By Trent Hawkins

The right wing war on renewables is heating up as the Abbott government announces yet another investigation into wind energy and health and a review of the Renewable Energy Target.

Australian Financial Review (23 Jan) featured an opinion article by Alan Moran from the climate change denying think tank the Institute of Public Affairs criticizing renewable energy. Moran argued that the performance of solar and wind during the recent heatwave in southeast Australia proves the technology’s unreliability. It seems neither Moran or AFR made any attempt to check the facts behind his opining.

Moran’s key claim:

“during heatwave conditions in the five days to January 18 this year, wind actually contributed 3 per cent of electricity supply across the Australian National Electricity Market. Nobody knows the contribution of rooftop solar but it could not conceivably have been more than 1 per cent.”

Moran is wrong on several counts. As pointed out by RenewEconomy’s Giles Parkinson, the highest peak demand periods during the 2014 heatwave were smaller than a similar event in 2009—a time when Australia had much less solar energy capacity. For Western Australia, a state where 130,000 households have embraced rooftop solar, the peak demand in 2012 made it to 4000MW, while it was only 3733MW last week. The difference between these peaks corresponds closely to the actual installed capacity of 340MW!

As we can see, Australia’s rapidly expanding solar energy capacity clips peak demand.

South Australia and Victoria experienced a similar impact. The Australian Solar Council reported that in South Australia at the times of peak demand on January 15 to 16, rooftop solar was generating more than 9 percent of the state’s electricity demand. Other analysis investigating data from the Australian PV Institute suggest that rooftop solar not only reduced peak demand, but shifted the timing of it, reducing the need for expensive open cycle gas generators to start up.

The Australian and Australian Financial Review prosecuted a similar argument as Moran since the heatwave. These articles cherry picked a single point on Wednesday January 15 when wind generated 7.4 percent of SA’s demand to raise doubt about the effectiveness of wind energy. But this completely ignores the rest of the picture for that week.

Wind energy delivered over 20 percent of South Australia’s demand between January 16 and 17 (Thornton reference). According to Tristen Edis of Climate Spectator, wind energy provided 20.4 percent of South Australia’s electricity supply on January 14; 24 per cent on January 16; and 36 per cent on January 17.

“[B]ased on historical data,” Edis explains, “AEMO expects that during the top 10 per cent of summer demand periods, South Australian wind generation contributes at least 8.6 percent of its installed capacity for 85 per cent of the time.” That means wind energy has a bankable baseload contribution of nearly 9 percent during the worst periods of summer electricity peaks. And most of the time wind is actually producing much more than that.

It is troubling that newspapers are willing to publish fallicies about renewable energy at a time when Australia needs to rapidly rollout the infrastructure to reduce our contribution to climate change. One wonders whether this anti-renewable energy propaganda is an attempt to protect the business model of incumbent fossil fuel generators and vertically integrated gentailers. Afterall, these entities have been caught off guard by the rise of cheap renewable energy and view the technology as a threat.

Lastly, Moran argues that:

“Because of our readily available coal and gas Australian electricity costs are intrinsically among the lowest in the world. This was formerly crucial to attracting highly competitive energy-intensive industries like smelting. Australia could once again benefit from low-cost electricity if deregulation freed energy supply from its renewable obligations.”

One has to wonder if Moran is living in the 19^th Century with these kind of statements. With 21^st century tech companies like Google setting a 100 percent renewable energy target, Australia’s best opportunity to attract big business to our shores is by having the competitive advantage of a low emissions energy supply.

Trent Hawkins is a Mechanical Engineer with a background in renewable energy and computational modeling. Trent was the Project Director of the recently published Zero Carbon Australia Buildings Plan at Beyond Zero Emissions. Hawkins was a contributing author to the Banksia award-winning Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan.