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Australians are already feeling the cost of the ‘renewable’ transition, but there are far higher costs to come, according to Chris Uhlmann’s new documentary ‘The Real Cost of Net Zero’.

Australia could have some of the cheapest energy in the world, yet our power bills rank among the most expensive.

This is just one of the powerful truths veteran journalist Chris Uhlmann drives home in his new Sky News documentary ‘The Real Cost of Net Zero: The shocking truth of the renewable energy push’.

First aired on the 27th of November, Uhlmann’s investigative foray has since garnered almost a quarter of a million views on YouTube.

I must admit that energy is not a topic in which I have taken a serious interest — until very recently.

Two things changed that.

Number one, I returned to Australia from the United States earlier this year and began paying Aussie power bills for the first time in years. Yikes.

Number two, I normally commentate on issues more closely connected to family, marriage, life and freedom. But at a time when families can barely afford to pay their power bills — and the price of Australian energy is contributing to a historic cost-of-living crisis — all of these precious values come under threat.

In other words, through its zealous pursuit of ‘net zero’, the Albanese government has transposed the energy debate into a cultural debate — and that’s my home territory.

Labor’s arbitrary goal of making Australian energy 80% ‘renewable’ by 2030 — more than doubling our output of wind, solar and hydro within six years — comes packaged in the promise that our electricity will be greener and cheaper.

Uhlmann begs to differ, and his insightful documentary challenges much of the political spin Australians have been sold.

Here are six things I learned from ‘The Real Cost of Net Zero’.

1. Australia could have cheap energy if we wanted it

“Down there is a brown coal seam,” Uhlmann narrates from a perch overlooking the Latrobe Valley. “It’s been powering Victoria for the last 100 years and it could go on powering Victoria for another 800, but we’ve decided we’re not using it anymore.”

Australia’s abandonment of coal is of course in response to fears over climate change — and Uhlmann doesn’t directly contest those fears (though I have elsewhere).

But he does contest the speed at which that abandonment is taking place.

“Ten Australian coal-fired power stations closed in the last decade,” he warns. “There are 15 still running but most are slated to close in the next 10 years.”

Later in the show, Uhlmann interviews Tania Constable, CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia, who notes that in prior decades, “We were around about the fourth lowest OECD country in the world in terms of our power generation.” Now we are among the most expensive.

Worst of all, it is currently illegal to build a nuclear power plant in Australia, even though our continent is home to over a quarter of the world’s uranium reserves.

Cheap power could be ours if we wanted it, Uhlmann suggests, but current political fads have put that reality out of reach.

2. ‘Renewables’ are unreliable even over long periods

The convenience of coal, oil and gas can hardly be overstated. Because they can be mined, transported and accessed on site at power plants, these fuels can essentially guarantee electricity on demand around the clock.

By contrast, it goes without saying that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, so wind and solar generation is inherently intermittent — and no amount of human activity can change that.

“On average across a year, the best performing onshore wind farms will deliver about 40% of their maximum capacity,” Uhlmann explains.

While I was under the impression that the intermittency of wind and solar was mostly seen over short periods like days or weeks, fluctuations in these power sources can in fact last months. For example, Uhlmann notes that from April to June of 2024, the capacity of those same wind farms fell to 26%.

In the words of University of Queensland Professor Stephen Wilson, whom Uhlmann also interviewed, “We’re replacing… almost always available generation with generation that’s only available for a very small fraction of the time.”

“We’re creating artificial scarcity all over the place, and when you create scarcity, you drive up the price,” he adds.

Uhlmann concludes: “Energy scarcity emerges everywhere wind and solar become the dominant form of generation.”

3. ‘Renewables’ have massive hidden costs

Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen has claimed that “renewable energy is incredibly cheap because its fuel is free — because it’s the sunshine and the wind.”

Uhlmann exposes Bowen’s claim as a storybook interpretation at best.

The electricity grid must be kept at a specific frequency to prevent blackouts and wide-scale damage to equipment. Managing this frequency is simple enough with coal, oil and gas because power plants can simply burn the correct quantities of fuel to meet these demands.

Wind and solar, by contrast, must be supplemented by a vast life support system to store excess energy created by sunny and windy days, and to recover that energy on cloudy or still days. Batteries and hydro plants come with a hefty price tag that is rarely discussed.

Even then, massive quantities of natural gas are still needed as a final backstop to cover the daily fluctuations created by wind and solar generation.

As Uhlmann reveals, this last fact reveals the highest cost of all.

Contrary to Chris Bowen’s claim, what sets the price in the wholesale energy market isn’t wind or solar but the last gas or coal-fired generator needed to meet demand. This is known as the “marginal cost” principle, where the most expensive generator required to balance supply and demand sets the price for all electricity sold in the wholesale market.

Thus, while wind and solar have low operational costs, they will only ever be part of a power grid whose price is set by many other complex factors.

For more on the hidden costs of renewables, watch this short presentation by Gerard Holland of Page Research Centre at the recent ARC Australia conference:

4. Wind farms destroy the environment

While it’s hardly news that the erection of wind farms requires vast tracts of scrub to be cleared, Uhlmann’s realism about the Albanese government’s goals is sobering.

“Chris Bowen has publicly said that we need one of these turbines erected every 14 hours [for the next six years]… in order to hit the government’s renewable energy target,” Uhlmann explains, as a camera pans backwards to reveal three towering windmills carved into an otherwise pristine panorama in the Atherton Tablelands.

“They will march across the landscape from sea to shining sea in their thousands, transforming it forever.”

Almost 22,000 such turbines are currently proposed, says Uhlmann. Another hidden environmental cost of this new power network is the vast transmission lines that will soon criss-cross the Australian countryside to connect such a decentralised grid.

The environmental damage this giddy project will unleash on Australia is surely one of the government’s best kept secrets.

5. The Albanese government is using subsidies to hide its own broken promises

At the beginning of his term, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Australians that “electricity prices [will] fall from the current level by $275 for households by 2025”.

Instead, the opposite has happened — and Australians are now paying up to $1000 more for their energy bills.

“It was a promise so wide of the mark that the federal government is now subsidising everyone’s electricity bill,” Uhlmann declares.

This subsidy is listed as “Australian Government Energy Bill Relief” on energy bills — and while it might feel like relief every quarter, it is a cost still covered by taxpayers.

It is difficult to overstate how cynical this tactic is — charging taxpayers to hide your own government’s broken promises.

6. Our government is driving us towards poverty

“The old electricity system delivered power for between $20 and $40 a megawatt hour,” Uhlmann recalls.

He then refers to Stephen Wilson, who has tried to calculate the cost of the new system, and has reached a figure of at least $200 per megawatt hour.

Couple this cost with the fact that we’re still only running at half the pace needed to meet Labor’s 2030 deadline, and its crystal clear that Australians will soon be driven into poverty by the cost of power.

It’s not just quarterly energy bills where Australians will feel the pain, but almost every other cost, since electricity is needed to produce the food, clothing and other commodities we rely on for daily life.

The red lights are everywhere, Uhlmann warns. Australia’s renewables transition is going off the rails, as state governments pay coal plants to extend their lives and as our country builds gas import hubs to meet acute demands, even though our own gas fields in Australia are bountiful.

The poverty being architected in the name of net zero might not be intentional, but it is entirely foreseeable and avoidable.

In my view, it is only a matter of time before the majority of Australians, including our current leaders, will shake their heads at the net zero madness that has temporarily overtaken our country.

The only question is how long it takes for the regrets to set in — and how poor Australian families will become in the meantime.

Watch ‘The Real Cost of Net Zero’ here.