If renewable energy and the related infrastructure was...

If renewable energy and the related infrastructure was commercially self-sustainable, they wouldn't need taxpayer money to bring them into being.

All those ambit claims about renewable power being so cheap; at no stage did those assertions include the requirement for taxpayer money to be applied to bringing them into being. Anything can be done cheaply if free money was to be had from the government.

In terms of the financial returns from investing in polysilicon manufacturing in Australia, can you point to the feasibility study IRRs on any of those investments?

Next, the matter of power in a power constrained country: Clue me this: what is the melting temperature of silicon dioxide, and where will the power come from to fuel the Siemens furnaces that will be required to produce just the polysilicon feedstock, let alone the wafers, cells and modules?

As for Quinbrook investing in polysilicon manufacturing in Australia, you know that's not Quinbrook's money, don't you? They are merely project and asset managers who clip the ticket while managing the capital of global investors. A bit like a Macquarie Bank, but these are specialists focusing on profiting from the Great Green Grift. (Like so many

Besides, the project hasn't quite been committed to; it's merely a proposal and has been a proposal for a number of years (no doubt, a long-standing proposal until sufficient support could be leveraged out of the ideological plutocracy to get it across the line).

So why should Australian taxpayer money go to subsidising the investment returns of global investors such as Quinbrook’s international clients? Why can’t the project stand on its own two feet?

As for your endorsement of governments acting as first-principle capital allocators, that might be the catchcry in centrally planned (i.e. Socialist) economies, but it's laughable given the massive body of evidence about how governments waste and misallocate money.

The last people self-respecting and economically literate citizens would want picking economic winners with their tax dollars are politicians. (Just one case in point: how's that Great Hydropower Dream in the Sky, Snowy Mark II, going? Increasingly, a wholesale disaster, one picked by the politicians playing the role of ideological capital allocator?)

As for the economic merits of renewables, let's look at the following cold hard facts:

1. Australia currently has the highest penetration of renewable energy it has ever had.

2. Power bills are currently at record prices (to the extent that taxpayer money has to be distributed to households to alleviate the pain).

(And we've heard all the excuses for this: Russia's invasion of Ukraine causing coal and prices to go through the roof; yet thermal coal prices have fallen but still power bills remain very elevated. Elevated to the extent that the government has had to step in directly to help people play their power bills. But renewables, they said. So cheap, they said).

As for your alternatives of Dispose of Waste vs Dump Waste in Open Lots, that's as churlish as it is a flawed analogy. The alternatives to renewable energy aren't equivalent to dumping waste in open lot; there are other alternatives, such as nuclear, gas (which is where, begrudgingly, even Labor is being forced to head, driven by the immutable laws of physics, chemistry and economics), carbon capture and sequestration.

In closing, the poster child for renewable energy in the OECD is Germany's "Energiewiende" policies.

Here's the outworking of not having sufficient dispatchable, baseload power.... hollowed out manufacturing and economic capability:


(Oh, and that sorry picture is compounded by the fact German households pay a 21% renewable surcharge as well as a 25% grid surcharge, so their power bills are increased by more than 85%.

85% higher power bills in exchange for an economy that is contracting.

Viva Renewables, eh?


No amount of manic-eyed, frothing-at-the-mouth, ideological trolling on the internet will be able to alter the fact that, in the battle between Blinkered Ideology and The Laws of Physics and Economics, Physics and Economics remain undefeated.


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