About this transcript: This is a full AI-generated transcript of The Renewable Lie: How Australia Was Sold a False Promise — Aidan Morrison & Chris Uhlmann from John Anderson Media, published June 12, 2026. The transcript contains 18,445 words with timestamps and was generated using Whisper AI.
"We are deliberately, willfully destroying the energy system that made us rich. No one has done what we are attempting to do. We are being the guinea pig right now. Australia, it's not 35 days. That includes the ships that are on the water coming in. It's more like 20 days. I was advised by Energy..."
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: We are deliberately, willfully destroying the energy system that made us rich.
[00:00:06] Speaker 2: No one has done what we are attempting to do. We are being the guinea pig right now.
[00:00:12] Speaker 3: Australia, it's not 35 days. That includes the ships that are on the water coming in. It's more like 20 days.
[00:00:19] Speaker 4: I was advised by Energy Co that if I wanted to take them on for the few hundred thousand dollar loss that they're going to potentially cause my wife and I in business, that I should lawyer up, but it wouldn't be in my best advantage.
[00:00:30] Speaker 1: They said it would be greener. They said it would be cheaper. It is neither of those things. And we are destroying our environment to save the planet. And the rest of the world is not on this pathway. We have to win for the sake of the Australian people.
[00:00:45] Speaker 2: But you guys have been basically, I think, lied to.
[00:00:57] Speaker 3: The podcast we're releasing now and the full documentary that will follow fairly shortly afterwards are of extraordinary importance. They are of extraordinary importance because they cover the fact that we like to eat, but that Australia is no longer food secure. We're going to hear from farmers and those who work with farmers from the town of Wolka first and then subsequently a documentary which was recorded with experts and with local farmers in a local wool shed on why our obsession with renewables in itself is proving to be deeply flawed now that we learn more and more about how it's going to be done and what it will and won't do. But much more than that, it's the flip side of the coin. Australia has not prepared for shocks in the way that other countries did. We are not fuel secure, particularly diesel. Therefore, we are not food secure. And in the recent oil shock, we saw the reality. China has over a thousand days in reserves. America, hundreds of days, even though they're self-sufficient. Japan, 250 days of reserves. New Zealand, around 95 days. Us, less than 30. And yet, for now and into the foreseeable future, Australia's farmers can't feed you without energy security. This is important. I hope we can get a groundswell going that says we need to rethink the very safety and security of the Australian people. Let me try and pull this into how I see it conceptually. Energy is our security and it's our economy. You are seeing at a local level, in microscope, if you like, in microscopic form, what is, not that it's small, what is actually happening to us with a failing energy policy everywhere. Essentially, if a government's first responsibility and I'm thinking of the federal government that I served in for many years, is the security and the safety of its own people, there are three essential elements to security. The first is social cohesion. The first is social cohesion. The first is social cohesion. Abraham Lincoln commented in America at the time of the Civil War that a house divided cannot stand. I cannot believe how fragmented Australia is becoming an energy policy is a big part of it. And to pick out two elements of it, one aspect is that rural and regional Australians are paying a very unfair burden. Of the so called transition. And in fact, in as much as we've made reductions in emissions in Australia, they've overwhelmingly come from restrictions on land clearing, which have bitten very deeply into the viability of a lot of farming, particularly in Queensland. And there's another aspect that Aidan will talk about, if you ask him, which is that the poor increasingly bear the burden of this so called energy transition. So social cohesion, our nation should not be being pulled apart at the seams, but it is an energy policy is quite a significant part of it. Economic security matters. Real electricity prices have risen by 60% in recent years, faster than just about any other country in the world. And we've always had high labour costs, but we had one comparative advantage, cheap energy. We don't have it anymore. It's doing immense damage and utter fiascos of the sort we're seeing with Snowy 2 only make our power much more expensive. And now the experts are even beginning to question whether it will even work. And it's gone from 2 billion to 40 billion. I mean, inland rail only blew out from four times, not 20. And so the economic cost is very high, and that is undermining our national security. But then I have to say to you that the other side, and you're seeing that economic disruption here in your community. So what you're seeing at community can be extended nationwide, is the point I'm making. But then there's a more direct impact, and that is that whilst we've got somewhere around five and a half thousand people now, it's doubled in the last couple of years, working in the energy department in Canberra, one has to wonder what they're doing. Because it is very obvious that they were not planning for a possible liquid fuel shock. I just want to tell you how sobered I am by how we have become a country that is no longer serious. Serious countries since the 1970s have known that there will be further oil shocks. China's a serious country, it has 1,300 days in stock. America is a serious country, I think, and it's got around 400 days in stock. Japan, like us, very different in many ways, but like us, a trading nation surrounded by water dependent on its shipping lanes, 254 days in reserve. New Zealand is a little trading country surrounded by water, 94 days. Australia, it's not 35 days, that includes the ships that are on the water coming in. It's more like 20 days. And you've had distinguished people like Professor John Coyne at the Australian Strategic Policy Initiative, warning that a serious interruption to Australia's liquid fuel suppliers would see grocery deliveries interrupted in a week or so. Now we've had the ultimate, thankfully, and I say that carefully. Warning shot with the interruption to shipping lanes on the other side of the world. What happens next time, what happens next time, if it's local? What happens? A serious country would be prepared for that eventuality, but we are not. So the same energy policy that is driving you bananas at a local level, and which your unbelievable local research reveals, is deeply and impossibly flawed. And no responsible government could possibly ignore the reality that you look like building one of the most expensive and large transmission lines in the southern hemisphere to a place where, in theory, there's been to be a whole lot of wind farms. And all the evidence suggests that none of them are locked in, and it now turns out that it's a low reliability or average only wind area anyway. You put all of this together, you put all of this together, it can't be ignored, just as the other side of the equation that we're utterly dependent on liquid fuels to keep the nation fed and secure can't be ignored. So it's a complex picture, I grant you. And perhaps that's why those who don't want to engage, including those who sit around cabinet tables, are reluctant to come and talk about it. So we've got to try and take the conversations to them, which is where I hope we can help a bit. So that's by way of background. Many of you I know are doing actual conversations around the place, and you'll have valuable things to say. That'll be part of the documentary, and we will have the actual formal show tomorrow. With a bit of help from several people, we have put together a little possible declaration, too, which I'd love to see called the Walker Declaration. But you're the Walker people, so you've got to decide whether you're happy with it and whether you own it at the end. Now, I would like to just introduce Anna, I know, will introduce the local people. But Aidan Morrison, who most of you seem to know of, I suspect that's part of the reason there's so many people in the hall. I mean, I'm not foolish enough to think it's me, you know, is a real expert on this. We met in what, about 2014? If you think he's good on energy, try him on defense. He'll tell you what a diesel submarine can do and what it can't and what a nuclear submarine can do and what it can't. And he predicted, and I kid you not, that the future of warfare would be swarming. Think drones and that sort of stuff. He was telling me that 14 in 2014. So don't ignore his predictions on where our energy policy is going. And I'm delighted that my very good friend, Chris Uelman, is with us as well. Chris was very keen to be involved. He sees the significance of this. He writes on it all the time. His logic is compelling. And I think he clearly understands the thing that I'm trying to say and will try and convey, which is that what you are seeing at the local level is one side of an energy policy that is now threatening the nation. It's harmony, it's economics and it's security, which are in fact all the key responsibilities of the federal government. It is the reason we have a federal government in the end.
[00:10:44] Speaker 1: I'm, you know, at a very much a third leg in this because no one's better than Aidan. Look, all I'll say is that my grandfather was born in 1899 into a house on the outskirts of Brisbane, which had no running water. It had no electricity. There were lamps that gave it light. There was wood burned in the stove. They had a nice box. They had no refrigerator. They had a toilet outside. When he died in 1967, he had a Ford Zephyr in the garage. He had a refrigerator, television set, a telephone. He had an indoor toilet. And that's all fossil fuel. He was two years away from the moonshot. He could have, in his lifetime, met the Wright brothers and Neil Armstrong. That is all fossil fuel, particularly oil. If you think about the Industrial Revolution, we were burning wood for millions of years. And the economy never really shifted. We get to the Industrial Revolution, we find a fuel source which is really dense, which gives us more power than we've ever had before. And it starts to turn the big wheels of industry. And we actually get that to move across the landscape and then across the seas. But then we get oil, which is the dentist, densest, lightest fuel we have ever discovered, and we harness it. And with that, we lift off from the face of the earth and we make it all the way to the moon. We did not burn fossil fuel because we wanted to destroy the environment. We did it because it gave us wealth beyond our wildest dreams. Your lifestyle is directly connected to the amount of heat you waste, whether you see it or not. And what we've done is essentially recruit an invisible workforce of billions of people which work alongside us every single day. What we are attempting to do now is going from dense energy sources to dispersed energy sources. It'll be the first time consciously in human history that we've decided we'll use worse energy sources than the ones that we just came from. And we have made this decision deliberately. We have 800 years' supply of coal in Australia. And we have decided we are not going to use it. We have abundant gas in Australia. And the governments of Victoria and New South Wales decided they were not going to look for it. And guess what? That system that's been described does not work without gas. We're not building one electricity system, we're building two. Because of what Aidan told you, because we have to move it through space and through time, we can shift electricity from the middle of the day, when there's a lot of sun, to the end of the day, maybe a few hours across that. We can't move it across season and we can't move it across weeks. There will be times when the energy system that's being built will deliver zero power, four days. When those days come, we'll need an entirely different energy system, one that burns fuel and delivers it to us on time in order for us to continue to function as a society. We are de-powering. And when you think about the amount of this stuff that's got to be built in order to replace the energy system that we had to deliver the same amount of electricity without data centres, is it any wonder that Australia's productivity has been declining in lockstep with the fact that we are building massive, unproductive assets? We are deliberately, willfully destroying the energy system that made us rich. Now this is not to say that we should not be considering doing something about climate change, but we are 1% of the world's carbon emissions. We export eight times more coal than we burn in Australia. All we've done is moved where the coal is burnt from here to somewhere else. Now, no matter what you hear about China building more renewable energy than anyone else on earth, China now burns 56% of the world's coal. And last year, we burned more coal, oil and gas than ever before in human history. The world is not doing net zero. Last year, carbon emissions rose again. 2024, I should say, will have the figures in actually every single year. I interviewed Ross Kelly in 1993 before she went to the Earth Summit. It was the first time, and she was the then Environment Minister of the Labor Party, I've ever heard about climate change. Carbon emissions have risen every single year since then. Yes, we are putting some more renewable energy on top of an ever-growing pile of coal, oil and gas. Again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be doing our fair share, but what we're going to do is we're going to have to face the adaptation. The question is how much money we expect us to spend on mitigation, and do we become a poor nation in the meantime? And I can tell you, poor nations don't care about the environment. If we want to stay rich, we need to use all the natural resources at our disposal, and one of those is uranium. We export a third of the world's uranium, and yet this government's actual stated policy is, we're not going to, we're going to have wind, solar and batteries as a main energy source. They were dubious, they don't want any coal, they were dubious about using gas as a transmission fuel. Now they know that they need it. But we're not going to use uranium at all, nuclear energy, even though we're going to have nuclear submarines. So if you could park that nuclear submarine in Sydney, you couldn't run an extension cord into the city. It makes no sense. What we are doing is willfully destroying our own economy, and it is incumbent on those of us who are beginning to see what the outcomes of this stuff are, to say something about it. I'll finish here. They said it would be greener. They said it would be cheaper. It is neither of those things, and we are destroying our environment to save the planet, and the rest of the world is not on this pathway. Thank you.
[00:16:46] Speaker 2: Today I'd like to share with you a first high-level story. I'm going to start global. This is the concern, as John has said, what's happening right here on the ground. It is a tiny microcosm of an absolutely massive concern that comes from a macro, a macro misunderstanding about our energy system and how it can and cannot work. So I want to begin with that first crucial question about why are we building renewables? Why are we building enormous amounts of wind and solar? All right. A lot of people might think the popularized reason is all about climate change, reducing carbon emissions, but actually that's not really all that it's about. When these policies were first announced, now we've got the New South Wales examples here, and you could do the same in Queensland and Victoria if you like. When these pieces of policy have been put in motion, the key argument that is always made is this is not just good for the environment. It's not just pushing down carbon emissions. No, no, this is good for our economic prosperity. This does not just have no cost. It's got a negative cost. It's going to be saving bills. It's addressing cost of living concerns at the same time. Okay. That is, in all the documentation, the main reason why we are pursuing this policy. All right. So this is the, this strategy is expected to reduce electricity bills. That's from back in 2020, 2019. I think actually this document just precedes the legislation being introduced. So that is the premise for heading in this direction. And as well, again, to get slightly nerdy for a moment, read the second reading speech. All right. This is the official statement of why policy is introduced. It has standing in law and in courts. If you want to know what is the purpose, what is the objective, read the second reading speech. And Matt Keane was blatantly clear, right? He said it up front. It's a plan to make New South Wales an energy and economic superpower. All right. He says multiple times through here, it's lowering prices for consumers. All right. This is the, we can avoid price rises and make a reliable system. Our state is in a unique position to take advantage of those energy resources to give our local businesses and industries the competitive advantages that comes from having low cost energy. This is not a sidebar. It's front and centre. He only mentions carbon, I think, once in the entire speech. All right. And I think it's the name of a policy or an institution or something like that. So it is front and centre as to why this rollout was started, was the promise of lower cost energy and all the good economic prosperity that comes with that. Now, there was a day around about the time when all this legislation was going through. And back in 2020, when there was a plausible argument, at least there were some seemingly credible people saying seemingly credible things at the time, saying this is going to be cheaper. All right. So Tim Buckley, who writes for the Institute for Energy Economics and Finance, a terrible acronym, whatever the IEFA, whatever it is. So he wrote this article. I think it's a fantastic little time capsule to go back to figure out what people were thinking. All right. At the time, he was cheering on the construction of a new interconnector called Project Energy Connect. Hooray. This is 1.5 billion. We need more investments like this. This project will now be completed at a cost of about 4.1 billion. And it was a very thinly run thing about whether it had any net benefits at the price that was actually approved by the regulator back then. But the idea was, centre here, and I'll read it out to you. It says that even allowing for firming, new zero emission supply could be delivered at below $70 a megawatt hour. $70 a megawatt hour, which was cheaper. $20 cheaper than the current prevailing prices of $90 a megawatt hour, okay? That was what we were telling ourselves at the time these policies were introduced, that this was actually going to be cheaper. Now, how did they come up with that? Well, I think he actually had a sneak peek at the draft report, probably, for CSIRO's GenCost, which was released shortly after. I'm going to show you in the next slide what GenCost was saying back then, and what it's saying in its latest versions, all right? This is the 2020, 2021 CSIRO GenCost report. This is the main cornerstone of the renewables, the cheapest narrative in Australia. And back then, it said, wow, wind and solar combined with all the add-ons, all the firming, the integration, the transmission, the distribution, the synchronous, all of that, it's way below $100. That's consistent with the $70 a megawatt hour. You can adjust for inflation, you barely get $80 or $90 a megawatt hour today in today's prices. Now, today, the latest full version of CSIRO's GenCost report is just there. Center point, $150 a megawatt hour, which is more expensive, by the way, than any sustained wholesale electricity prices we've ever had in the history of the national electricity market, right? So I haven't done any lifting the lid on GenCost yet. This is just their numbers on the latest version of the 2025 report, and it is not saying anything consistent with this being cheaper electricity whatsoever. Later, I will lift the lid just a little to give you a taste of how they got to that hopelessly optimistic position. But there is a good reason. There is a good reason, in my opinion, to expect that renewable energy actually just does not scale to produce cheap electricity at 50, 60, 80, 90 percent, all right? The fundamentally intermittent nature of it and the dispersed nature of it makes it an engineering challenge. It just does not scale well. And you can see here on this chart that we produced, and I'll pitch a little paper here, we've written it, called the Renewable Energy Honeymoon, that describes that argument in detail. The CIS did that last year, and we looked at all the countries at 2023 prices, and those countries that have large shares of wind and solar in particular, there just aren't any that still have very low-cost energy. There are a whole bunch of countries that have energy at 10 cents a kilowatt hour, US cents. None of them are above 30, 40 percent wind and solar. If you think you've heard an exception, if you've heard someone prominently say, oh, but hang on, but what about Canada or Guatemala or hang on, Norway or New Zealand? Hydro. Hydro, hydro, hydro. It is all hydro, all right? Now, hydro has this brilliant phenomenon that you can turn it on and off like a tap because it actually has a tap, right? That's how it works. So, and that makes all the difference in the world for how it works to engineer a system of reliable electricity. Wind and solar, there are no exceptions. No one has done what we are attempting to do. We are being the guinea pig right now. Now, some strong critics will say, well, that's correlation. It's not causation. There can't be anything that could be spurious, right? There is a bit of a theory, and I'll dare to try to explain it to you, which is that it's the intermittent nature that makes things hard, all right? And so you can imagine here, these funny little blocks on the page are trying to steal, man, how good it would be if the renewables behaved the very best way they could. Imagine we have the sun that rises in the middle of the day and stays steadily out and sets at sun time, and just then, just then the wind rises to fill in the evening gap. And they both produce shapes that are consistent with about 35% for wind, which is an optimistic version of the average for how much wind's capacity factor is, and about 25% for solar. You can only get to the sum of those parts, about 60%, before you are forced to start moving energy around, through space or through time. Otherwise, you have to waste it. You've got to do one of three things. Waste energy, move it through space, move it through time. Now, of course, in the real world, the weather does not behave like that, and you have these problems set on a lot earlier, somewhere around 20% or 30%, which is where you start to see price challenges in the market. But anyway, there is a theory there. And what we're seeing is that theory is being borne out spectacularly right now in Australia, as the plan for the rollout proceeds. Because we have, in the words of the chair of the regulator, Claire Savage, a wall of capex that's about to hit us, all right? We've got to late 30s, maybe 40% wind and solar in the grid. And we're now at this point where we have to start moving energy around. And that means building transmission. Megaprojects and masses of them. All those bubbles there, they represent big transmission projects. Around $3 billion is that center of the block there. And they're all in the wrong place because Central West Irana is now $5 billion. VNI West has now gone up to $7.6 billion, right? So they need to be shifted up. But that wall of capex has yet to hit your bills. This is necessary, we know it. And it is just coming very, very soon. Now, everyone else has tried this. I think in Australia, it's useful to use some international examples. What's happening elsewhere in the world? Germany's a little step ahead of us. They've got a little bit more wind and solar even than we do. How's it going there? Stunning letter that no one in the news reported on in Australia. All the captains of German industry basically wrote to the chancellor and said, this isn't working in the strongest possible language. They said, if the energy transition is open heart surgery, as is sometimes said, then this operation has been a complete failure so far. We have to conclude the patient is in danger of dying on the operating table, all right? This is from people that run companies like BASF, one of the biggest chemical companies in the world, all right? They are saying this is not working. Worst economic crisis since World War II, they think, okay? So huge regret from countries around the world that are trying this out. Now, even in the United Kingdom, okay? They've got a little bit of optimism and I think it's going to get better soon, but they are happy to make the link, which no government in Australia is, between the renewable energy rollout and higher prices, at least in the medium term, all right? So they've acknowledged here in introducing a new subsidy, okay? This is in February 2025, this came out. Said, as a number of our policies have been developed to increase the share of electricity that's coming from renewable sources, and they go on, electricity is too expensive. We have to shelter our electricity-exposed industries with new subsidies, all right? That is the purpose of this statement. The UK government recognises that in the short to medium term, the resulting increase in retail electricity prices reduces the competitiveness of the UK's most electricity-intensive businesses, all right? So the link is being made there by a Labor government. That's not on Hyde, it's not being hidden. Somehow, we can't get the confidence to make that link in Australia yet. Now, there's a bit of hope there, short to medium term. In the UK, maybe the Labor government's thinking, "Oh, just around the corner, soon, it's going to get better." That hope was absolutely spectacularly dashed by an incredible parliamentary hearing that happened late last year, where a bunch of CEOs from the largest energy companies came up and made statements like this. They came and said, "If we continue on the path we're on, in all likelihood, electricity prices for a typical customer are going to be 20% higher in four or five years' time they are now," even if wholesale prices halve, all right? And that is devastating because the wholesale prices, because the wind and the sun don't send a bill, that was the only hope that the policy ambition that, "Oh, it'll go down soon," actually hung on, right? That was their last hope, all right? And this completely dashes it. Another CEO independently said, "Look at the non-community costs," right? Policy costs, network costs, these are all the fixed add-ons that someone has to pay for at some stage. If the wholesale price was still zero, bills would be the same as they are today, all right? So there is no future hope from those countries that have tried this further than we have. What about in Australia? Let's look for some local evidence to see what's happening here. So New South Wales, this policy was introduced to push down prices, and yet now we have half a billion dollars added to consumers' bills each year. If you read the fine print, which is my job, half a billion dollars added to pay for the costs of those policies specifically. So this is just enormous. I'll keep trying to carry on because hopefully the rain continues. It's not worth waiting it out, right? It'll keep going all night. So anyway, so that's about double the cost of building a project like Humlink, all right? Which has not yet happened, okay? We've barely got started and the subsidy, the costs for this stuff is already half a billion dollars a year. About 50 bucks a year on your bill already in New South Wales for these things here. Okay, let me continue. Let me keep trying. This is another, I think, an absolutely amazing newsworthy series of quotes, right? Okay? These come from the start of the capacity investment scheme, all right? This is the subsidy, the subsidy program to underwrite the development of wind and solar so it keeps reaching financial close. It is the whatever it takes, taxpayers will force this subsidy. And I attended one of the webinars that I was on and the transcripts are available when they were consulting on the design of this scheme and it was explained very clearly by Kirsty Gowans, who is the head of electricity in the department of climate change, energy, and water, and etc. to cue Chris Bowen's department. She is the most senior bureaucrat in the country for electricity. And she said, look, okay, from the point of view of the minister, the government's consumer prices are an overriding issue. The government feels they need to manage as part of securing the broad community support for energy transformation. All right? This is saying the quiet bit out loud, okay? They're trying to manage consumer energy prices to win support for this, okay? And wait for this one. Mindful of the fact that with the transformation of the size that we've got now, passing costs through to consumers isn't always a model that is achievable politically or sustainable. That means the most senior bureaucrats in the country knew perfectly well that this was going to be so damn expensive that if you let the costs go through to consumers, you'd be voted out of office. And they've been told to manage that on behalf of the minister, all right? So again, if you're still arguing this is going to be cheaper, bring it on. The evidence is just absolutely so clear that no one can maintain this anymore. Even experts, right? I sometimes do this for communities. I turn up and offer myself as an expert to discuss the economic and policy implications of individual projects. And one of them who turns up at all of these on the other side, an expert paid by the proponents, paid by wind and solar developers to argue the case for why this project should be approved, why planning approval should be given, does not make the case, does not make the case that this is going to be cheaper energy overall. This is going to lower prices. In fact, he says it doesn't mean the system will be cheaper than not constraining emissions. And I make that clear in my submission. So there are no experts out there still saying this is going to be lower cost energy. They're just saying the government has said this is the policy and we're compliant with the policy. So we have been absolutely had because the policy when it was introduced was justified entirely on the premise that this would push down prices and was good for the economy. So I will as I as I move into this discussion about this project and this renewable energy zone in particular and the enormous transmission investments. I want to talk about just one of the three documents that are used to kind of justify the faith that renewables are cheapest. Okay, I've got a little Matt Queen quote up on there. I trust the CSIRO. I trust Emo. Let's focus for a minute on CSIRO's gen cost just to explain how their optimism has got them to such a position as saying renewables are cheaper. This is the chart. $150 a megawatt hour is what they say. I haven't doctored this. I haven't changed it. No modifications. I haven't picked a bone with any of their arguments yet. $150 a megawatt hour is what they say firmed integrated renewable energy is likely to cost. Now, how did they get to that number? Well, actually, the key thing to understand, it is not a single number they calculated. They calculated that as just the midpoint in a range of numbers. Okay, they have a little range. We've never had prices that high before, right? This is higher than we've ever had except the Ukraine war. So they're promising already this is a more expensive electricity. But there's meant to be a range that fits in. It's about $125 to $176 a megawatt hour is their range. And they just picked that $150 out of the midpoint of that range. And to understand how unviable that range is, we need to understand what drives that variation. And it comes from one thing. It does not come from uncertainty about how much it costs to build a wind turbine. It does not come from any uncertainty about how much transmission is required or how many synchronous condensers are required or what batteries will cost in the future. There is only one thing that drives that range. And it is the capacity factor they assume for how much energy you get out of a wind turbine. As in, how much compared to it operating at full power all the time, do you actually get out on average? So this is an important quality for renewable energy. And here's what they do. This is the true facts from CSIRO's own assumptions, is that range here on the lower bound, which is what drags their optimism to think that potentially we could have acceptable prices. They assume 32% average capacity factor for solar. I don't know if anyone has any solar panels, but on a rooftop that's not tracking the sun, 15% is actually what you'd probably get on the average for rooftop solar. And wind, a stunning 48% average capacity factor for wind. That's how they get to their lower bound number of 125. The upper bound, of course, those numbers wind at 29%. I don't know if you've scanned around the capacity factors that are for actual operating wind farms. It's pretty close to average. I'll show you in a second. Solar 19%, very plausible actual real world outcome. Here is the capacity factors for wind across a whole range of actual operating wind farms in Australia. And you can see here 29%, which they assume is the very worst, all right? That's actually bang on average. That is the middle of the pack. And of course, 48% is off the chart. No one actually has achieved that in 2024. It is unachieved wind capacity factors. And in the details, which I'm inclined to follow, they actually tell us exactly how they did this. They told us how they got to that result, okay? They went through 11 years of history and they found the highest, the best result they got out of all those years and found the best year for the best performing wind farm. And it got to 48% in a single year, all right? And they used that as the basis for what a good outcome. Of course, this is ridiculous. You can see how far away the average is from the high point. If you're developing at scale, if you're building at fleet, you never get better than average by definition, okay? So it is absurd to suggest you can build these numbers out of taking the very, very best results. So all of which is to say, I think it's, oh, by the way, just some extra evidence to point this out. So CSIRO's numbers, they rely on about 48% for their best, most optimistic case. A recent project here, and this is an amazing document, a primary source that I refer to. It's for the hills of Gold Wind Farm, all right? And this is amazing for researchers like me because this is one of the only times a developer has opened their books and explained all of their economics transparently. And they did that because the state planning department said, take out a few of those wind towers. They're too offensive environmentally and visually. Take out a few of them. And they cried poor and said, no, no, no, no, it spoils the economics of the wind farm now. We need every single wind farm along that tower on that ridge. And so they opened their books and showed us their economics. And they said, yeah, 32, 33% is the average of what we get. You know, hills of Gold, just down the hill here. They also said the marginal loss factor, read wasted electricity in the transmission process, is about 11 or 12%, all right, of energy. That is not included in CSIRO's gen cost as well. So 10% worse than what CSIRO estimates should be baked into your understanding again. There's another amazing confession in this document, which is just amazing, is that they were asked, this panel of experts to hear the case, were asked, is this just an expensive wind farm, is this a poor site? And the experts that were hearing that case said, no, no, no, it's not expensive. Many of the easiest, the most favourable sites in New South Wales have already been developed. So the pipeline and remaining sites all have less than ideal conditions in one or more respect, which is a statement of the obvious, actually. Wind is a resource curve, the easiest ones, closest to transmission, nicest, flatest land, best wind. I mean, they do go first, right, obviously. So from here on out, we don't expect better performance from wind farms. It will probably get consistently more tricky or harder to build, more complex terrain, et cetera, et cetera. So in reality, CSIRO, their upper bound should be a lower bound. And I could go on about a whole bunch of other things they have not really incorporated. I think we are taking everything else they've assumed. I think it's going to be north of $176 a megawatt hour is the very best that you can consider leaving all their other arguments intact, which is truly an energy disaster. So let me give you a few important pointers about the history of the New England res and how this has come about. Firstly, is it a good wind resource? This whole area has been based on the idea that this is going to be a good wind resource. There'll be huge demand from developers in this area to build it. And I think in my mind, when I hear people talk about how good the wind resource is, we have the wrong mental model in our heads. Actually, there's a bit of an assumption that, oh, is it windy in New England? Draw a big line on a map. Actually, this again, this brilliant resource has shown us that the amount of wind you get out is extremely dependent, particularly in complex geography, on the individual towers and exactly where they are on the sites. And so you can see this huge north-south ridge line along here with green dots. They are high-performing wind towers that are doing quite well. The very best in that whole project, 42%, 42%, the best wind tower on the highest point of a north-south ridge, because east-west winds are predominant. Other towers, a whole string of them in that area, are actually performing much lower, 19%. Okay? So just depending on where your tower is and how high the ridge is and which way it's facing and the predominant flows, you can have a factor of two, more than a factor of two variation in what you actually get out of wind tower. So when they say New England has good wind, no, it will only be possible if they put it in just the right places, which will be a lot of the highest points in all the places. And I think actually it is very much the blowing of the predominant east-west winds that gets picked up on a north-south ridge line. That's what creates good wind. And if you could cherry pick all those places, then maybe it would be okay. But on average, for the amount of winds proposed, you'll have to plaster enormous areas and have vastly, lots of turbines that don't achieve anything like that. So I'm not optimistic about the actual quality of the wind in this area. I'm not sure what anyone else is. It's been rated C-grade. And I've got to thank Cameron and Greg here for putting together some amazing analysis, or Rachel here, of how the assessment of New England res has tracked over time. C-grade wind over time quite consistently. All right? So that's what New England has been rated at, which is meant to mean above 35%, okay? That is a lot better than what the New England guys – sorry, the Hills of Gold project said they would get down the road. So I am skeptical of that. That is way above the average for Australia at the moment. So that's what it's rated as. And other sites in New South Wales, such as Broken Hill, have been recently upgraded. Ask a question if you want to. I'm a tiny bit suspicious of that because I know the lobbying that's gone on by particular developers in those areas over the last few years. And maybe it's true, but there are motives at play there as well. So how did this begin? Okay, this is the earliest bit of document. This is – I'm a primary sources guy. Sorry, don't bother reading it. I'll explain it to you if it looks complicated. But this is a chart that comes from the 2020 integrated system plans accompanying indexes on transmission. The bottom bit here is Central West or Central New South Wales plan. And the idea was there, they'd be hosting capacity altogether about five or six gigawatts, all right? Five or six gigawatts of generation in Central. And half of that would be the Central West Arana res, okay? The cost for Central West Arana was 450 to 850, which is where that 650 initial estimate came from. So it's a real number, right? That was what their idea was. We'll get Central West Arana in for about 650 million. Of course, the price that we've agreed to pay is 5.5 billion overnight construction costs for that zone now. So that's how the evolution of costs have gone. Of course, imagine CSRO gen cost back then. What were they looking at? They were assuming this. They were assuming, you know, $650 million is what you needed to build a res, because that's what the documents at the time, before we actually started to building them and scoping them out, suggested, okay? New England here is suggested to have 5 to 6,000 megawatts, 5 or 6 gigawatts hosting capacity. And it was going to cost, I don't know, 1 billion to 1.75. One and a bit. One and a half billion dollars was their estimate. I think there is not a chance there won't be a similar expansion in costs. And we can see why, of course. However, into that mix, there has been some additions. That was the initial estimate. We'll have sort of 5 or 6 gigawatts. But there were new projects, and in particular, in this area, a very, very ambitious project. There was going to be 4 gigawatts on its own, all right? In the Walker area in particular, okay? Now, this is a massive wind development that's sort of unprecedented in terms of scale and ambition. And that resulted in, and there's lots of information here, a list of different projects being added to the official inputs. When the powers that be, the market operators say, where should we put transmission? Where should we put renewable energy zones? They looked at this voluntary big list of projects that were scattered out for this area here to be 3.4 more gigawatts, okay? Which created this ambition, created this idea, this nudge that maybe, maybe 5 or 6 gigawatts was not enough. Could go to 8 gigawatts of wind farms. And we can see that in actually the regulatory documents. Again, I'm a details guy, but there was a hint of this back in 2020, all right? They said options to increase this to 8 gigawatts to match the target for New South Wales government will be explored in the preliminary activities, all right? Preparatory activities. Now, so that's what they were talking about back then. There was a hint that, oh, maybe not because we said it's optimal in our own analysis, but maybe because there was so much interest and the government wanted it to happen, maybe we should upgrade that even a bit further. Now, at 2020, they only had four or five. Central was at four, all right? The central scenario in the experts' analysis had four. The very optimistic ones, the step change and fast change, only had five installed gigawatts of capacity in the entire New England Renewable Energy Zone. And there is no doubt, no doubt. I'm leading to something. You'll get why in a minute. There is no doubt in my mind that this is talking about the installed capacity of the generators, the generators that are installed on the ground, okay? That is going to be four or five gigawatts, all right? And there's a discussion here again about eight gigawatts. Now, that's really important because there's a link here between how much generation you build and how fat the wires have to be, how much transmission you need to carry it away, all right? Because if you have eight gigawatts of generation, you will only send full eight gigawatts away when you have perfect sunshine and the very best wind coinciding. Now, the sun is not up at any nights and the wind does not blow very, very hard all the time. So, you never really have that perfect scenario. So, you tend to downsize your wires considerably to make the whole system make sense, okay? Because you can store a bit of energy in batteries or you can waste just a little bit on those occasions when you have maximal output of wind and solar. So, the right-sized network capacity is generally about half, roughly, changes for particulars, but roughly half what the generation capacity in a particular zone is. But this has led us to a potential massive mistake that is coming later on because the New South Wales government announced that they would upgrade this res to be eight gigawatts of generation. You can see how it came. The Welker proposals were in. They said eight gigawatts of generation would be great. This is the best place, okay? Matt Keane explained his logic, said there's ninefold level of interest in central western Rana. That was astounding. So, it makes absolute sense to go even bigger in the New England res, okay? So, his logic is clear. He thinks renewable energy is popular. He thinks it's popular in the regions. He thinks it's popular economically. He thinks there's a huge queue of developers that are trying to get in on this. And so, he's sold out the other zone down there. That's more than enough demand. Let's expand the next one. Let's make it even bigger. Eight gigawatts is a big step up, all right? And remember, at the time, I think central western Rana was only at three. Three, it might have been four and a half, but nothing like this. So, this is a massive supersize me moment. And in the legislation that he passed at the end of 2020, he said as well, eight gigawatts of generation capacity, generation capacity. That's how many wind farms would install, right? That's what would be here. But in the same document, there was a crucial mistake, right? In the same legislation, they actually said that the New England Renewable Energy Zone has an intended network capacity, network capacity of eight gigawatts. This is a disaster in the making. This is an infrastructure absolute nightmare. Because those two things should be a factor of two apart, all right? If you want eight gigawatts of generation, your network capacity should be roughly half that amount. And they have just said in the legislation that they want it at the same size, all right? And they made the declaration under that act. He went and followed through and said eight gigawatts of network capacity, not installed generation, which makes all the difference in the world. And this was basically imbibed in the modelers, went back to the market operator, who's ran their numbers, turned their wheels again, and said, "Okay, how much renewable energy should go into this zone?" Well, the New South Wales policy is that we have to have eight gigawatts of network capacity. And you can see quickly from 2022, it was suddenly assumed to step up to a total of 15 gigawatts in by 2050 of installed renewable generation, okay? Not like the four to five we saw in the previous integrated system plan, okay? So a simple mistake has basically slipped into the machinery, the wheel was turned, and now we're projecting 15 gigawatts of installed capacity in the same area because the minister required the network would get to eight gigawatts. Total disaster. An absolute disaster. But it gets worse. It gets worse, all right? So the two major transmission lines that are assumed to get us to eight gigawatts, and actually they won't, I'll touch that in a moment, but they realize when they're building 500 kV, all right? So most of the transmission lines you see are only 330 kV. 500 kV lines, double circuits. So there's three different bunches of conductors because it's three-phase electricity. Double circuit, quad-orange conductors. So bundles of four wires is each phase for each circuit. Six bundles of four conductors on these things. These towers are enormous, right? Probably 65 to 80 meters tall, depending on the design. And they have to carry a huge amount of weight, have to be extremely wind resistant for high winds, which can rush up and down these gullies. And so you have to pin and drill foundations into the deep earth. Like, you know, I'm talking about 15, 20 meters. I know people have got these being built on their land at the moment, other parts of the country. So very, very deep foundations. And they're built in a constructed up manner, right? Where they basically will have prefabricated enormous sections, spars of, and they'll be lifted into place and bolted in together in these huge, big prefabricated structures. And the government has basically admitted an enormous, an enormous accident of planning. After spending a couple of years considering that it would go along the existing transmission line for most of the way up to the New England res, they realized that previous transmission line, the access road is a mere goat track compared to what they will need for the heavy machinery to actually build these things. These things will need enormous big flat pads for incredibly big cranes. And some of the terrain is even so steep in that, in that line there, they'll need to actually lift things in by helicopter. All right. So, so this says here, uh, 570. This is the old route. 570 towers require non-conventional construction. All right. This would require construction with bespoke plant. Some which would include heavy lift helicopters. All right. So, um, 570 towers. That's a third of the line that is inaccessible by road and would be helicoptered in. So this whole valley, it's going to be busier than Bagram with a number of Chinooks and, uh, and, uh, and Blackhawks that are carrying in these huge spars and bars to get into place. Right. An absolute disaster. So this is them writing to us and saying, this is unconstructible basically. Okay. And I think they simply didn't estimate how hard it would be to have such larger towers. And as well, if you're craning and lifting things in and dangling huge steel spars off a, off a helicopter, the last thing you want is to be right next to another high voltage transmission line, which of course they can't take out. So total disaster, total incompetence, they would be pushed off the side of the ridge. The amount of spoil, um, they've said here that they would need, um, 2.5 million cubic meters. All right. Of soil when they have to carve out those big flat pads. All right. So with this, uh, 320,000 spoil movements to create the flat pads and sort of, and be able to build this stuff. So in engineering, absolute diamonds, they've shifted the whole route, which has impacted a whole different set of communities. Uh, and I've been down visiting some of those in the area of Gundy just recently. So on top of not needing the size, all right, they have absolutely stuffed up the design and route selection because they could not run it along this, the craggy ridge line with another power line going on there on a comparative goat track. Just wouldn't work. So they've now moved it into prime farming land in the valley, just adjacent. All right. Which is where I spent, uh, the last couple of nights. And so this is a disaster. They think the next track, the next route is going to be better. Still only how many it says here. Just 97, just 97 towers will be constructed with heavy lift helicopters. So still a huge area of this is just so steep and inexceptible, but it's, uh, won't be done. All right. And of course, sorry, this is a full table. I just want to tell you the cost and risk and the schedule implications. This is fully redacted. All right. This, this is how you get to a snowy 2.0 scale disaster. Another time over. All right. The secrecy around this is just absurd. There's no way to access the full information. They're just not telling you the cost. So I can tell you for free, it'll cost an awful lot. But they have not told us how much that is here. And certainly CSIRO five years ago, when this whole thing was set in motion, had no idea of what was proposed and how absurd it actually would be. But it gets worse still, of course, um, eight gigawatts. All right. It's not the same as Central West Arana, which is currently declared at six gigawatts. Central West Arana does have a core trunk line of two 500 KV double circuit steel towers. Exactly the same as is specified for this project. All right. And they are just six gigawatts. All right. Not eight gigawatts. Six gigawatts is the declared capacity for Central West Arana later on. The first phase, by the way, they've got 7.7 gigawatts licensed to connect to that grid in the first phase, which is only 4.5. So you can see they've got more installed. Everything checks out and you can see that that ratio between the installed network capacity and the installed generators is playing out. But here in this project here, it is actually said that the first stage gets you 2.4 gigawatts. All right. By 2032, 33. All right. Stage two, which is the second 500 KV line will be delivered. Apparently a year or two later gets you an extra 3.6 gigawatts, which gets you to 6 gigawatts, 6.0. That's correct. And the maths is right because of various reasons electrical. There's more redundancy when you have two. You get a bit more out of the second one, et cetera. But there is a third stage here. All right. And they had to put this in here because otherwise they would not comply with the legal directions that have been given by Matt Keane, which is that it has to be 8 gigawatts of network capacity. So they will need another line of some kind, maybe single circuit 500 KV or double circuit 330 KV. But an additional stage three providing at least two gigawatts may be developed in the future, subject to energy demand and relevant approvals. And you can see them getting soft on the knees, right, as they say this sort of stuff. But you guys have been basically, I think, lied to. If they've come and said they're going to build just two, that does not comply with the law and the directions of the minister right now. They will need to be a third. And so I think you should bear that in mind when considering what their planning is and whether they're dealing in good faith if they ask you for just two lines, because it does not comply with what's required under the law. So they won't make that. And you can see, again, in the final bit of fine print, this is the last slide for my talk before we move to questions, but they are starting to walk this back. You can see the inconsistencies emerge in the fine print here. This comes from the AEMO draft 2026 integrated system plan, the market operator's blueprint. And they have said here that in their optimal development path they modelled, again, these are the experts, the guys, the guys that crank the handle and say, where does it all go and what transmission we build? Crank the handle here. Their optimal development path only includes stage one, all right, back down to one 500kV line in what they model as optimal. And their whole model only models about six gigawatts of renewable energy. It might be seven, six or seven being built. So they've halved from the 15, they're back down now to less than half that in what they call the optimal development plan today. So it says here, and this is a bunch of technical gobbledygook, but they're covering their behinds, basically. They're just telling you all the different rubber stamps they've been able to go through. Latest 2025 infrastructure investment objectives report. This is a big rubber stamping machine from the consumer trustee. It's complicated. Included modelling the second stage option in the 20-year development pathway that best met New South Wales' legislated objectives for energy infrastructure. Okay. That's the admission. That's them saying, we're doing it because the policy says. It says we're doing it because it was written down. Okay. But wait for the next bit, all right? Only stage one, both parts, is included in the proposed optimal development path in the draft 2026 ISP. And, all right, the crunch. Ongoing analysis and stakeholder engagement between now and June 2026, which is when the final version of this document comes out, is needed to ascertain whether the second stage will optimise benefits to consumers in the 2026 ISP. Okay. So, here you can see the consequences of an absolute planning disaster starting to be worked out, all right? If we were to build this power line up here to comply with the letter of the directions, it would be 30% larger again, all right? If we were to do it to comply with what's in the optimal development path, the boffins are now telling us, it will be half the current size again. If we were to do it to the actual level of renewable energy generator interest, which is completely evaporated in this area, there's only one or two and they look like they're not going to reach financial close, you would probably not build the line at all, or at best slightly upgrade existing lines. And if you were to build it to optimise consumer bills, you would certainly not build a giant renewable energy zone in an area such as this, which is prime agricultural land up a kilometre into the sky, the highest altitude that we have, that experiences amazing fog and rainfall, which means it's terrible for solar, and potentially has decent wind along one ridgeline that abuts onto the most amazing national parks. This is a harebrained idea to make this the place that you roll out gigawatt upon gigawatt upon gigawatt of renewable energy. And you can see how poorly thought through it has been in the planning process that has led to this. So I urge you in any ongoing analysis and stakeholder engagement, to let your opinion be made clear. And I can tell you as a Sydneysider and an energy consumer and a person, New South Wales and a citizen, I don't think that this is worthwhile if it's pushing up energy prices full stop. It's not just your local livelihoods that are at stake, and your operations of your farm and your scenery. This is an issue that is much, much bigger. As John has said earlier today, our whole nation depends on secure and reliable electricity. And the optimism about price is absolutely beyond belief. And what we've had here that is being planned now, is the clear evidence that this will be the most absurdly expensive way to build an electricity system. And I think that the policy should be revoked, because the entire political license was predicated on the idea that this was going to be cheap, low-cost electricity, which fuelled our economic prosperity. There is just not a chance that is still true today, particularly because of the evidence of this particular, absolutely poorly thought through, hopelessly badly designed energy system right into this region. Thank you very much, everyone. And I'm happy to take questions.
[00:57:54] Speaker 5: Aidan, I've heard you speak before, always wonderful. For the people in the room here that haven't heard you speak before on the range of emissions, wind and solar versus nuclear, are you able to give a very short summary of the difference of emissions?
[00:58:22] Speaker 2: So, all wind, solar and nuclear obviously don't emit any emissions directly when a wind turbine turns. And same for nuclear power plants, only steam that comes out. So, Zero, the important question is how much overall to build the stuff and go through the life cycle, et cetera, to get it in place, does that actually take? Consensus figures are for nuclear, it's really low, something around about 10, maybe as low as 6 grams, grams per kilowatt hour, grams of carbon per kilowatt hour. Put it in perspective, black coal, something like 900 or 1,000, okay? Gas could be around sort of 500 or 600, roughly half, okay? Roughly half coal, so gas is much less. And so, nuclear is by far the best. Even that amount of concrete, when you run it for 40, 50, 60, 70 years, is extremely low in terms of the amount of actual life cycle emissions. Wind is meant to be, on the face of it, not too bad, because they have a lot of cement. And if you assume 25 or 30 years out of it, they get to around, often around 20, 20 grams, okay? So, probably maybe double what nuclear is, but they're both very low. What that doesn't take into account, though, is that you have to often clear land to actually put in a wind farm. Never take into account, all right? And so, when you're putting in wind farms in forested areas, I think that's just mind-boggling. It still wouldn't probably push you up to 1,000, not claiming that. You know, coal would still be more emissions intensive, we know that. But wind would be a lot more than that. Solar, consensus is that it used to be claimed about 44, right? So, thinking about four times, 44 grams per kilowatt hour. There's very credible cases that the way it's being built now, particularly in China, which is very coal-heavy in their production of silicon, which requires an absolutely enormous amount of energy. It could be much higher than that. There's credible numbers up around the 80 to 100 grams. So, it's not nothing. No, it's nothing in the carbon. But also, the costs of decommissioning and recycling. Again, it's one of these difficult areas where the absence of evidence is often used as an evidence of absence. In this case, of the cost and process, because we just haven't had a generation of massive amounts of batteries, for example. They're new. They only got big in the last five, 10 years. So, they have a 10-year lifespan. So, we have not experienced and figured out, honestly, how to dispose of them, what their costs. And so, there's been a massive free kick that's been exploited, I think, because all the analysis of, A, the carbon, but also the cost, right? Because we don't have any information about actually how you would recycle a battery, you just don't put a cost for that in, right? So, there is a kind of an extra headwind at the start. The first generation of an energy system or a new technology gets the benefit of not necessarily having experienced the full life cycle costs and implications. And I think that's a serious concern for batteries and solar, in particular, in Australia. And the turbine blades, huge. You know, the proposal now is to just bury them, which is not particularly impressive. Thanks for the question. Cheers.
[01:01:16] Speaker 6: Thank you, Aidan, for coming and giving us an amazing presentation. I would like to know, a lot of Australians, most of us, have put solar on our roofs. How is that impacting the grid? And is it positive or negative to the whole energy system?
[01:01:35] Speaker 2: Very good question. And it's an area of a lot of passion of mine. Solar, a little bit, it's quite okay. Not bad for the grid, a tiny bit. We've now reached the point, though, where rooftop solar is actually causing massive headaches and problems for our grid, probably larger than the benefits it actually delivers. So there's a thing called minimum system load, all right, that's required to keep all these power lines humming and the whole grid turning over and stable, sending electricity around the country. You actually need to have certain things about voltage control and frequency control. And you need a bit of power actually flowing to keep that whole system working. You need certain machines still turning over. And rooftop solar is the point of now threatening that and potentially meaning we we're trying to turn it down the rest of the system lower than it can safely go, which means you have extra costs to add. And the market operator has been quite open about this a couple of years ago, even saying that we're going to have to develop systems to do, it's called an emergency shut off, which is basically take control of your solar and switch it off and stop it from powering the grid. And the fallbacks for that are that they try to trip off your solar. If they don't have a switch, they can basically manipulate the voltage to trip off your solar system. So your inverter goes, "Wow, I can't handle this." And that goes up that way. And then they have to basically disconnect areas. You know, they'll have to basically shut off areas that are exporting too much instead. So cause mini blackouts. That's all in AMA documentation from the system security plan, future system security plan from 2025, I believe. I could find slides on it if you want. But yeah, it's a problem. Economically though, sorry, it's a passion point. Because I think we've all grown up thinking that solar on our rooftop is a little microcosm of how good renewables are and that this scales up to the whole economy. And so if I'm saving money from my rooftop solar panels, it must work well. And this must scale to the whole system. And unfortunately, those extra steps, they just do not follow through. Funnily enough, there is a perfect quote from Anthony Albanese. I don't know word for word, but he says literally that in one of his speeches. He says, "Just like it works for a household, solar works for our nation." All right? So this is just, again, such absurd ignorance of systems design and economics. But even in the solar households, unfortunately, it's okay for you to be rewarded if you're genuinely bringing down other costs for the systems. Okay? So you can be paid. You can save money off your bills and even get something paid back to the extent of the value that you bring to the overall system. That would be good. Unfortunately, the tragic news is that at the moment in Australia, people with rooftop solar are benefiting much, much more than that. They're actually benefiting from shifting costs onto other people's electricity bills. Okay? There's two ways this happens, all right? One of the ways is all the poles and wires in the street and the transmission, all right? All the fixed costs in the systems that you still need when the sun is not there, or even if you have batteries, if you have a shady day or two and you finally switch on your, you know, need to draw power from the grid, that happens on the same day that everyone else with the battery needs to do the same thing. So everyone fails at the same time. You still need that system there to exactly the same degree. You can't scale back every, you know, you can't take out every third power pole in the street just because, you know, you get every third hour of your energy from the sun, right? That doesn't work that way. So by you saving on your power bills, consumptions, you're actually not contributing your fair share to the upkeep of the poles and wires. So that's shifting costs onto other people. So why did power bills go up over the last 10 or 15 years? Well, guess what actually? Part of that is the increase of solar. Less kilowatt hours sold to people to maintain the same fixed costs of the grid. The price per unit overall for everyone else still consuming it has to drift up. That's part of what has happened, which is a real tragedy. And the other one is on the wholesale cost. When you're a solar user, you never buy power when it's really cheap because you've got solar panels on. You're producing their power. You're a power producer when power is cheap and totally abundant, all right? So all the other people that your electricity retailer has to serve that doesn't have solar power, they sometimes at least buy power when it's dirt cheap. So the average cost of actually selling the electricity to a solar householder is actually higher per kilowatt hour consumed. At the moment, all the energy companies just simply cross-subsidize and smear it out across their entire customer base. So unfortunately, people have loved solar and adopted it on the illusion of an overall economic advantage, but actually a whole bunch of it is shifting costs onto other people as opposed to actually removing costs for the whole system. So it's a tragedy and it's extremely politically popular, rooftop solar, but it's one of those things that if we want to be actually hard-headed and look at the engineering and economic realities, which we must be if we're going to have a reliable electricity system, we're going to have to confront the hard truth that we've actually overcompensated people for their rooftop solar. And to have a truly fair go, they're going to need to be less well compensated, which will make solar less popular, which will be good for actually the energy system and slow down the other headaches that solar is introducing.
[01:06:44] Speaker 7: We just gave the opportunity for a few people to send questions in. So I'll just read them out as a bit of a backup for questions. The first one was from Bill Travers from Gundy. We know renewables are not cheap to build. We know they don't lower retail energy prices and we know they aren't good for the environment, yet the government is obsessed with sticking to their policy targets. How do we shift the energy debate from a policy discussion to an objective discussion based on engineering and economics?
[01:07:12] Speaker 2: Fantastic question from Bill. This is a really, really good question. I think about it long and hard because it seems like you know all the information, and I feel like you can go through and find the facts, and yet it doesn't seem to permeate. And still, it's popular for people to argue that, no, this is cheaper. It'll get there soon. We're doing it for the right reasons. And so I think the only way that we can do this is to make it impossible for people to keep basically lying, all right? That is basically what it is now. The claim that this is a lower cost system is just downright dishonest, okay? So there has to be consequences, unfortunately, for people. And so call out politicians by all means, all right? But the other thing that I will say is that I think there are also cases where the institutions and the bureaucrats that we've been given have let us down badly and occasionally done things that literally break the mandates, the rules, the laws that say what their job is to do, all right? And so I think unless people can understand why they thought something was a good thing before and how that's not become a good thing today, the answer is you were told something rubbish before, right? It was actually a nonsense, okay? And so I think it would help people to get around that fact if they actually knew they were told a lie, a furphy. The biggest one, my favorite one, is the integrated system plan, all right? And I've got slides on this somewhere. I could probably – I might even see if this wakes up. I can show you. But the ISP is claimed by many people to be the document that proves that renewables are cheapest because it's announced every year with a heap of fanfare to the effect of this, all right? So this is the sort of fanfare it gets, okay? Daniel Westerman. As with previous reports, the plan shows the lowest cost path for secure and reliable electricity is from renewable energy, backed up by this, plus, plus, plus, plus, all the wires, the poles, the affirming source, et cetera. So he's saying that this is actually false and misleading. The fine print is that's a comma. That's a comma just there, not a full stop, all right? And if you read where this is put in print – and this is from a YouTube caption, I think, right? But it makes all the social media. If you read where this is in actually the full print in the actual documents, they say something like this and then go on to fill it out and say, in accordance with policy targets or on our way to net zero, which is actually code for them saying, we never tested anything else other than the renewable energy pathway the government has laid out in front of us. So that, in my mind, is a travesty. This is how it's worked. So back in 2020, the ISP, they had a big range of scenarios about how fast we might or could or should adopt renewable energy, all right? And there's a central one, and then there's a fast one, and then there's a step change one, all right? None of them got anywhere near 82% renewable energy by 2030. None of them, all right? That was off the charts, unthinkable, so to speak. And yet, in 2022, a whole range of targets, the political momentum around emissions reductions grew, and they imposed a bunch of targets for emissions to reach net zero at that point by 2050, and it shifted up the spread. But again, only the hydrogen superpower, which is totally disgraced, reached over 82% in that time. But then the government in 2024, they made an official policy. They made an official policy that we had to hit 82% renewable energy, all right? And guess what? The market operator said, well, you know what? That means we have to model everything achieving 82% renewable energy by 2030, okay? So, of course, they're not testing against actually what it means to adopt some nuclear or leave coal running a bit longer because they have assumed their job is to only model government policy, all right? Now, in my opinion, this is actually a breach of a very clear obligation to consider all the parts of the objectives for the energy system. And they're a thing. They're written down in law. There's a black letter bit that spells that out. And concerns about price are not meant to be demoted or subordinated to concerns about emissions reductions. They're meant to be considered in conjunction. And the market operator here is absolutely doing that. And they're telling us very clearly because we requested a change to this. We requested put in a bloody baseline, right? Economics 101. What do you do, cost-effective analysis? Do a neutral baseline to see what things cost, right? What's the alternative? They've refused, point blank. Said they would not contemplate addressing a scenario that does not include meeting all these government targets. So, this institution has been forced, or they claim they're forced, to simply just follow the mould. And yet, a whole bunch of politicians now say, look, the experts back our plan. No, they just repeated back your plan to you. They did not actually back your plan. In fact, explicitly they said, and I think there's even quotes here from, all right, this is it, from a Senate hearing. The ISP is not a tool to evaluate government policy. Damn. We all thought it was, right? So, it's a tool to say what needs to be delivered in order for that government policy to succeed, okay? There is absolutely no doubt this is crystal clear. It's been worked through in a whole bunch of different ways. So, we have been terribly misled by these institutions who we all thought were doing a proper comparison, and they never were. And I think we need to, we need to expose that. And when people understand they've been lied to, maybe then they can actually change their opinion, have permission to change their minds about what the right way forward is.
[01:12:41] Speaker 8: Thanks very much, Aidan, John, and Chris, a great introduction. I just wanted to follow on, I think, from Bill's question before, because that was a good introduction, as many people in this room have been sort of battling in the trenches over years, trying to work out how we best convince the government that their policies are either wrong, or their misstatements or misinformation or just outright lies. And that doesn't tend to work. You can throw that at them for however long you like. Nothing sort of bounces. But I like sort of where Chris was going a little bit in, in terms of, okay, when we have a look back at what drove Matt Keane in 2017 and 18 was the fear factor, coming out with the, okay, we're gonna, the lights are gonna turn out, so Liddell's gonna close or Araring's gonna close in 2025. It's now looked at it at 2029. And I guess to some extent we're in the hands of Origin Energy in terms of when that's gonna happen. But how do we best arm up when we throw, when, when Penny Sharp throws that back at say, the Guardians, this is all about the fact that we have to do this. What, what, what, what do you think is, is the best way to go and combat that?
[01:14:02] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, I think you have to arm up. I think that's right. I, I'll share a little, I share a little quote that came from someone who I have, I suppose, an admiration for how brutally effective. But on the other side, there's a, there's a guy that used to run the Smart Energy Council called John Grimes. And the Smart Energy Council is the lobby group for basically battery and solar manufacturers, right? And so he's doing a swan song in the last few weeks because he has created a new job to go international. He's been so spectacularly successful with the cheaper energy battery program. Okay. This is the subsidy that started $2.3 billion over four years. Blew through that budget in less than a year. And he got it extended to 7.6 billion, which is working it back from a trajectory about 14 billion. So he's made so much money in the last year for his group that he's now going out. So he's telling all these amazing stories about how he got change, how he got his policies in. And in a candid interview with Giles Parkinson, he recounted a story about visiting a politician back in the day on the blue team, the blue side of politics in New South Wales. And we can all probably guess who that might be. I know there's a blue team politician who's very much was there. He's a minister at the time. I've had his face up here earlier today. Idle speculation on my part. But John Grimes recounts a meeting and he said, like, you know, he came out, didn't feel like he was making progress. And that blue team politician came out to him and said, hey, John, I've got a tip for you. Political parties are organised crime. If you can't hurt us, you don't matter. And that's his justification for what has been an absolutely bruising and extremely combative stance that he's taken in politics through that lobby group. All the $600 billion numbers, that was that group that produced them for the nuclear alternative, etc. So he's been a controversial figure, but very effective. And I think that in this case, you have to take instances where people have made verifiable mistakes, right? Red lines have been crossed. Don't think too much about the high level, whether it's you've got moral justice on your side. Find some concrete instances where the letter of the law or mistakes are really on your side and really push back. Because there is not consequences for people breaking the law, bending the rules, making bad statements, incorrect statements, then they'll just keep going, all right? And the loudest voices will keep winning. So you have to call out and find those instances, I think, and really hold them to account. And for example, the mistakes that have been made in the past, I think people aren't aware, but Waratah's super battery. The purpose of that was just to allow Araring to close in 2025, right? Matt Keane signed us up to a purchase of a billion-dollar battery, basically, through five years of payments. It's a five-and-a-half-year contract, all right? So that Araring could close in 2025, all right? And now, those five years are going to go through till 2030. Four out of the five years, Araring is still going to be open, all right? So, absolutely the most catastrophic waste of money to invest in a five-year contract, paying $100 million at energy users' expense on a battery. I mean, unfortunately, he hasn't left policy. He's left politics. He's still in there. But his legacy, it's the most catastrophic failure of policy. I mean, if the opposition, if there's an opposition for that, would be having a field day. I should be having a field day on that. But yeah, concrete mistakes. I could be here all night talking about the things that you find and the details, but they'll have to swing back and really make some hay out of the catastrophic mistakes, because they're there. The breadcrumbs are all there about how badly these things can be done. And you can see the breadcrumbs here about how badly they're going to be done again. I hope that helps. Mark, thanks for your question. Great to see you.
[01:17:46] Speaker 9: Aidan and Chris, the other resource that we haven't got is water. Energy Co commissioned their own study and found that there were a 46 megalitre a day deficit in water during peak construction. Their own consultants summarised that water availability and water treatment as high risk with a red flag. Can somebody tell us why Energy Co are proceeding with this scale of development when they've been given a water warning as well as the other warnings?
[01:18:22] Speaker 2: That's an excellent question. And thank you very much for bringing it up and others. The sort of local information that I'm sometimes not aware of, hadn't noticed, but when you look at it, it absolutely checks out. And so I think it's the case that we need in certain parts of the res, sort of five or ten times, right? So big multiples of the amount of actual water available, in particularly the construction phase, all right? Because as you can imagine, these construction phase are huge civil works, massive amounts of concrete production, quarrying, blasting dust, et cetera, management. So the water in construction is enormous. And no, this area doesn't have that much for that huge women construction. Why are they doing it? Why are they carrying on? Because they committed to the policy, right? Like that is the only reason. Why would you carry on with any of this when the cost, et cetera? I mean, if you can ignore one thing, you can ignore anything. And these organizations are clearly saying they're just simply trying to save face. They committed one time ago and they cannot admit that they made a mistake or have got new information that changes the whole premise and cannot walk it back. So I think it is indefensible, just as it is for the overall cost, the constructability. The evidence is in. This is not a good idea. This was born out of basically a single individual, a small enterprise, walking around or talking to a couple of people in pubs and building up a bigger than Ben-Hur image of an extra four gigawatts of wind generation in this corner of the res that that developer could own. That propagated through to the minister who said, you know what? There's so much demand. Let's supersize the generation. And then by a slip of the pen, doubled that again through the network. So, of course, none of this checks out. If they were to follow the details and analyze what is the right amount to build up here, it would be no more than you already have probably, right? It is not a good plan. So, disgraceful. But you can see how they've got this far. And it's exactly the same reason. They're ignoring all the evidence that this is not going to work out.
[01:20:23] Speaker 10: Yeah. Aiden, over here, sorry. Aiden, can you please talk us through the financing of the transmission line project and then the ongoing ownership and then repayments that need to be made?
[01:20:36] Speaker 2: Excellent question. Yes. So, the financing is, for this type of project, perfectly and completely opaque. All right? So, there's a little back story here because transmission used to be a regulated monopoly. All right? So, it used to be there's one transmission company and you have to build a line and it's a big, long-lasting asset. And basically, we don't have competition between different vendors. We just sort of say, okay, it's a civil works, fairly sensible thing. Pick a route. Tell us you'll make a margin on it. Build it competently and you can make a margin on that. And they tell us how much the margin is, right? What's that return of capital, right? What's the way to average cost of capital? Now, this system has been blown apart, basically, in the Electricity Infrastructure Investment Act, the EII Act, which is the roadmap legislation. And the reason is this. The reason is, basically, TransGrid, which was the regulated monopoly, they've broken their business model because they were used to getting a fairly lean mean, six percent, all right? Regulated, transparent return on their investments. But when they were asked to go and build massive, big, new, multi-billion-dollar, huge, multi-hundred-kilometer investments, that created a different risk profile that they were not set up for, basically. And so, this happened in Project Energy Connect. I can give you all the fine print if you want. And they went, I'm pretty sure, I can't prove this, went to the New South Wales government and said, we need a bit more money, please. And the New South Wales government said, nah, you're bluffing. We'll go to market, all right? You don't need more money to build these huge, big greenfield projects, a better return, because of the increased cost or risk profile of a multi-billion-dollar project. And that's what the system currently is. The system currently is, is that they go out to market for every new res zone, all right? They've done it once for Central Westerana. And they went and said, who can build something? Guess what? I know for sure. TransGrid wasn't bluffing. The market came back and wanted a lot more than the normal regulated returns, all right? Because these are bigger and more complex projects. And they carry a lot more risk on the blowout of that cost. And so, they've gone out to market. And what has the government done in response? Kept the return on capital completely confidential, all right? It's a tightly held and guarded secret. So, they're going to go out, in the process of going out to market now, to say to a new consortium of engineering, construction companies, wherever in the world, and saying, how much do you think it'll cost to build this huge transmission line up into, you know, this is roughly twice as high up as the base station of the Snowy 2.0 scheme in the Snowy Mountains, right? So, how much do you think it'll cost to build up here with the helicopter lifts and that? And they will come up with a number. And they will put in their own risk-weighted, expected return on capital, right? And tell you what, it's not 6%, all right? It's going to be 9, 10, and we will never know what that return on capital is under the current financing arrangements, all right? So, that's how it's done for these ones under the Electricity Infrastructure Investment Act. The minister declares it's needed. There is a rubber stamping process to say it's in accordance with policy, and I won't go into that. But then they go out to market, and the market says how much of a return they want. And it can be any amount, and we will never know, all right, how much money they're making on these projects, how much they need to get built. Okay. So, for the Central West Irana Res, question about who owns it, and at the moment in Central West Irana, this is the first run, it will be a consortium called ACE Res, all right? They will build the asset. They will own it, all right? They'll be operating it for 35 years. They basically will get paid an agreed return, which we don't have full visibility on. We don't know the size of the margin that's in that either. 35 years at the end, basically, they will be able to sell it back to the government, all right? And the government will have basically first dibs on buying it back off them. I haven't got a particularly clear picture on how they figure out what the price will be at the end of that asset's life, or the government will strike a new deal. I think it's open for them to strike a new deal as well, for them to continue owning and operating it, which is plausible as well. So, very unclear. I hope that answers the question there.
[01:24:47] Speaker 7: So, you've summarised the premise of the question, but it finished with another question relating to how does that allow, or how do we prevent the risk of gold plating when a lot of this system is so opaque, and a lot of the returns to those construction businesses are related around the cost of build?
[01:25:09] Speaker 2: I don't think there is any particularly - I can't see how we can prevent gold plating in this case. I mean, the specifications are not particularly clear exactly how and why they pick every element of the transformer or whether a line runs parallel or could be done more efficiently. No, I think there is no way of really doing that. EnergyCo are meant to be the trusted experts that get this sort of design right and take it out to contract. But you've seen how they have gone on the route choice, et cetera. I don't think we can trust that very well. And explicitly, certainly in terms of how they bid and the financing, the regulator has to sign off that there was a competitive process, all right? So, they have to say they went to market and there was competition in that process. But whatever those players come back with in terms of their price, if there was a competitive process, is assumed to be acceptable and in the consumer's interest. So, no, I think it was a real, again, a massive strategic error to blow apart the regulated monopoly and have this system introduced. The regulated monopoly should have been extended and we would have had to be honest with ourselves that bigger projects require more payments to cover the larger levels of risk. And we would have seen clearer earlier on that this whole endeavour was going to cost a whole bunch more. But there's nothing wrong with the regulated monopoly system we had before. And it was a huge, strategic error to do what we're currently doing.
[01:26:33] Speaker 11: Aidan, thank you very much for your presentation. Brilliant. Thank you. Now, you did mention that Matt Keane said that if we're going to do something about get results, we need to stick the knife in and twist it. Now, which means that we've got to go at it in a legal way and what have you. How does a small community like ours get the funds to support the legal people and fees and stuff that are going to be involved in this? And you've been speaking about the vast sums of money that they have to throw at the project. So, obviously, we'd be just a little speed hump. Yeah. Thanks.
[01:27:10] Speaker 2: Yeah, really good question. I have to pass the hat around, I suppose. This has been done in various other places. And I've talked to other communities, including Victoria. They've mounted challenges to transmission lines, etc. My only advice is that there can be a world of difference between you making what you feel like is the most morally strong case, all right, to say this is how pained we are and aggrieved we are by a particular process, and you finding the most legally strong case. And so, I just think it's worth being totally clear-eyed about that. And I've seen multiple efforts by motivated communities, and often they can raise a bit of money and have a go. People are passionate here. But don't make your legal case your sob story for how bad things are you exactly here. Figure out one particular chink in their armour that might be just adjacent or might be a technicality or might relate to some other economics and go after that and make yourselves known that way. And so, be smart. It's, yeah, the legal case. Find a strong legal case and twist the knife. And if you want to talk to me about where I think there are a few, in particular, the glaring, the glaring problem now is the government has said they're going to, their legal requirement is a declared zone at eight gigawatts. And I'm absolutely sure. They've denied it. I'm absolutely sure. They can't do that with the two lines. So, that might be an opening. I'm not a lawyer and, you know, but, but yeah, find technicalities on which they fall down. Don't, don't run to the courts with your sob story about how bad it is for you, because that doesn't win. You need to, you need to find the right angle. John's, John's pointed this out that there's been deliberate efforts by people to try to annihilate, in particular, the coal industry. And there was a huge movement. It's now quite well documented. Some amazing work that's been done by the Page Research Centre to bring these forward and put them into parliamentary inquiries. But to the tune of $100 million a year, mostly international funding, has set up organisations, including the Sunrise Institute, Sunrise Group, Sunrise Project, the Sunrise Project. And a part of their strategy, and it's a full integrated strategy, is to try to increase the costs and delay projects through a campaign of lawfare, as well as targeting the social licence for coal, as well. So, anyway, people have played all these tricks very effectively and with huge amounts of money. And they are targeting individual projects, left, right and centre, just try to raise the cost in the courts all the time to try to push things out. There's one that's been heard recently, I'm not necessarily saying it's linked to them financially, but on whether a coal mine extension needs to consider in the application, the scope through emissions, which is the environmental impact of that coal being burnt somewhere else in the world, in China, for example. So, yeah, honestly, the radical left in pursuing climate agenda, which I regard as being quite, you know, not evidence-based, I think it is an ideological pursuit, have been ruthless and extremely well supplied financially to pursue these sorts of things, and have made it quite effective. But I find it a little bit sad that, honestly, the conservative movement, or people just after a slightly more considered approach to how you build energy, are very shy, very reluctant. And I think I've heard some conservative politicians saying, wouldn't it be good if we removed all those restrictions in the law and so you could ram through good projects that produce good energy? The shoe is on the other foot, all right? You know, at the moment, this movement is trying to ram through the most completely economically unjustified and very environmentally destructive things, and they have not got their house and their paperwork in order, in my opinion, and they contradict themselves left, right and centre in that process. So, yes, I think it is time to lawyer up if people are up for that fight. It should be done, because the other side have done it to great effect for a very long time.
[01:31:08] Speaker 4: Two things I think Australia should really have a look at now is preferential voting. If you don't get your heads around that, these naive parties that get in and hold us all to ransom, and, Chris, you made the comment that we – well, 30% of us probably didn't vote for Ulvo and another 30 probably didn't. This preferential voting thing is let these tree-hugging little pricks get away with it. And that snivelly little bloke is going to get some international award for being a toad. So I was advised by Energy Co. last week that if I wanted to take them on for the few hundred thousand dollar loss that they're going to potentially cause my wife and I in business, that I should lawyer up, but it wouldn't be in my best advantage. So Australia, I can only say this, and Barnaby, I think this is not directed at you, but it's all at the major parties. You blokes are pushing shit uphill with a brick. And it ain't going to happen unless you get somebody like Cameron, whatever his name is in Queensland, a Labor strategist, to get behind your party and be able to sell the bullshit that these fellas are selling us. Because we're so far up this gully now, we won't get a chance to come back. And this communistic government that's here now – and it's my opinion, if you don't agree, we'll talk about it outside – but we're in deep shit here. And unless you guys get your head around this preferential voting thing, Queensland just lost an LNP seat because of some tree hugger. Now, we need to stop that. And we need to get people into Liberal National Party, One Nation, who are going to have a strategist there that can throw this shit back at these people. And if you want to stop the lies, get rid of these minority parties that are going to cause us grief. And that's the reason why today, as far as I believe there's two Liberal National Party people have changed to One Nation. And I think the writing's on the wall. If you want this security and you want this free life, get your heads out of the sand and work this preferential voting out, because it is what's killing you. And I'm sorry to bring it up, but that's what's going to happen.
[01:33:15] Speaker 2: I'll take that as a comment.
[01:33:19] Speaker 12: Thank you very much for the presentation. It's terrific. This might go to John a little bit. A few years ago, Huawei was blocked from the telecommunication project in this country because of national security. Potentially, could there be a national security aspect of this because most of this technology is coming from one source and it's not Australian manufactured. Is that a threat to our energy security in this country?
[01:33:53] Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you. I'll add something first. Happy for John to comment as well. But I know that it is a concern because a lot of the inverters and electronics, I mean, there's a lot of suspicion about whether there's separate little communication devices inserted and actually there have been instances of that found and bands put on certain companies, et cetera, in Europe. But it's actually even simpler than that. A lot of these devices require software updates to occur in order to keep running. And if you don't get the software update, they just stop, all right? So, extremely easy to actually make this something that falls over in a heap. So, we should be concerned. Absolutely. Those big, boring spinning machines, they run in a way that we can see and control quite a lot more easily. So, I think it's reason to be quite concerned about that. John, do you want to comment too?
[01:34:43] Speaker 3: Well, only in as much as you indicated, I might have something to say about it. You know, Malcolm Turnbull did a great thing, one of them anyway, or did one, and that was recognising the work that had been done by Australian security people into the dangers that Huawei presented and they were banned. And eventually the Americans followed suit and eventually the Europeans, the only people still toying. This is an interesting insight, and embedding Huawei into their national telecommunications network amongst the Western countries is Italy, because Huawei is offering to do it for about a quarter of the price of all of the other majors. And you can see how that sort of stuff plays out. So, the British security agencies have expressed concern that if you had 100,000 electric vehicles on the roads throughout the UK from a certain country and they chose to shut them all down, you'd bring Britain to an economic and social nightmare. Americans and Brits are considering banning people who are in security sensitive areas from buying Chinese motor cars, but we've just lifted the restriction then, so MPs everywhere can drive on Chinese cars. So, just a couple of broad comments. We are talking about an environmental, economic and national security nightmare, and plead with our leaders, plead with them to accept the premier responsibilities that are theirs. And I just reiterate again, our forebears gave us the world's best constitution and best institutions when they set up the federation, and their primary objective was our safety. And we have to, the one bit of leverage that I think people might understand. I tried it in Melbourne this week, with about 70 inner city Melbournians, to simply say to them, "Do you realise you now live in a food insecure country?" What do you mean? But we cannot, I mean, people worry about petrol prices. Petrol gets you to work, picks the kids up out of school, important things, but it's diesel that feeds you, and it's gas-produced fertiliser that feeds you. And by the way, all of our crop protection chemicals now, none of them are locally produced. We are no longer a food secure nation. We have to win for the sake of the Australian people, against the odds, and so our appeal has to be to calm reason, and a denial of this appalling, emotionally driven ideology that has taken hold, and has grown like a cancer. And our forebears would be ashamed of what we've become of a country. And that we as a nation should ask the Filipinas, and the Indonesians, to provide us with some fuel and some fertiliser. And that we should go to China, which is prepared for an oil shock and put down 1300 days of supply, while we have about 20. What have we become?
[01:38:07] Speaker 13: Thank you all for coming. I think a massive applause for Aiden. And also for John for this. I'm sure that like a lot of you, we probably never thought we'd be so interested in talking about energy. And thank you for making it so interesting and informative. Lots of big kind of shocks there. I think I'm sure for lots of people in the room around how this kind of was conceptualised and where we've gotten to. I think that we can really clearly say that unfortunately, energy salesmen sold a pipe dream to the government, including Walker Wind, that then was used to declare something that just now is not fit for purpose. And we are going to be pushing really hard to make sure that is known to this government and to all of our state and country. And I think there's a movement happening and we're seeing that movement and we've kind of just got to keep pushing hard. And so we're going to be calling on our community obviously a lot over the next, you know, well, particularly before the election, but in an ongoing fashion. So I hope everyone stays on board. Locally, I forgot to mention earlier as well that, you know, the state government, Minister Sharpe also in the desperation to kind of keep moving this process forward. Last week offered 60 million dollars across all the councils. I'm sure some people were quite concerned about that. Our council have a mayoral minute that is directly opposed to this transmission corridor. And I believe that they also need to start thinking a little bit further about the reduction of the res considering what Aidan said tonight. And I encourage all of you to keep talking to your councillors who are to represent the constituents of this town. So make sure that your voices are heard to our council. And I really hope that skerrick of money that is offered is refused because what's 12 million dollars going to be for the size of this disaster economically, environmentally, not just for our town, but for our whole state. And so, you know, let's see what our council do at a local level, but this is much bigger than that.