From STOP THESE THINGS

Like any ideological cult, wind and solar acolytes bury troublesome facts and replace them with oodles of helpful fiction. Start with the supposed cost of the electricity occasionally generated by wind turbines and solar panels.

The usual trick is to invent some model said to capture the unique benefits of running on sunshine and breezes. The model ignores critical variables (such as sunshine and wind and wear and tear on turbines and deterioration of panels) thereby overstating output and understating the actual cost of generation.

Once upon a time Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) was renowned for advancing science and technology using objective and critical analysis, and all for the benefit of the Country. These days. Not so much.

CSIRO is just another government institution overrun by ideological crones obsessed with the conceit that they alone can change the weather 50 years from now and that if we don’t ‘act’ now the world will incinerate some time later next week.

Well and truly captured by wind and solar rent seekers, part of their brief is to put up fictional accounts of the (always understated) costs and (always overstated) benefits of wind and solar: its GenCost report sits somewhere between Science Fiction and rubbery accounting, as Nick Cater explains below.

We now know Labor’s renewables dream is based on economic modelling that isn’t as ‘unimpeachable’ as Chris Bowen claims it to be
Sky News
Nick Cater
4 May 2024

A scan of Chris Bowen’s media archives on his ministerial website shows that he has claimed that the cheapest electricity comes from renewable energy at least once a week for the last two years.

“Facts are facts,” he told ABC’s Sabra Lane last December.

He cited economic modelling by the CSIRO describing it as “unimpeachable and very, very clear”.

If the Energy Minister is beginning to sound screechy, it is probably because he’s losing the argument.

An Essential poll for the Guardian last month found that 40 per cent of Australians think renewable energy is the most expensive form of energy, up from 38 per cent last October.

Only 36 per cent said nuclear was the most expensive, and 24 per cent picked fossil fuels.

For the first time in an Essential poll, a clear majority supported nuclear energy, 52 per cent in favour compared to 31 per cent against.

The findings should trouble not just the government but the CSIRO.

It has suffered self-inflicted repetitional damage by venturing outside its area of scientific expertise into the complex microeconomic world of energy pricing.

Despite Bowen’s insistence, most Australians know that computer modelling of future prices are not facts but predictions that must be truth tested against observations made on the ground. Observations of the upward trend in household electricity bills, for example.

This week, the Centre for Independent Studies published a devastating critique of the CSIRO’s modelling which shows it to be unworthy of the paper it’s printed upon.

The CIS’ conclusions confirm that our peak scientific body has been wading out of its depth, cherry-picking data and making rookie calculation errors.

Significant costs attached to renewable energy are conveniently ignored in the CSIRO GenCost analysis.

The cost of storage and associated transmission lines incurred before 2030 are treated as sunk costs, even though investors will expect a return over the asset’s life.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan – Bowen’s roadmap of the transition to renewables – requires considerable rooftop solar and home battery investment.

Householders and businesses bear this cost, but it is not included in the GenCost analysis.

The cost of decommissioning turbines, solar panels and batteries at the end of their life is also excluded.

In estimating the carbon emissions savings that are said to come by adopting renewals, AEMO’S roadmap excludes emissions from the manufacture of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and the other paraphernalia required by intermittent renewable energy, making them seem cleaner than they are.

CSIRO’s method of evaluating individual projects doesn’t consider the energy system as a whole but as separate parts.

This approach allows financially unviable projects to get approval, leading to costs being transferred to consumers.

Most egregiously of all, the CSIRO cherry pick the data to make other forms of electricity generation appear more expensive.

It bases its cost estimate for Small Modular Reactors for example on the cost of a failed project in Utah, which faced peculiar cost overruns, technical challenges and regulatory hurdles.

It includes the finance costs for SMRs but not for wind and solar, where the assumption is that money is borrowed for free.

The GenCost report would likely have found nuclear was considerably cheaper if it had examined a mass-produced reactor like GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300, which is about to start production in Canada for installation at Darlington Point in Ontario.

Previous nuclear reactors have been one-off projects.

SMRs like the BWRX-300 will be made on production lines similar to those used to manufacture aircraft.

GenCost uses unrealistic assumptions about the construction costs of new coal plants, making them appear more expensive than renewables.

The ISP selectively chooses specific future years in its cost-benefit analysis to justify transmission projects and ignores years where reliability breaches are likely to occur.

In its determination to stack the cards against fossil fuel generation, the CSIRO assumes that the current price spikes for coal and gas caused by the Ukrainian war will remain constant throughout the lifespan of new plants.

In reality, world gas prices have already returned to levels close to those before Russia’s invasion.

The complete list of errors and biases in the CSIRO GenCost is extensive.

The CIS report is available online.

The CSIRO’s errors are forgivable in part.

The organisation’s expertise is in scientific research and innovation, not microeconomics.

It is hard to fault its work on insect control, fine wool processing, radio astronomy, WiFi protocols or polymer banknotes.

Yet its work on energy pricing is not just economically naive but a departure from the established scientific method.

It commits the most egregious error in the scientist’s rulebook: a priori reasoning, the formation of conclusions based on deductive logic or pre-existing knowledge in which the search for empirical evidence becomes superfluous.

The CSIRO researchers knew what the answer should be and proceeded to torture the evidence until it made a false confession.

A priori reasoning can be helpful in mathematics and logic, but it should never be applied to empirical questions or phenomena in the natural or social sciences.

It leads to confirmation bias, where investigators selectively interpret evidence to support their preconceived notions.

It encourages logical falsehoods and oversimplification, where conclusions are drawn from established principles and ignores the complex, dynamic systems that operate in the natural world or human behaviour.

It cannot cope with complexity or uncertainty, is inherently speculative and runs a high risk of error.

It leads to the delusion that computers are intelligent and that the ability to compile a spreadsheet is the path to omnipotence.

These are increasingly common symptoms in the laptop class.

It’s a condition that might be called Excel syndrome, the delusion that the ability to put a spreadsheet together is a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about.
Sky News

And check out Nick’s interview with Alexandra Nicol on the extortionate costs of wind and solar subsidies: