For 15 minutes on Sunday morning, ABC local radio listeners were treated to a rant from Dick Smith as the millionaire attacked Australia’s transition away from fossil fuels, claiming renewables would make electricity unaffordable and cause sweeping blackouts.
“It seems we have been sold a pup and we are not getting the full truth all the time,” responded Ian McNamara, the host of Australia All Over. “There are lots of people who will back you up.”
But Smith’s diatribe was a mix of straw man arguments, incorrect claims and, at times, some laughable false equivalences.
McNamara has hosted Australia All Over since 1985. The show, heavy on folksy Australiana “from Broome to Botany Bay”, is something of an institution on ABC local radio around the country.
Smith told McNamara – known as “Macca” – that CSIRO estimates of the cost of solar and wind had ignored the cost of storing their power in batteries. He claimed factoring this in would show that electricity from a renewables-dominated grid would be “unaffordable”.
Except the CSIRO estimates of the cost of electricity from solar and wind, explained in its GenCost report, do include an allowance for extra costs associated with storing that power and the extra transmission infrastructure and other engineering that’s needed to integrate them into the grid.
That report finds even with those costs included, electricity from solar and wind is the cheapest.
McNamara offered some of his own misinformed views, saying he had heard the UK wanted to ban offshore windfarms.
In fact, the British government earlier this year awarded contracts to nine offshore windfarms. A defacto ban on onshore windfarms in the UK was lifted this year.
McNamara also said Australians have the “most........