JoNova

Chris Bowen, Photo by Crawford Forum, 2016

By Jo Nova

Coal is the most unreliable energy and other fairy tales

Lord help us all.  Chris Bowen — Minister of Storms in 2100 and coincidentally in charge of our national energy, could have given some straight up answers, instead he shared some fairytales, and made absurd contradictions spiced with inane cliches. Four years after taking charge he’s still blaming the Coalition and the Russians for everything.

Kieran Gilbert, at News24, interviewed Chris Bowen but let him get away with a full Snow White fable. The “most unreliable part of our energy system is coal” the Minister said, apparently unaware that wind turbines fail every week and solar generators fail every day. Unfortunately Gilbert missed the chance to let him know, and Chris Bowen dug himself in further:

Mr Canavan would have a lot more of it [coal] if he had a choice. And what that would see is increased unreliability, increased prices because when coal goes down, bills go up.

At which point Mr Gilbert could have asked, so if the prices rise when coal plants stop, you’re saying the grid is cheaper when the coal plants are running? 

And your goal is to shut the coal plants down…? 

Thing is, coal is easily the cheapest source of energy on the Australian grid if we rule out the subsidized “fake” bidders. (Just check the last AEMO Quarterly report where brown coal was still winning bids at $27/MWh).

Which is why, presumably, China built a monster 78 gigawatts of brand new coal power last year, because it is unreliable and expensive, right?

AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics (QED) Q2, 2026

As for reliability, we know coal plants are like cars, and if you keep fixing them, they can keep running. The Hazelwood power plant was still running at nearly 90% capacity in the last days before it closed at the age of 53. Though we’re driving the current coal fleet into the ground with frequent stops and starts to accommodate the most unreliable generators on the grid, which are solar and wind power. Though to be fair, if we had tidal or wave generators they’d be worse.

Kindergarten Energy Lessons

The core of Chris Bowen’s reasoning is that while the opposition want to use all our energy sources,“Australia is the best renewable country in the world and we want to use that to create energy abundance “.

Australia may have a lot of sunlight and wind, but we also have the largest uranium resources on Earth, the second largest supply of brown coal, and the fourth largest of black coal. We’re also the third largest exporter of liquid natural gas. Chris Bowen thinks energy will be cheaper if we ban uranium and coal.

Unfortunately  these are concentrated high-density sources of energy that every country wants to buy, but wind and solar are low-density sparse energy sources that require kilotons of carbon fibre at least 6,000 kilometers of high voltage lines, and thousands of square kilometers of farmland, national park, and wilderness. Not to mention all the rare earths and heavy metals, some dug up by child labor in the Congo or with slave labor in China. And they kill birds. What’s not to like, apart from everything?

“…there’s been no small module reactor built anywhere in the Western world.”

When asked why Australia won’t lift the ban on nuclear power, Chris Bowen had to reach back 40 years to find a pointless anecdote about an opposition minister who said small modular reactors were about to happen.  “ And here we are 40 years later,” says Chris Bowen smugly, “and it hasn’t happened. And there’s been no small module reactor built anywhere in the Western world.”

Which shows how delusional and out of date he is.  The Russians and Chinese have not only made small modular reactors above ground, but the UK, US and the French have made 270 of them that travel in the oceans in waterproof boxes. The US Navy built the first nuclear attack submarine in 1955.

Two months ago, the US got four completely new small modular reactor prototypes working. One designed by an Australian, Bobby Gallagher, was built in just 150 days. All four designs came together in a year, egged on by Donald Trump, which suggests that we could have built a small modular reactor on dry land any time in the last 40 years but no one tried.

The whole conversation is patently absurd. The opposition minister 40 years ago was more up to date in the 1980s than Chris Bowen is today.

And earlier in the interview when asked about the high prices of renewables Bowen claimed “We’re starting to turn the corner” which sounds a lot like his claims that small modular nuclear is always just around the corner. So he’s wrong about both, the only difference is he’s been wrong about the nuclear ones since before he was even born.

Who paid for that?

Whenever Chris Bowen brags about something being cheaper, people need to drill into where the money came from:

Here’s  him bragging: “460,000 households now have a cheaper home battery, that’s a program the coalition would scrap.”

A wise inquirer might reply, “hallelujah”.  “The batteries weren’t actually cheaper were they, they were the same total cost, but other people were forced to pay part of the bill. And who paid for that? How much has that program cost taxpayers so far?”

And “Wouldn’t it be fairer to add the cost of all those batteries and the subsidies onto calculations of what Australian wind and solar power actually costs, since coal, gas and hydro plants don’t need the batteries do they?”

Australians paid (at least) $23 billion more for electricity since the Labor Government took power

Gilbert pointed out that Angus Taylor claims “Australians have been slugged $23 billion extra… over the last four years since the Government promised bills had come down.” Bowen replied that bills were too high but it was a bit rich coming from Angus who “changed the law to hide in the most disgraceful act of an energy minister in living energy. He knew that prices were going up 20 per cent. He didn’t want to tell the Australian people that before the 2022 election so he changed the law to hide it so it was released weeks after the election, not days before.”

Which is a bit rich coming from Chris Bowen who was supposed to update Australia’s Net Zero target for the Paris Agreement by February 2025 just before the election. He broke the Paris agreement and delayed that announcement of a massive increase until a few months after the election.  Poll shows 83% of Australians didn’t want higher emissions targets, but the Labor Party did it anyway. Far more disgraceful than delaying the notice of electricity price rises is hiding an economy-wide policy that the Labor Party didn’t need to bring in, and chose to hide from the voters.

I don’t recommend watching it, but if you do, look out for weasel non-answers like:

We’re seeing downward pressure on prices  (but not actually cheaper prices).

Chris Bowen interviewed by Kieran Gilbert, News24

By Jo Nova

Dear Chris Bowen, it’s time for some public debates, not for a Ministry of Misinformation

The rise of One Nation has spooked the Government. A large section of the public hates their policy. But like any true socialist they won’t wonder if it’s because it’s a stupid plan, they’ll play the victim and attack the unbelievers.

Climate Change Authority has released Misinformation: A climate policy risk,which is just an excuse to attack those who doubt with snide allegations about their mysterious funding. It’s the same old ad hominem attack with bonus excuses for Mr Bowen’s failure to win over the voters.

See, the reason he struggles is not because his plan is crazy, but because the critics are “well resourced actors” with “unclear funding resources”, unlike Mr Bowen, a poor nobody who is only the Australian Minister of Weather and Energy Control, protected by Parliamentary Privilege, supported by billion dollar agencies like the ABC, CSIRO, AEMO, and ANU, not to mention the BOM and AER. None of which has ever asked him a single hard question in public.

Supposedly the Climate Change Authority want to support a “healthy information ecosystem.”. Except if the skeptics are so wrong, and the evidence is overwhelming all Chris Bowen has to do is debate the unbelievers in public and the people of Australia will figure it out, yes? That’s what a healthy information ecosystem looks like.

But Bowen knows he can’t win an open debate — not when it took Australia decades to build 24GW of coal plants, which we’re hell bent on shutting down, yet China built 78 gigawatts of advanced Ultra-supercritical coal plants last year. We’re spending hundreds of billions to close every last plant, while they’re building our entire national coal fleet every four months and pretending they’re going to start cutting emissions any day now.

Chris Bowen runs scared from a public debate because:

• • • — He doesn’t know what his magical transition will cost? Where’s that bill?
    • — He can’t say how many degrees his policy will cool the world. What do we get for all that money Chris?
    • — Half the voters don’t want to pay a single dollar for Net Zero, are they all stupid? Do we live in a Democracy?
    • — Global warming will save ten times more people than global cooling will. Why don’t we discuss the benefits of warming?
    • — Carbon pollution feeds plants, forests, flowers and our food crops. Why don’t we talk about feeding the poor?
    • — Australian sea levels were more than a metre higher 7000 years ago. Koalas and corals survived.
    • —  1,000 Islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans are still not sinking,
    • — The Great Barrier Reef is in record good health, despite all the forecasts of doom.
    • — The Arctic sea ice was all set to disappear except that it turns out Arctic sea ice has not shrunk for twenty years. 
    • — The BOM can’t tell us how they altered Australian temperatures by homogenizing sites up to 1,500 kilometers apart.
    • –– Twenty eight million weather balloons still can’t find the missing hot spot showing the climate models are wrong about the main amplifying feedback in their models.

…and I’m just getting started.

The document is full of misinformation itself like “Misinformation narratives now focus on disruption, not denial”. When skeptics never denied anything in the first place, except that Mr Bowen, God of Nothing, might be able to control the climate through our power plants.

And then there is ‘Malinformation’

The Climate Change Authority even includes Malinformation under the definition of “misinformation” — so people who are telling the truth, but with ‘intent to mislead’ are guilty of misinformation.

I’ll just get out the Intent-o-mometer gauge then, so we can figure out who is telling the truth because they think it should be told, and who secretly wants to fool everyone by … sharing inconvenient truths.

Defining misinformation

For this paper, ‘misinformation’ is used as an umbrella term for misinformation (unintentionally false), disinformation (intentionally false) and malinformation (true information used with the intent to mislead).2 We have chosen misinformation as it is in common use. Experts often distinguish between the different terms.

While freedom of expression and debate are fundamental to democracy, these forms of information disorder can undermine informed public discussion and confidence in climate and energy policy.

And there it is. Even the truth can be misinformation. Black is white. Up is down. Freedom is slavery.

The Australian has exposed it nicely:  Government launches ‘misinformation’ unit as climate body faces ‘stealth tax’ backlash.

Reneweconomy responded with the usual scoffing indignation, pretending the government was struggling to have a say and the big naughty Murdoch funded NewsCorp was part of the problem because it printed some skeptical articles, not that Peter Hannan had time to explain in his long article where any of the skeptics were wrong.

Chris Bowen has the entire Commonwealth apparatus behind him. He has departments, agencies, universities, broadcasters, consultants, modellers and taxpayer-funded experts, and the climate propaganda has been running for 30 years, yet here we are again, with them blaming “communication” problems, because the voters don’t want what the government is selling.

(PS: To the Climate Change Authority, how do you know the skeptics are well resourced if you don’t know their funding sources — it’s like everything else in the climate debate, just made up?)