall records.
Over a decade ago, Paul Miskelly and Anton Lang, working independently, used the AEMO records of wind power generation to discover prolonged periods, up to three days and nights, with very little generation across south-eastern Australia (the NEM.) Miskelly warned that the system would need 100% backup from a fleet of fast-acting gas turbines.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1260/0958-305X.23.8.1233
Their work was discussed on Jo Nova’s blog, The Energy Realists of Australia took it up and passed on the word to politicians and journalists, apparently to no effect. So far the wind drought story has not been clearly explained by commentators and journalists, including those who are generally critical of the net zero program.
The evidence is publicly available in the AEMO records since 2009 and it can be found on the AEMO site and others including Aneroid Energy and the NemWatch widget. https://anero.id/energy/wind-energy
People are urged to consult the widget at breakfast and dinnertime to see if they will get a hot meal when there is less coal power in the grid. https://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/reneweconomy/
WHAT ABOUT STORAGE?
Responding to the low-wind problem, the Prime Minister and Chris Bowen routinely refer to water storage, as though storing energy is a no-brainer. However the comparison is inappropriate because the amount of man-made water storage is an invisible fraction of one per cent of the water stored naturally in the soil, not to mention permanent waterways and lakes.
Imagine plants growing without natural storage, they would need continuous rain or heavy mist to survive, otherwise a few minutes of sunshine would kill them. That would be the fate of an RE-dependent grid on a windless night.
THE COST OF BATTERY STORAGE AND McBRATNEYS LAW
The cost of batteries and pumped hydro is prohibitive to cover worst-case scenarios of wind failure, like ten low wind nights in the month of June 2017. In any case, McBratney’s Law dictates that you can build as much storage as you like but you will never fully charge it with a grid dominated by wind and solar power. https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/grid-scale-electricity-storage-why
THE COSTLY FAILURE OF DUE DILIGENCE ON THE WIND SUPPLY
If people in high places had been aware of wind droughts and their full implications, we might have been spared the waste of tens of billions of dollars in Australia, and the other costs flowing from the net zero project. The discovery of wind droughts could have been one of the most important finds of recent times but it came too late and most people still people don’t realise why they matter so much.
THE TIPPING POINT AND THE WIND DROUGHT TRAP
Ten coal stations closed in the NEM between 2012 and 2024, reducing the coal capacity from the vicinity of 29 GW to approach 20GW which is the base load required overnight. When the capacity of reliable power falls below the base load, the grid enters a red zone where RE input is required to keep the lights on, but none is available on windless nights, regardless of the number of windmills and solar panels on deck.
The diagram indicates the essential features of the situation, although the numbers change all the time, apart from the base load. That has been stable for years, despite population growth, due to undocumented deindustrialization which has delayed the onset of serious blackouts.
The wind drought trap is set as coal plants close one at a time over a period of years with a “frog in the saucepan” because people don’t realise they are in the trap until it closes on dark and stormy night with extreme weather conditions. See Texas in February 2021.
A similar trap can close in the daytime when there is not enough inertia in the grid to handle fluctuations in the wind and solar input. See The Pain in Spain!
As it is, we cannot afford to lose any more coal capacity and state governments are propping up coal plants in the hope that something will turn up. The grid is vulnerable on nights with low wind whenever coal capacity is down due to scheduled or unscheduled outages.
The bottom line is that subsidised and mandated wind and solar power can displace coal (to a point) but they can’t replace it.
Schernikau and Smith explained that wind and solar will not replace conventional power because they are too inefficient to reproduce themselves. They are “energy thieves” because they are a net drain on the energy economy of the world. https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/wind-and-solar-the-energy-thieves
WORK REQUIRED
One of the outcomes from this enquiry should be an investigation into failure of the meteorologists to issue wind drought warnings and a parallel investigation into the way that the subsidies and mandates for wind power were put in place without due diligence on the supply of wind.
Why did anyone ever think that windpower on the grid would work? This is a truly scandalous situation because the continuity of the wind supply should have been assessed before windmills were allowed to dilute and destabilize the power supply in the western world.
Lack of basic due diligence enabled one of the most damaging public policy blunders in peacetime history. Not long ago Britain was the workshop of the world and recently German was the powerhouse of the European economy. Then they bet the farm on windpower and they are losing it.
Sailors at sea and millers on land experienced wind droughts for centuries.
The Sinister Threat of Wind Droughts
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation.
Data on wind speeds have been recorded for sixty years on the North Sea oil and gas platforms.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/a-curious-tale-of-the-north-sea-winds/
Trillions of dollars have been spent around the world rolling out wind and solar infrastructure and now we have more expensive and less reliable power with catastrophic environmental impacts.
The elephant in the room is the severe wind droughts or dunkelflautes that drastically reduce windpower generation over continental areas for days or even weeks at a time. Paul Miskelly and Anton Lang in Australia found serious gaps in the input of wind power using the records kept by the Market Operator since 2009.
Why did the official meteorological offices around the world never issue wind drought warnings?
THE LATE DISCOVERY OF WIND DROUGHTS
Wind droughts could have been the most important discovery in the 20th century but the discovery came too late to avert the rush to wind and solar power.
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the wind farmers apparently never checked the reliability of the wind supply.
We have to talk about wind droughts
In 2020 the term “wind droughts” began to appear in the literature of the Energy Realists of Australia and in the Integrated System Plan produced by the Australian Energy Market Operator.
Still the Commonwealth and state governments are pressing on with ambitious transition plans despite the evidence of wind droughts and the impossibility of providing grid scale storage to ride through the worst case scenario of several windless nights in close succession.
The following agencies and institutions have questions to answer.
BOM, CSIRO, AEMO, the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies (see the critique by Aidan Morrison.)
All the government departments and the other QUANGOs, NGOs, think tanks and university departments promoting net zero.
The ABC, other media agencies and individual journalists and reporters on the energy beat.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
We urgently need to have a comprehensive register of the pecuniary interests of all the politicians and administrators who promote net zero projects.
CONCLUSION
It seems that the wind and solar power supply is not fit for purpose to support a modern industrial society. Grid managers are working overtime to maintain the power supply and they have only succeeded so far IN Australia because deindustrialisation has flattened the demand curve.
At the same time a great deal of energy and ingenuity is being applied to analyse the entrails of the system to make it work better. This may not work. Consider the case of the steam engine; no doubt steam engines can be made more powerful and efficient but they will never be fit for purpose for space travel.
If the wind and solar grid is not fit for purpose we had better pivot from the net zero program to make an orderly retreat, removing wind and solar power from the grid, to build a cheap and reliable power supply for the future.
Looking for the Net Zero exit sign
Let’s get serious about planning an orderly exit from Net Zero. We need a plan ready to go before a government comes to power with the desire to exit, only to find they are short on time.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION.
Other books http://www.the-rathouse.com/pubbooks.html
Personal website http://www.the-rathouse.com/index.html
Energy Realists website https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/list-of-briefing-notes
Spectator series https://www.spectator.com.au/author/rafe-champion/
Substack https://substack.com/settings?utm_source=signup§ion=publications
Briefing notes produced by the Energy Realists and circulated to 800+ state and federal politicians and a list of journalists.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/list-of-briefing-notes
Nice writeup. Here in far-off New York State, USA, we’re dealing with similar issues. I haven’t looked at wind droughts here yet (I will now!), but we have week-long ice storms and extended winter periods without breezes and sunbeams. Our grid operator tells us 1) we need dispatchable, emissions-free resources (DEFRs) for about 10% of our energy needs in a renewable-heavy grid and notes 2) we haven’t identified the technologies this will require, let alone developed and deployed such resources at scale. Yet we’re hurtling full-speed ahead with heaving money at “renewables.” Existing storage technologies are too expensive and impractical to use on the scale required. We do have the option of nuclear generation, which Australia has rejected.
Our grid operator warns us that without DEFRs, reliability is at serious and substantial risk, yet our politicians, too, ignore the warnings. The grid has become politicized; it’s now the plaything of emotionally immature factions whose goal is to manipulate public opinion, not ensure a reliable electric supply. As is the case where you are, the politicians are counting on being able to manipulate an ignorant public. I wish you the best of luck pushing back against that!