Total renewables is a “thoughtless, implausible decision” - McClelland

To the Editor,
A BLIGHT ON THE LANDSCAPE
Wind and solar will never meet our insatiable demands for energy and power at affordable consumer prices. The renewables have an incurable intermittency and staggering amounts of metals and minerals needed to deploy them at scale, besides a huge ongoing disposal and replacement cost.
Their connection to wandering, invasive tentacles of high-voltage transmission lines widens their footprint at an appalling secreted cost to taxpayers.
Furthermore, there’s not enough land in any country on this planet to accommodate the massive amount of wind and solar infrastructure that would have to be built in the future as electricity usage soars unabated.
Bureaucracy seems glaringly unaware that electricity has become the fuel of the Information Age which requires more and more uninterrupted supplies of electricity.
The dominating Giant Five (Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft) are among the richest and most politically powerful companies of our time.
They dominate the Information Age using massive amounts of digital data and cannot do business without unbelievable quantities of electricity. Alphabet consumes as much electricity as the whole country of Zimbabwe. Amazon consumes double or more than Alphabet!
Today our impressionable younger generations of idle parentage are being sucked in and unwittingly controlled totally by these large companies such as Facebook. The lack of a contrary perspective in news has the potential of destabilising democracy.
Crucially, we must never allow elites or government to organise society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. This is a lesson for Australians who have not had real input into the current government’s thoughtless, implausible decision of a net zero emissions with total renewables.
Furthermore, the recent final, predetermined decision of the NSW Government Commission’s Public Hearing into the viable establishment of Riverina wind farms was an absolute farce and gross injustice and misuse of taxpayers’ money. Much to Lincoln’s chagrin, we have a government ‘by the people, for the people, of the foolish’.
We need a government in Australia not driven by ‘ideology or grand gestures, but by pragmatism’. The ignorant must still try and understand that our electric grids still need traditional generators to supply electricity when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing.
Let us not be thwarted by the cheap dismissal of the shedding of hazardous components from existing wind farms as being a ‘forever chemical fable’!!
The element of myth and legend is a false and extraordinary analogy for recognised truth and the harmful pollution by old wind farms of some chemicals only now being belatedly phased out by government legislation.
Published papers by groups of prominent scientists debunking the idea of an all-renewable energy economy are ignored by government and the left-wing media and ‘fifth column’, National Broadcaster.
Other scientists with opposite views, backed up with numerous flaws and technological shortcomings and errors, are the heroes of climate activists and of course are politically popular.
It is interesting to note here that comprehensive and significant Harvard studies involving 1150 solar projects and 411 onshore wind projects found that solar panels produce about 10 times more energy per unit of land than wind turbines which undoubtedly exposes wind energy’s paltry power density – a decisive blow for the wind farms.
Wind energy cannot shrink its massive footprint and already has come close to its maximum efficiency limit.
The low and costly output, unsightly presence, hazardous pollution, degradation of land values, unrecyclable components and looming human health issues, make wind turbines ‘figuratively and literally’ a blight on the landscape.
THE NUCLEAR NECESSITY
Nuclear energy’s greatest virtues are its unsurpassed power density, its tiny footprint and zero carbon emissions. This in turn allows us to spare land for nature.
As we look about us we see the prominent boneheads who pay homage to the Easter Bunny fantasy of believing that total renewables will rapidly wean us off fossil fuels.
The continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid the possible contamination of the atmosphere.
In 2019, the International Energy Agency reiterated its support for nuclear by declaring that without more nuclear energy, global carbon dioxide emissions will surge and any effort to transition to a cleaner energy system will become drastically harder and more costly.
Nuclear energy remains the safest form of electricity production. The nuclear waste issue is not a technical problem, it’s a political problem. France provides the world’s best example of proper nuclear waste-handling and gets about 75 per cent of its electricity from its fleet of 60 nuclear reactors.
Potential lies in the manufacture of small modular reactors where components are fabricated in a factory rather than a construction site.
In contrast, making solar and storage work will require billions of tons of material to be mined, transported and recycled – silica, copper, lead, zinc and lithium as well as enormous quantities of rare-earth elements and cobalt.
Mining and smelting all this will have significant impacts on people and the environment - until it all runs out! In the meantime, the biggest threat growing from all this is China’s manipulation of much of the world’s mineral source.
Natural gas is abundant and will be a fuel of the future because of its relatively low cost, low carbon and production from a relatively small footprint. It has been the fastest and biggest addition to world energy supply that has ever occurred in history.
The staggering growth in global natural gas production and long-term availability makes this the logical power to use with nuclear. Both will have a negative impact on the economy and environment while providing significant decarbonisation.
It is imperative that we have a system that is stable and predictable that gives the consumer what they want, when they want it, at low cost, keeping our manufacturing base and our workforce growing. You can’t achieve or envisage this with a system driven by weather!
Now that the hydrogen hype has come crashing down we must embrace the potential of nuclear, pushing aside all the fear-mongering. This is the only way we will save the biosphere in our attempt to produce lower-carbon electricity.
This may be a ‘Letter to the Editor’ but more importantly is an article inspired by the huge following I have gathered from previous articles. Importantly, it adds timely balance to the misinformation we receive from the left side of politics and government lapdogs, the taxpayer-fed energy companies.
Chris McClelland, Hay.