Renewable Power Australia – Flannery’s 100 Per Cent Fantasy

Posted on Wed 11/28/2012 by PA Pundits - International

By Andrew Bolt ~

Challicum Hills Wind Power Plant near Ararat in Victoria Australia.

Terry McCrann fact-checks Australia’s Chief Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery’s latest prediction:

The latest effort from its so-called ‘chief climate commissioner’ really takes the cake with his absurd claim that Australia could be powered “almost entirely by renewable energy.”

Oh yeah. Renewable energy now provides about 10 per cent of our electricity. Sounds like we’ve got a running start? We’ve ‘only’ got to expand it tenfold?

Except what people like Flannery never tell you in all the headline flummery, is that the overwhelming majority of that comes from hydro power. And nobody’s building dams any more.

Yes, the body of his report does note that some 65 per cent of that 10 per cent comes from hydro. It’s arguably closer to 80 per cent in non-drought years.

That means barely 2 per cent of our total electricity comes from what the average person would think as ‘renewable’… Wind and solar…

That means even using his optimistic numbers for current wind and solar generation, we would have to increase our installations of wind and solar by at least forty times what they are today to get 100 per cent of our electricity from these two “plentiful” sources….

But that’s to produce today’s power. Flannery’s talking about some decades ahead, when our demands will probably have doubled. So make that a 160-fold increase in windmills…

Solar and wind could even be the cheapest sources of power for retail users by 2030, Flannery trumpeted. As carbon prices rise, he added.

Yes, the greatest half-truth of the climate propagandists. Make real power sources ridiculously, unnecessarily expensive and suddenly wind and solar become “cheap.”

TonyfromOz adds…..

Australia’s JoNova has a more in depth UPDATE on this at the following link. I have a disclosure here as this is a Guest Post that I contributed to at that site.

Tim Flannery – Baseload is just a “coal” industry idea (Yes and darkness is a “renewable” idea, right?)

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.

Andrew Bolt’s columns appear in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Adelaide’s Advertiser. He runs the most-read political blog in Australia and hosts Channel 10’s The Bolt Report each Sunday at 10am. He is also heard from Monday to Friday at 8am on the breakfast show of radio station MTR 1377, and his book Still Not Sorry remains very widely read.

Read more excellent articles from Andrew Bolt’s Blog . http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/