The marketing hype around renewables has ratcheted up recently with triumphant headlines making claims such as South Australia producing its energy needs via renewables for 10 days straight
and a steady string of headlines about new batteries, the home battery roll out exceeding expectations and more. It’s all designed to make you believe that the renewable energy transformation is here, that it’s a roaring success, and that the naysayers were wrong to doubt the power of the sun and wind to power an advanced modern economy. But their desperation is beginning to show, and with apologies to Shakespeare, me thinks the carpet bagger doth protest too much.
These headlines are very carefully worded, as I’ll show you in a minute, so that they’re technically not lying, but they are very much deceiving, and they’re working overtime to try and hide how desperately wrong our energy transition is going. I’m going to use this national electricity market fact sheet from the Australian energy market operator as my single source of truth for this video. And then I’m going to compare some of the claims being made in the media and in their marketing to show you that when the green carpet baggers speak of the opportunities in the green energy revolution, it’s a bit like a real estate agent calling a house a golden opportunity. I mean, you know that that house is going to be a basket case.
We’ll get to the details next, but first, my name is Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate what I’m doing here at the Topher Project, then please help me to keep going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net and by checking out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
I was already preparing to do this video based on other spurious claims about batteries in particular that I’d been observing when I suddenly stumbled across this remarkable claim. The claim that South Australia had run for 10 straight days on renewable energy. And I thought, what again? Didn’t they do that back in 2022 as well? And it turns out it didn’t happen again. This is just this Unbox Factory Facebook page regurgitating old news for clicks. They posted it 4 days ago, but it did indeed happen back in 2022.
The funny thing is that renewable energy sick fans are so gullible and prone to believing everything they read without fact-checking
that they’re carrying on in the comments as if this is news and it’s just happened. But even though this is old news, it is a useful illustration of how you need to take the headlines with a grain of salt. It says South Australia generated 100% electricity for 10 days. Now, this happened back in 2000 December 2022. And if you look at the actual data for those 10 days, you’ll quickly realize that there was only one evening during which they did not need some sort of backup. And on some nights, they needed a lot of backup. And in South Australia, that means a little bit of battery storage. More on that later. And a whole lot of brown coal power being imported from Victoria.
So, how can they claim 100% renewables for 10 days when on nine of those 10 days they needed coal or gas or some other sort of backup? Well, they can claim it because they’re ignoring the reality of the ups and the downs and they’re just using the average. The peaks above the 100% line outweighed the troughs below the 100% line. So therefore, we produced more than 100% of our electricity needs via renewables. Yay. Except that you didn’t because you still had to import brown coal power from Victoria to keep the lights and the air conditioning on at night. This is how they lie. They paint a pretty picture in the headlines and bury the details, the truth, further down the article.
Now, I wish that I could say that this was an isolated case, but it isn’t. We’re seeing a plethora of headlines about big batteries right now and how they’re changing everything and solving exactly this problem, the problem of the intermittency of solar and wind power. Now, batteries are the most expensive form of power on the grid, right alongside diesel power, according to the 2024 figures from South Australia. But that’s only half the story. If you’ve seen my recent video about the Australian energy market operator and their bid stack system where I used poker chips to explain how our energy market works, then you’ll understand that batteries aren’t just expensive for the power that they provide. But they actually make all of the power expensive every time they are used. Now, if you don’t understand that, you don’t know what I mean by that, then do yourself a favor and watch my video about the bid stack as soon as you’ve finished this video.
Okay, so batteries are expensive, but that’s okay if they’re fixing the problem and making it possible for us to use renewable energy all day long, right? Well, that sounds nice, but that’s simply not what’s happening. Let’s turn our attention to this fact sheet from the Australian energy market operator all about the 2025 National Energy Market, which is basically the East Coast and South Australia, because all of that is one big connected grid.
Just a few quick points to kick us off. Notice the vast difference between the generation capacity bar chart on the top right and the generation supply on the bottom right. Notice how in terms of capacity, rooftop solar in yellow is far and away the biggest. But in terms of actual energy supplied in reality, it’s fourth and it’s barely 1/3 of the size of black coal despite having a lot more capacity. Well, that’s because so-called renewables have a very low capacity factor. Where a coal power plant can run at an average of 90 or 95% of its capacity for its entire lifespan, solar and wind are doing very well if they can run at 35% and a lot of the year they’ll be running at 25% or less of their rated capacity.
Now, this makes a lot of renewable energy announcements very deceiving because when they announce the size of the solar farm or the wind farm, they’re announcing the capacity, not the likely production in reality once you factor in the real world capacity factor. So, there’s that, but you probably already knew that. I want to draw your attention to the middle of this fact sheet towards the bottom where you’ll see the maximum demand record of over 35,000 megawatts of power set all the way back in 2009 back when Australia used to actually make things and the minimum demand record of about 10,000 megawatts of power was set just over a year ago. These are the extremes and for easy calculations let’s just say that about 20,000 megawatt is the average in that context.
Check out this announcement about Australia’s longest duration grid scale battery.
Australia’s longest duration battery will come online this year. A major milestone as the power grid charges towards a mostly renewable energy future. Wow, sounds exciting, right? When fully charged, the Limondale battery in Southwest New South Wales will be able to pump 50 megawatt of power back into the grid over 8 hours. Again, that sounds impressive to the average low-information, low IQ Guardian reader. They even provide some pretty pictures for their more linguistically challenged followers, although they did stop short of providing a coloring book or a dot-to-dot option. There’s some pointy arrows just in case you needed a little bit of extra help. And there’s this claim. This is the longest duration battery in Australia.
Thing is that for those of us who follow these stories closely, something looks very off about this picture. The question that goes through my mind immediately when I see this with the claim that it’s the longest duration battery is where’s the rest of it? For reference, this entire battery has only 400 megawatt hours of usable capacity, which it drip feeds out at 50 megawatt, leading to the duration of 8 hours. And for reference, this is the Waratah Super Battery. It has four times the energy storage capacity at over 1,600 megawatt hours and 17 times the power capacity at 850 megawatt. But if you do the math, that means that this super battery could drain itself in only 2 hours, which is kind of framed as being a bad thing. Whereas this new battery, it can keep going for 8 hours, which means it’s better, right?
Well, it seems that the Guardian hack that wrote this article believes that, that’s the case. But no, actually, that’s nonsense. What they’re doing is taking a flaw, a downside in this new design and advertising it as a feature. The reason this battery can last 8 hours is because it can only dribble power into the grid at a mere 50 megawatt. Which means that we would need 400 of these kinds of batteries to meet Australia’s average power demand with these batteries alone because it can only deploy its power very slowly. That’s not a feature. When it comes to battery backup, flexibility is key. You want the option to be able to release that power quickly because you can always slow it down if you want to.
The Guardian helpfully inform us that the average duration for grid scale batteries commissioned in Australia is 2.7 hours.
And they make that sound like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not. It means that those batteries are able to deploy more of their stored energy faster in those moments when it’s needed, which makes them more useful, not less. They’re literally cheering on the weakness of this new installation and pretending that it’s a headline feature. Saying that this is better than this is like saying that a small bottle of water is better than a big bottle of water because it has a smaller neck. So, it takes longer to empty that bottle out. Well, no. It just means that it has less water in it and you can get the water slower. It’s less useful in every single sense. That’s not a feature that you should be advertising.
Now, to be clear, I’m not a fan of any grid scale batteries at all for reasons that I’ve covered before. But my point today is not the batteries themselves. It’s the deception. Literally trying to get you excited about how the green revolution is apparently going backwards rather than forwards.
Now, Daniel Belton, the chief executive of RWE Renewables Australia, said projects like Limondale were helping to unlock the full value of renewable generation by ensuring energy is available when it’s needed most. Uh, no, that’s not happening. That Limondale is a step backwards compared to other batteries that have been installed because it provides so little power and provides its energy storage so slowly, which means that in all likelihood it won’t be able to provide all of its available energy fast enough to meet a peak in demand in that moment when it is needed most.
Again, I’m no fan of the renewables transition. I firmly believe that it is economic and environmental vandalism. And I’m not for a moment suggesting that the Waratah super battery is a good idea. It isn’t. But just look at the dishonesty in the marketing. If the renewables rollout was going as well as they pretend, they wouldn’t have to lie and deceive. The fact is that renewables are terribly inefficient, as can be seen in the fact sheet. And the fact is that the more we have shut down coal and added renewables, the more expensive our power has become. And that’s true everywhere on Earth, not just in Australia.
There is literally nowhere on Earth that has a high proportion of renewables and cheap electricity. There is not one. Which brings us neatly back to South Australia, the renewable energy superpower of Australia. You’ll be shocked, shocked, I tell you, to discover that South Australia has the most expensive energy in the national energy market. Who knew? And not by a little bit, by a lot. That’s not a coincidence. They shut down their last coal fired power plant in 2016 and went all in on wind, solar, and batteries with massive diesel generators always on standby, but we’re not supposed to talk about those.
Leath Vanillin is the author of this article in macroeconomics and he shows that Adelaide has the most expensive electricity of any capital in the national energy market running more than 50% more expensive than power in Melbourne is. And of course the power in Melbourne benefits from Victoria’s brown coal power generation capacity. The facts are as clear as clear can be. And yet South Australia are doubling down on this renewables nonsense. Per the article by Leath Vanillin, South Australia has set a target to produce 100% net renewable energy by 2027, which would require closing the state’s gas fired and diesel generators.
Given that wind and solar generation are completely dependent on the weather, policymakers clearly gave no consideration to how such a policy would operate in practice.
In times of low wind and solar generation, which happens regularly, South Australia would be exposed to blackouts. In fact, the state would have experienced regular blackouts already were it not for the importation of electricity from Victoria, which is overwhelmingly generated from cheap brown coal supplemented by expensive gas.
We all know that that’s true because we saw what happened when they supposedly achieved 100% renewables for 10 days straight in December 2022. They needed Victoria’s coal power for nine out of the 10 nights or the lights would have gone out. Which means that South Australia is only able to pursue this 100% renewables fantasy because it is a leech, a parasite on the other Australian states who keep their coal fires burning.
And in the end, doesn’t that really just sum up the whole renewables push and explain why the headlines are becoming more desperate and more dishonest with each passing month? They’re reaching the point where they actually can’t keep going further into renewables. The strain on the grid and the pressure on the few remaining base load power stations is too much. The costs are continuing to rise despite their lies to the contrary. And it’s not clear how much longer they can keep pretending before something breaks in a really serious way.
But in the meantime, the media will keep making their claims, misleading readers into thinking that a step backwards is actually a step forwards and selling the fantasy that if only we do more of what’s made our bills so expensive in the first place, then magically if we do enough of it, the bills will go down again. The key now is to keep calling out this BS every time we see it and supporting the members of the Liberal and National parties who are working hard to abolish net zero in their party because South Australia is all the proof we need that 100% renewable energy is a fantasy. We will never achieve it and it will cost us a lot to try and fail.
My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us in the media and from our politicians. If you appreciate having me as an Aussie voice talking about issues that affect Aussies, then please help me to keep doing what I do by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net and check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
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