When it comes to energy generation, ‘all of the above’, gets my prize for the dumbest comment by centre righters / putative conservatives during the past year. Sky presenter Steve Price and National’s senator Matt Canavan come to mind, but there are numbers more. The difficulty for me is that these guys are on the right side of things yet still don’t get it.

Let us be clear. There is no place in a country’s national power system for wind and solar farms. They despoil the landscape. Moreover, this despoilation is  exacerbated by their requirement for thousands of miles of wires and poles. They deliver poor quality variable power which complicates and increases the costs of  grid management. They have a relatively short operational life which means they must be disposed of somehow and replaced at frequent intervals. And, the killer, they go to sleep when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

To be even clearer.  Wind and solar need to be backed up 100%. Batteries are so noneffective as to be risible. Pumped hydro is infeasible. Green hydrogen is a sick joke. Wind and solar can only operate if backed up by all or some of coal, oil, gas and nuclear. But here’s the rub. While renewables need fossil fuels and/or nuclear, fossil fuels and nuclear don’t need renewables. And, in fact, renewables, inadequate in themselves, ruin the economics of fossil fuels and nuclear. You can’t stop fossil-fuel or nuclear plants each time the sun shines brightly or the wind comes up. It’s nonsensical.

Oh, just remove the legal prohibition on nuclear and let the market decide say some pathetic conservatives. Really, this market is so rigged that no company is going to sink money into building a nuclear power plant or into any power plant (nuclear or fossil fuel) designed to operate efficiently 24×7.

In case a Trump like figure emerges in Australia. Ok, fat chance, but we can live in hope. Here’s the energy policy to make Australia great again.

• Stop all construction of wind and solar farms tout de suite.
• Develop and implement a strategy for closing down and removing existing wind and solar farms – yes, it will be expensive to pay compensation and the like, but cheaper in the long run than allowing these things to degrade national energy generation.
• Stop accepting feed-ins from roof top solar and stop all subsidies. If people want to instal rooftop solar at their own expense to reduce their own electricity bills, fine. But let’s not mess up the grid and, as well, have the poorer half of society bearing the cost of subsidising the richer half.
• Stop Snowy 2.0 in its tracks and save any more dollars billions from being squandered.
• Develop and implement a (real) nation-building strategy of constructing HELE coal, gas and nuclear power plants. These will all need to be publicly owned or in partnership with the private sector initially. The energy system is now too corrupted to rely on the private sector alone. At a later point, total privatisation can occur to pay down public sector debt.

It’s choice. Get poorer or start getting richer. Not hard unless you’re a climate cultist or stupid.

Oh, and by the way, didn’t I mention, get rid of the quixotic ‘net zero’ target – yet still impress the CO2-fixated international community by trumpeting how much emissions will fall, compared with, say, India or China or with the rest of the world taken as a whole.