The renewable energy industry is in full collapse mode this week. First, Orsted A/S, the world’s largest offshore wind farm developer, abandoned two major US projects due to supply chain and interest rate impacts, and now solar stocks are being clubbed like a baby seal in US premarket trading on Thursday after solar equipment-makers SolarEdge and Sunrun reported dismal guidance amid waning demand. 

From STOP THESE THINGS

Keep cranking up power prices and watch your economy slowly disappear. Subsidised wind and solar guarantee the former and the latter simply follows.

Every country that has tapped into the so-called wind and solar transition is suffering from power prices that are simply out of this world. Australia is a case in point.

Having just been whacked with 20-30% increases in their power bills – on top of increases of between 10-20% in retail power prices that took effect throughout the financial year – many Australian households and businesses will see a 50% jump in their power bills in less than 12 months.

And yet, Labor party apparatchiks reckon that the solution to the unfolding disaster is simply more of the same; much, much more. As Nick Cater explains below.

Labor’s renewable ‘investments’ are just blowing in the wind
The Australian
Nick Cater
6 November 2023

The floundering offshore wind turbine industry received some welcome news from Australia last week with a strong hint from Jim Chalmers of more sugar on the table for renewable energy.

The promise of what the Treasurer euphemistically called “more decisive action across all levels of government” is a sign of increasing desperation as the government’s emissions-reduction timetable falls hopelessly behind.

The giant boring machine crawling beneath the Snowy Mountains is an apt metaphor for the government’s progress towards its 2030 target. Both projects were based on heroic assumptions, ­neither were adequately surveyed, and both have turned into giant sinkholes for capital that could be better spent elsewhere.

It will be little comfort to know that ours is not the only government to discover that the carbon challenge cannot be overcome simply by setting targets.

Joe Biden’s dream of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind turbines by 2030 is in tatters after a string of cancelled projects. Last week, Danish wind energy company Orsted dropped two projects that would have installed more than 200 giant turbines off the New Jersey coast. Orsted’s stock has fallen 60 per cent this year and The New York Times estimates it will have to write off billions of dollars in investments in the two ­projects. Orsted is not the only company encountering headwinds.

Britain’s target of 50GW of offshore wind by 2030 can only be met with substantial subsidies and revenue guarantees. The Swedish company Vattenfall abandoned a giant offshore wind project off the Norfolk coast earlier this year, blaming a 40 per cent rise in costs. The latest auction for offshore wind licences failed to attract a single bid.

Anja-Isabel Dotzenrath, BP’s head of low-carbon energy, told a Financial Times conference on Wednesday that the US offshore wind industry was “fundamentally broken” and required a “fundamental reset” to help the nascent market grow. Mounting problems included approval delays, long timelines and escalating interest rates that have caused financing costs to soar.“There’s really not a Plan B right now,” environmentalist Jeff Tittel told the New York Times. “It’s a political disaster.”

Enter Energy Minister Chris Bowen who told the Asia Pacific Offshore Wind and Green Hydrogen Summit in August that Australia had big ambitions for offshore wind. “We aren’t just building an industry from scratch,” he said. “We are building an industry in which we want to be a world leader.”

Bowen has announced five offshore wind zones in the past year, with a sixth between Bunbury and Perth expected to be formally ­announced this month.

The numbers, sprinkled like fairy dust in the minister’s press ­releases, are too silly to believe. The Hunter, Illawarra and Southern Ocean zones alone will provide enough electricity to power 16 million homes, according to the minister. In a country of 9.7 million households, that would be impressive if it were true, rather than a scribble on the back of an envelope.

We are told that the energy ­capacity of the five offshore wind zones in the eastern states will be 43GW. That means constructing 5400 turbines with a boilerplate capacity of 8MW, or one a day for the next 15 years. On a conservative installation cost assumption of $US1.3m a megawatt, that would require a capital investment of $86bn.

“We need you,” Bowen told the industry gathering. “We need your capital. We need your investment. We need your experience.

“The Australian government is deadly serious about our journey to become a renewable energy superpower.”

Reducing emissions is not as easy as Labor seemed to assume when it announced its 82 per cent renewable-energy target two years ago. The construction of onshore wind, grid-scale solar and transmission lines has fallen way behind the government’s timetable. Offshore wind, with its long lead time and significant capital costs, is an even larger challenge.

Yet building the extra generation capacity to meet the government’s 2030 target is only the beginning. The additional power that would be needed to manufacture green hydrogen on an industrial scale has barely been discussed. Yet the amount is considerable.

Plans for the proposed renewable energy hub in Gladstone, Queensland, for example, include a facility to export 4MT of green hydrogen a year. That would require 110GW of renewable energy capacity, according to a presentation by Gladstone Ports Corporation chief executive Craig Haymes at a recent engineering conference. It means an extra 10,000 wind turbines or 2500sq km of solar panels, an area the size of Fraser and Mornington Island combined.

Some attendees thought Haymes may have been trying to can the project by putting the figures on the table. Yet in a statement, the Corporation said Haymes had merely wanted to illustrate “the potential for renewable energy for Queensland and the opportunities this presents”.

Green hydrogen is at a nascent stage. It is an inefficient and hazardous way of storing electricity, and there is no serious industrial ­demand. It comes with huge capital constraints.

Yet governments in the US, Europe and Australia are investing billions of dollars of seed capital into hydrogen produced by renewable energy without a care in the world as to where the energy will come from.

In a speech to The Australian’s Economic and Social Outlook Conference last week, Chalmers flagged a “uniquely Australian” revamp of energy policy to prise an extra $225bn in capital from the hot little hands of private investors. He promised measures in the 2024-25 budget “to get private capital flowing towards our priorities effectively and efficiently”.

The hubris in this statement bodes poorly for our future prosperity. Diverting the flow of such huge sums of private capital to government pet projects, however noble the intentions, is the road to economic ruin. The investors withdrawing from renewable energy projects are responding to price signals. Private investors have a keen nose for snake oil. They are trading off costs and benefits and assessing the technical feasibility of projects with rigour this government has failed to match.

“Australia is, to be honest, a bit like the kid who forgot to study for an exam early in the process and is pulling all-night study sessions,” Bowen told the August conference. “But now we are working 24/7 to catch up.”

The tragedy is that Australia was gifted the chance to learn from the mistakes of others. Bowen’s obstinacy comes at a price.
The Australian