For 15 minutes on Sunday morning, ABC local radio listeners were treated to a rant from Dick Smith as the millionaire attacked Australia’s transition away from fossil fuels, claiming renewables would make electricity unaffordable and cause sweeping blackouts.
“It seems we have been sold a pup and we are not getting the full truth all the time,” responded Ian McNamara, the host of Australia All Over. “There are lots of people who will back you up.”
But Smith’s diatribe was a mix of straw man arguments, incorrect claims and, at times, some laughable false equivalences.
Unaffordable electricity?
McNamara has hosted Australia All Over since 1985. The show, heavy on folksy Australiana “from Broome to Botany Bay”, is something of an institution on ABC local radio around the country.
Smith told McNamara – known as “Macca” – that CSIRO estimates of the cost of solar and wind had ignored the cost of storing their power in batteries. He claimed factoring this in would show that electricity from a renewables-dominated grid would be “unaffordable”.
But the CSIRO estimates of the cost of electricity from solar and wind, explained in its GenCost report, do include an allowance for extra costs associated with storing that power and the extra transmission infrastructure and other engineering that’s needed to integrate them into the grid.
That report finds that even with those costs included, electricity from solar and wind is the cheapest.
Windfarm bans?
McNamara offered some of his own misinformed views, saying he had heard the UK wanted to ban offshore windfarms.
In fact, the British government this year awarded contracts to nine offshore windfarms. A de facto ban on onshore windfarms in the UK was lifted this year.
McNamara also said Australians have the “most expensive electricity in the world, apparently”.
Or, if you look for some evidence, apparently not.
Analysis two years ago from the Australian Energy Council of electricity prices in the OECD found 17 countries with higher electricity prices than Australia.
Another analysis of global prices suggests there are more than 20 countries with higher electricity prices than Australia.
Cheap nuclear?
Later in the program Smith spruiked nuclear energy, pointing to the major nuclear generator France, which he said had the cheapest electricity in Europe.
It’s worth saying that comparing electricity prices across nations is notoriously difficult because of local circumstances, such as tax and subsidy regimes or market structures.
But data compiled by the European Union shows prices paid by households for electricity, with about 20 countries having cheaper power than France. Prices in France are in line with the EU average, according to the data.
The Broken Hill blackout
Whenever there’s a major power outage in Australia, some commentators can be relied upon to find a way to use the chaos to criticise renewable energy.
On 17 October, an extreme storm destroyed seven towers on the network that transmits power to Broken Hill and the surrounding region. Broken Hill only has one transmission line – known as Line X2 – delivering power. The area suffered total blackout and then intermittent power for two weeks.
Broken Hill has a local windfarm, solar farm and a battery.
Smith said the region was “the ideal place to show renewables working with a huge windfarm and huge solar farm” but said “the whole lot got turned off and they went to blackout”.
“That’s what will happen to the whole of Australia if we attempt to go 90% renewable. It’s so ridiculous it’s delusional.”
In The Australian, Nick Cater, of the Liberal party-associated Menzies Research Centre, said Broken Hill’s blackout “shows how crucial baseload generation is to the grid’s stability. Without it, balancing supply and demand becomes impossible.”
Was this really what the outage showed?
“Definitely not,” said Glenne Drover, an energy systems expert at the Australian Institute of Energy.
He pointed to South Australia, which on several occasions had run predominantly on renewables while the state was “islanded” – that is, essentially cut off from the wider network in other states.
Broken Hill’s system was not configured to utilise the solar, wind and battery if there was a major transmission outage.
Instead, the network was configured to rely on two diesel generators that would form a micro-grid. But one of those generators was offline and the second struggled to keep up with demand while syncing with rooftop solar installations.
The battery technology does have the ability to work in a micro-grid, but was not configured to work this way. The battery was reconfigured after the blackout, and was switched on a week after the outage.
But why couldn’t the solar and wind power be used?
“The reason wind and solar were not available is because it was attached to the transmission system,” said Alison Reeve, an energy expert at the Grattan Institute.
“Wind and solar switch off because you don’t want to electrocute the workers working on the system.
“The wind and solar behaved the same way as a coal-fired power station would have, or a nuclear power station or gas. They’re all connected to the transmission network and if it goes over, all the generators switch off. That’s how the system works.
“It has nothing to do with solar and wind and everything to do with how the transmission system works.”
Nowhere in the world?
Smith attempted to draw an equivalence between Lord Howe Island – where a micro-grid of diesel generators, solar panels and a battery supply about 400 residents on the World Heritage-listed island – and Australia’s enormous electricity network.
Smith claimed the island’s battery sometimes goes flat after days of cloud. But he didn’t mention that in its first two years, the new solar and battery system has reduced diesel consumption by 700,000 litres, saving $1.5m in costs.
Despite the fact the Lord Howe Island’s micro-grid only serves 400 customers, Smith presented it as a case study of the unreliability and expense that Australia’s entire electricity network could face in the future.
Smith also claimed: “No one has yet developed a way of putting intermittent renewables to connect with a coal-grid – a stable grid. It hasn’t been worked out anywhere in the world.”
Except: this is literally happening all around the world, including in Australia.
Dr Roger Dargaville, an associate professor in renewable energy at Monash University, said: “Lots of countries and regions are already working with high penetrations of variable renewables like solar and wind.”
Dargaville pointed to South Australia with 70% renewables, Germany and Spain which both have more than 50% renewables “integrated into complex systems of coal, gas and nuclear”, and Denmark, with a grid with more than 80% renewables.
“The transition to renewables is not only technically and economically feasible, it’s inevitable,” Dargaville said. “Fear-mongering can only delay investment in new capacity which could lead to shortfalls and cost increases.”
