If climate change is the new official religion, our Energy Minister is a member of a strange puritanical sect that eschews modern technology in its quest for redemption.
Chris Bowen is under the spell of renewable energy fundamentalism, driven by a supernatural conviction in the power of wind and solar.
Renewable fundamentalism rejects the science that has convinced the rest of the world to embrace nuclear energy. It ignores the evidence that 75 per cent of global clean energy is generated by hydroelectricity and nuclear power. It is blind to the apparent limitations of sources of energy that are subject to the whims of the gods. It embraces the primitive superstition that nuclear energy is unnatural, impossible to control, and contaminates everything in its path.
It is hard to find any other explanation than blind faith to explain why Bowen believes that the Australian electricity grid can run smoothly without reliable base-load power. For those acquainted with the laws of physics that govern the operation of electricity grids, what Bowen proposes is the equivalent of walking on water.
Walking on water is what Bowen is now proposing to overcome the shortage of suitable land upon which to harvest the winds. Zones have been set aside across vast swathes of the ocean to build hundreds of giant windmills in the sea, each requiring some 20,000 tonnes of steel and non-recyclable turbine blades that last for 15 years or fewer.
It requires a particular kind of stubbornness to press ahead with such a costly, logistically challenging plan while insisting that nuclear is too complicated and expensive.
Nuclear generation is the cleanest, safest, and most reliable form of energy yet mastered by humankind. The new small modular reactors are easy to install, take up very little space and cause minimum disruption to biodiversity.
On the other hand, the technology behind wind turbines is at least 3000 years old. It turns the world’s flimsiest fluid – air – into electricity using the least-efficient energy converter – a propeller. Spinning blades 100 metres long are extremely dangerous, particularly to birds.
The challenge of constructing a giant wind turbine in the middle of the ocean is huge. And they are anything but cheap. Installing the 200 offshore wind turbines that would be required to match the generating capacity of the Eraring coal-fired power station, for instance, would cost $11 billion at current estimates. We should not forget that wind operates for an average of only 24 minutes in a given hour. Which 24 minutes they might be is anybody’s guess.
Yet Bowen appears blind to the foolishness of trying to re-engineer our energy system with such flimsy tools. Confronted with the most complex policy challenge of our times, he doesn’t behave like a person looking for answers. He seems convinced that he already has them.
In other words, he behaves as the anointed one, with the blinkered self-certainty that characterises the modern technocratic elite acting out the prevailing vision of our time.
The US economist Thomas Sowell wrote of the vision of the anointed in a 1995 work that explains Bowen’s unwarranted confidence in his plan. ‘Empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted,’ wrote Sowell. ‘Facts may be marshalled for a position already taken.’
It is strengthened further by the moral force that attaches to almost every policy discussion today, particularly on climate and energy. The vision offers ‘a special state of grace for those who believe in it,’ says Sowell. ‘Those who disagree with the prevailing vision are seen as being not merely in error, but in sin.’
The fatal combination of absolute certainty and self-righteousness is common in fundamentalist religious sects. Now that same combination of dogma and hubris encourages Bowen to rush in where angels fear to tread.
