The Failure of the World Windpower Leaders

BITTER LESSONS FROM SOUTH AUSTRALIA, GERMANY AND BRITAIN

From a series in the Australian Spectator Online. They are also posted on Substack.

First published 6 February 2025

South Australia, Germany and Great Britain boldly pioneered the green energy transition, and now they are demonstrating that this is the worst public policy blunder ever.

In 2025 South Australia virtually admitted that they will be a mendicant state for power until either nuclear power is running or they rehabilitate coal and gas. The Energy Minister requested a change in the rules to permit diesel backup and this was granted by the Australian Energy Market Commission.

Now they have moved to the edge of the abyss because South Australians are being encouraged to embrace a future when the power is out from time to time.

With yet another power price hike in the works this year, an energy technology expert warns South Australians may need to consider tolerating the occasional blackout for the sake of cheaper power.

PREMATURE CELEBRATIONS

In the parallel universe where the wind and solar enthusiasts live, there are frequent celebrations over new heights of wind and solar generation in South Australia. They are apparently in denial of the brutal reality that almost every night they import coal power from Victoria. The success of the transition to green power is not measured by the high points, it is measured by capacity to get through windless nights, and no amount of overbuilding will help.

The chart shows that the generation during low-wind periods remains near zero while the installed capacity grows. The green bars indicate the installed capacity and the blue bars at the bottom indicate the generation during low-wind periods.

The South Australian situation is particularly dismal because demand has not increased due to deindustrialisation caused by the increased price of power and also by instability in the frequency and voltage of the current caused by the fluctuating inputs from the sun and wind.

THE GERMAN DEBACLE: FROM THE POWERHOUSE OF EUROPE TO THE RUSTBUCKET ON THE RHINE

The failure in Germany is more spectacular because Germany has been the beating industrial heart of Europe.

Blame it on The Greens.

Their Green Party grew out of the Ban the Bomb movement of the 1950s and in the 1990s they formed a coalition government with the previously dominant SDP, the Social Democrat Party. Their radical green energy agenda became law in 2000 and they demanded an end to nuclear power, a suicidal crusade that Chancellor Angela Merkel embraced after Fukushima.

What could go wrong?

Under the auspices of the ambitious targets set in the Act, the green transformation to a ‘low-carbon, nuclear-free energy system’, the energiewende, rolled forward with even more ambitious target set in 2011 (approaching Net Zero by 2050).

Sadly, the energiewende was dead in the water by 2018 when the official progress report admitted abject failure on the three arms of the policy triangle, price, reliability, and emission reduction.

Adam Smith wrote that there is a power of ruin in a nation and Germany was such a massive powerhouse that it took years to bring the giant to its knees. Now they are in recession, becoming ‘the rust bucket on the Rhine’, in the words of a mischievous commentator. Power-intensive industries are relocating to China or the United States or simply contracting dramatically like the great car makers BMW and Volkswagen.

Insolvencies are at record levels, the public infrastructure decays while tens of billions are still pouring into wind and solar facilities that invade forests and farmland while making the supply of power less reliable and more expensive.

Despite that, public opinion remained strong in support of green objectives until reality began to bite in the last couple of years.

Britain is in the same parlous state and they also aspire to increase the wind power capacity by as much as nine times. This makes no sense because overbuilding does not compensate for the lack of wind during wind droughts.

In the words of one commentator, ‘We are creating what might be called a zero-industrial society.’

In recent months the massive ethanol plant in Scotland closed with the chairman warning of ‘the extinction of our major industries’. Iconic firms are closing or shedding thousands of jobs. Vauxhall, for example, has closed British plants. The last genuine steelworks at Port Talbot closed costing 1,000 jobs and Hotpoint shut a factory in Bristol.

Chemical production is down 40 per cent since 2021, cement and electrical equipment down 50 per cent, overall industrial output down 10 per cent. Britain was once the workshop of the world and lately it has dropped out of the top 10 manufacturing countries.

That should be enough to change the minds of people who saw green energy as the way of the future but the Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently announced that they are committing to artificial intelligence to boost productivity. The British grid is teetering on the brink of collapse already without adding demand from the most energy-intense industry on the planet.

South Australia, Germany and Britain demonstrate that trillions have been spent to get more expensive and less reliable power with massive collateral damage to the environment. Meanwhile, emissions march upward in the developing world and nothing that we do in Australia will make a detectable difference. Given that, why would we spend a dollar to pursue Net Zero, let alone hundreds of billions, maybe a trillion?

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

It’s too easy. Build new coal plants using the technology proved in South Korea to rapidly (two to three years) get capacity at a cost of $2 billion per GW, and gradually replace the faithful and hardworking old clunkers for about half the cost of Snowy 2.0. That could halve the cost of power and put a stop to the carnage in the countryside.

Put coal in the Coalition energy policy and read Schernikau and Smith to get the big picture.

First published in The Australian Spectator.