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Australia’s new ‘renewables’ power plan beggars belief.

There was a time when politicians promised cheaper electricity.

Then they promised cleaner electricity.

Now they’ve settled on something much more achievable… teaching Australians to enjoy sitting in the dark.

According to the latest energy wisdom, we’ve been a unreasonable in expecting electricity to work every time we flick the switch.

An article in Wednesday’s Adelaide Advertiser encourages South Australians to be open to “occasional” power outages if they want lower power bills…

Power Outages the Solution to Cheaper Renewable Energy?

Adelaide University energy expert Daniel Rossetto told journalists that ensuring renewables were reliable was expensive. But there was a solution.

He asked…

“Are we prepared to take little more outage time in exchange for lower prices?”

After all, the expert in global environmental and energy commodity markets says, reliability is expensive.

How terribly selfish of us.

Imagine applying this revolutionary thinking elsewhere.

Can’t afford a reliable ambulance?

Perhaps we should embrace the occasional heart attack without paramedics.

Road maintenance costing too much?

We can drive costs down by agreeing that every third bridge is aspirational.

The beauty of modern government is that every policy failure becomes a character flaw in the public.

If the lights go out, it’s not because decades of energy policy have produced a fragile and expensive system.

No, it’s because Karen in Adelaide insists on boiling the kettle during a heatwave.

The nerve.

We’ve gone from “renewables will make power cheaper” to “power will still be expensive, but at least you’ll develop resilience by eating dinner with candles”.

It’s less an energy policy than a Victorian-era lifestyle program.

The remarkable thing isn’t that someone suggested Australians tolerate blackouts. It’s that they said it with a straight face.

Imagine the marketing campaign.

“Electricity 2026: Now available most of the time.”

Measuring Progression by Regression?

Perhaps the next innovation will be subscription tiers.

Bronze Package: Your lights work Monday to Thursday.

Silver Package: Air conditioning permitted on alternate weekends.

Gold Package: Electricity whenever you need it – available exclusively to Labor cabinet ministers.

When I was a kid we didn’t applaud the toaster for working. It was considered a bare minimum.

Now electricity has become a luxury item.

The real masterpiece, though, is asking people to pay more while receiving less. That’s the sort of business model that would make a used-car salesman blush.

Perhaps that’s the future Australia has chosen: a nation where we celebrate technological progress by learning to live exactly as our great-grandparents did — except with Wi-Fi that also drops out whenever the power does.

Progress, apparently, isn’t measured by how much your life improves.

It’s measured by how enthusiastically you applaud its decline.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report.