In the classic comic/horror movie Return of the Living Dead, there’s a scene where the zombies eat the brains of the police trying to stop them and one of the zombies uses a cop car radio to call, “Send more cops”.

I thought of this the other day while reading about the new Australian Labor government, returned from the dead after more than a decade, led by an opponent of the Hawke-Keating Labor Party economic reforms of the 1980’s, and a man whose brain not even a hungry zombie would touch.

They’ve arrived just in time to confront a crisis in the Australian electricity system caused by the shrinking gap between power supply and demand, courtesy of the “success” of successive Labor and Liberal-National governments in squeezing out fossil-fueled power stations with wind and solar by making the former unprofitable.

So when a cold snap hit Australia recently – the Coldest Start of Winter for Over a Century in fact – the following things happened:

  • The grid operator tried to force thermal generators on at a power price less than their fuel costs, so the generators took their units off the market.
  • Thus there are power cuts in Oz and power prices have gone through the roof.
  • The authorities finally suspended the market and ordered operators to bring plants on line, for which they will be “compensated”. No doubt this will be taken by the Left as yet another example of how markets fail.

In the darkest of ironies the government was forced to grovel as well as enforce:

Labor has begged industry bosses to fire up all their coal-fuelled power stations at full capacity to ease the national energy crisis in a dramatic policy u-turn.

Just days after promising ‘real action on climate change‘, Labor today demanded the nation’s coal power stations are all brought back into service as soon as possible.

It’s not just the power plants that have been shut down but coal units that have broken down as they haven’t been maintained because they haven’t been generating income. And all the parties (except maybe the Australian National party) will talk only about how quickly they need to be shut down.

Green political hostility towards coal and gas development created Australia’s energy shortage problem, by discouraging investment in affordable energy resources, and choking off the supply of bank finance for building and maintenance of coal plants.

This is called karma. The poster child of renewable power, South Australia, actually had to burn diesel again.

I’d like to think that Aussie voters will learn something from this but they’ve just managed to escape disaster – this time – so will likely need a longer, colder power crisis. Next time the gap will be bigger, as will be the case in the USA:

Unfortunately, the reliability of the electric grid could get worse in the coming years as more reliable power plants are retired. MISO’s capacity shortfall is projected to grow to 2,600 MW by 2023, enough to power virtually every home in Minnesota on an average hour, and capacity deficits are projected to widen in subsequent years.
…
The graph below shows the capacity shortfall growing from 2,600 MW next year to 10,900 MW by 2027 as the green bars sink lower toward the x-axis. For context, 10,900 MW is more than the amount needed to generate Minnesota’s annual electricity on an average hourly basis. Of course, some hours will have much higher demand, and some hours demand will be lower, but the trend is troubling regardless.

That’s from a report issued by the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator powerline outfit, which details a high risk of blackouts this Northern summer resulting from the current gap of 1,230 MW shortfall in power plant capacity to meet its peak demand and reserve margin.

This gap has arisen after 3,200 megawatts (MW) of reliable power plants, mostly coal and nuclear, were retired last year:

“Green” energy liberals have demanded, successfully, that reliable coal and nuclear plants be closed so they can be replaced by wind farms and solar installations. But those unreliable, intermittent sources can never replace power plants that actually work 24/7. Hence the blackouts that are now beginning, and will become more and more widespread if we continue to rely increasingly on undependable sources of power.

President Obama was the last Lefty politician to display some honesty about the true cost of renewable energy:“Electricity prices will skyrocket”:

You’d therefore think that the Democrats would be overjoyed at the massive increases in energy costs, and of course they secretly are, except for one thing crucial to a politician:

Elections have consequences, someone once said, and now the consequences of all of those elections in which Californians put leftist Democrats in office are hitting them in the wallet. They asked for it, they got it, and now they don’t like it.

The same thing – massive increases in power prices plus unreliable power plus fossil fuel plants that cannot be scrapped – has happened in Germany in particular and Europe in general, and all for poor results in GHG emissions reductions (France excepted because …. nuclear).

But never fear, the Greens have a solution:

Already, liberals are talking about a future in which you don’t control your use of electricity. Rather, a utility does. Thus, when “renewable” energy sources don’t produce enough to meet demand, the response will be “demand management.” That may mean, among other things, that you won’t be able to turn on your own air conditioning. Rather, the utility will control the temperature of your home for you.

Classic: via political control the Left create a problem and then solve it with more control. The thing is that in the USA I’m not so sure that will work given how much Americans hate being controlled. Some years ago my friend Cathy, living in San Francisco, talked to all her equally Liberal, tree-hugging friends about a great idea she’d grown up with in New Zealand – “Ripple Control” – which many of you may remember from the 1970’s and 1980’s. In the wee small hours the Department of Electricity would signal water heaters to shut down, starting them up again about 5am or so. Naturally Kiwis took it up the ass, even as they blamed Muldoon.

Her neighbours and friends completely rejected the idea and – as she sheepishly admitted – did so with some heat.

See also:

Powerless Europe (plus dirty Germany)
Energy Charades (Coal expansion in China, India, SE Asia vs. Germany)
Energy Realities (US GHG emissions reduction success vs China coal plus wind fail)