Essay by Eric Worrall
In 2024 LONGi, then the USA’s top solar-panel supplier, was sanctioned by U.S Customs and Border Protection for alleged use of Chinese forced labor. They aren’t the only Chinese company to be sanctioned.
From the video;
5:25 Everybody knows the one thing you can do to cut your power bills is to install Solar
6:53 Countries are lining up to learn from the Australian experience
7:57 In May this year, China installed 116Gw of renewable energy. … Australia installed just over 7Gw last year.
9:30 China foresaw the trillion dollar transfer of wealth underway from the fossil fuel sector to the renewable sector decades ago.
12:00 The world can’t leave it to China alone, Australia must also diversify
12:36 But not everyone is leaning into the transition. Just think about this, imagine the transition as a marathon race. The best runners run a marathon in a little over two hours. And so if the multi transition, the multi-trillion dollar transition of the world were a marathon race, then countries like Australia, Japan, the US would be like the runners at the start line, limbering up, getting their numbers. But the only problem was, that race began an hour ago. That is how far ahead China is in this race. Now for a brief moment, it looked like the US would put themselves in contention for a podium finish, the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, unlocking a trillion dollars in investment. Then on Friday the 4th of July, President Trump signed his big beautiful bill.
Now I’ll leave it to Elon Musk to critique, I want to travel to the US one day. “It gives handouts to the industries of the past, while severely damaging industries of the future”.
Here here Elon Musk. It is an effective US surrender, out of the energy transformation race. And actually that’s really bad news, bad for the entire world. Clean energy is not just a climate policy, it’s an industrial strategy, a productivity strategy.
18:40 But friends, not all of our political leaders share the same vision. I’ve been the chief executive of the smart energy council for 17 years. And it’s been a shocking thing to watch. Being anti-renewables is a defining test of allegiance for the coalition. Strangely Trumpian, in a world before Trump the politician. Going all in on an economic and engineering lie. A lie which sits at the heart of the not so secret coalition agreement between the liberals and the national party. That renewables can’t compete, that they’re too weak, too unreliable. That adherence, that belief, gets you in, and keeps you in. Break ranks and you’re done for.
23:30 [Talking about former opposition leader Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan] The leading energy analysts at climate energy finance, the full costings, capturing it all, the put the cost [full life cost of 7 nuclear reactors], the entire cost, at between 4.8 and 5.2 trillion dollars.
29:45 Gas is a gamble
30:14 Building a circular economy is also central to reform
32:31 COP31 will deliver billions of dollars to the Australian economy, through trade deals and tourism, and expose Australian businesses to the world. But we haven’t secured the bid yet. … Friends we are in the diplomatic and economic race for our lives, to real zero.
33:37 [Question] You’ve received a little bit of applause here, in making for a 2035 target in the high 70s range. Yet In view of Trump’s United States, the general perception is the race is if anything slowing down. Why would Australia be acting proportionately with the rest of the world if it went for such a high figure, in the high 70s?
The global transfer of wealth, the $10 trillion which is spent a year on coal, oil, gas, petrol, diesel around the world, that is transitioning. The world is in the process of electrifying everything that can be electrified, transportation, gas industries, renewable energy and more. That is really significant. And why are they doing that? They are not doing that because there is a UN mandate or a charter, they are doing it because that saves them money. It is actually the cheapest thing to do. There is a race underway, countries which lean into this and secure the advantage, win disproportionately economically. And that is Australia’s challenge. And if you set the signal, if we unite behind this as a nation, it’s possible. I’ll tell you one other thing I see in China, one thing you can say about the Chinese system, is that China plays as a team. And Australia spends all of our time trying to tear each other apart. That is no way to compete for team Australia, to think about our collective national wealth, our natural resources, and our intellectual capacity. And that’s why it is so important that Australia does lean in, because this is the trade and business and investment opportunity of a lifetime.
48:30 [Question – Michael de Percy, Spectator] An hour north of here in the Upper Lachlan, there are wind turbines in every direction as far as the eye can see. Power bills have gone up, over the last four years, 40%. The question is, why should residents of the Upper Lachlan trust what you say today, and also will it actually get cheaper? We’re hearing “free”, but its costing a lot of money
You know, it takes me back. Do you remember, was it Joe Hockey, passed the wind turbines on the way to, you know, the blight on the landscape. It was the period when we had, these were creating acoustic brain cancer in people, right? It was a phase that we went through in this county. Um that’s not to say, that there are people in regional rural Australia that don’t have genuine concerns, and they’re right to hold them. But I would say this: we need to get better in engaging in these nation building projects. One thing that I’m advocating for amongst our membership is to bring forward projects that do more community benefit sharing. That actually means if we’re producing the cheapest power, and the community is hosting it, why can’t we have a mechanism, that actually gives in that community 5c off their retail for their energy for example right? There’s that we could do, to spread the load, covered by one community, but its covered by the entire nation.
1:01:55 [Solar powered data centers] – Why don’t we … make the green data centers here? We could actually build enormously power hungry AI chatGPT big servers which are going to, if we don’t get this right, not only push up energy prices but be a carbon bomb which destroys the world, why wouldn’t we build those data centers where energy is the cheapest to produce, where we actually tap into Australian sunshine and wind, energy storage, to actually attract that investment in our country…
I love John Grimes’ version of rolling back the 40% energy price rise over the last 4 years, by giving a small groups adjacent to objectionable renewable facilities a 5c discount, and “spreading the load” on everyone else. Doesn’t sound much like a price cut which would benefit all Australians.
The COP31 reference is about Aussie PM Anthony Albanese’s international grovelling to be the host of the big 2026 global climate conference. Turkey is apparently the main road block to Australia winning the COP31 bid. Despite this I think Australia has a chance. After all, if big oil nations can host COP28 and COP29, why not have a major coal exporter like Australia host COP31?
Solar powered data centers – what a joke. When you have a multi acre installation with equipment which costs up to $10,000 / square yard, when idle time loses you millions of dollars per hour, and the installation requires hundreds of megawatts of rock steady reliable energy, playing balancing games with unreliables is a headache you don’t need. How much energy storage would be required to guarantee that system running 24×7? There is a reason Microsoft is restarting Three Mile Island nuclear plant to feed their insatiable energy needs, this is not a level of energy use which can be reliably supplied by battery firmed solar. And that nuclear plant isn’t costing Microsoft the best part of a trillion dollars, which is what John Grimes thinks it costs to build a nuclear plant.
The part which really upset me was Smart Energy Council CEO John Grimes praise for China.
China might be “pulling together” on Net Zero, but they are also building a lot of coal plants – a fact John overlooked in his presentation.
China is also facing credible accusations of using slave labour in their renewable industry – the article below details sanctions imposed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after they discovered evidence of forced labor in China’s solar supply chains.
Sadly the US anti-forced labor sanctions against Chinese renewable components didn’t stop the flow of alleged slave labor products into the USA – Indian companies stand accused of helping China circumvent the USA’s slave labor sanctions.
John Grimes’ Smart Energy Council has been touched by the slave labor scandal, according to Sky News – his organisation has allegedly received donations from companies sanctioned by the USA for alleged use of forced labor.
John Grimes’ also in my opinion praised China and displayed disdain for Australia’s political process, which he described as “tearing each other apart”. There is a name for “tearing each other apart” verbally, that name is democratic debate. As the author Terry Pratchett once said, Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. And if that freedom to pull in whatever direction you want sometimes looks like “tearing each other apart”, the alternative, pulling together Chinese style, at the point of a gun, with overseers, chains and whips at the ready if anyone dissents, lets just say that isn’t the kind of pulling together I would choose.
Chinese style pulling together frequently also leads to terrible outcomes and massive resource misallocation. Part of the reason China is in serious economic trouble right now is they squandered billions of dollars on excess housing, high speed rail, and a bunch of other boondoggles far in excess of rational need. Under the Chinese system no underling has the freedom to call out the incompetence and corruption of their bosses.
The green agenda John Grimes praised is particularly untouchable in China, because that agenda was set by President Xi Jinping. Xi’s administration has repeatedly demonstrated incompetence at managing China’s energy needs. But Chinese people who challenge Xi’s authority seem to have unusually bad luck when it comes to being arrested, or other unfortunate life events, so I doubt many people in China have the courage to tell Xi to his face he is making a mistake. But there are other signs of trouble in communist paradise – The effort China is putting into building coal plants contradicts claims that Xi’s renewable push is an overwhelming success.
Another example of Xi incompetence from 2017, when Xi Jinping’s administration botched China’s coal to gas transition – From 2017, “Chinese officials point fingers as gasification crisis worsens”.
Claims that renewables offer an economic advantage are clearly nonsense. Profitable opportunities don’t need government subsidies. European states and US states like California have sky high energy costs, despite having embraced the renewable transition for decades. After years of effort and billions of dollars of public expenditure, you would have expected to see some benefits by now, if there were any benefits to be had.
But you know what? It’s a free world, unless perhaps you are one of those unfortunate Chinese renewable manufacturing team members who is permanently chained to their workstation for the crime of being a member of an ethnic minority group.
President Trump has not stopped California or other green states from pursuing their renewable dreams. All Trump did was pull the federal funding, force them to go green on their own dime, instead of making everyone else pay for their fantasies.
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