Power bills will come down

of course they will! The Prime Minister has promised us! We were promised a drop of $275 by 2025.

And people believed him. We had a change of government. The new government was going to solve all the climate change issues. We were going to be world leaders in renewable energy. People were going to be able to afford electric vehicles and there would be charging stations right across the country. Solar panels on rooftops would be feeding so much electricity into the grid that we would have sufficient for domestic use. The wind turbines were going to run industry across the country. Oh yes, it would take a little while but it could be done without bankrupting the country.

Now that the government has been installed it is a different story of course. They are apparently not to blame at all for the expected minimum 35% rise in power bills next year. Suddenly it is "the war in Ukraine" and the failure of the big power generators to get on with the job of supplying power with "renewables" and...and... 

And no, you must not mention the "N" word  - nuclear power is not an option. Even if it was an option in one way it apparently costs too much and takes a decade to build just one nuclear power plant.  Right now of course we can't even find somewhere to store nuclear waste - so what little we have gets stored at the facility for nuclear medicine in the middle of a very large city.

I am more than a bit tired of all this. The idea of "renewable" energy is not the panacea it appears to be. There are genuine problems with the production and disposal of solar panels and wind turbines. There are genuine problems with the supply and distribution of the power they do manage to generate. Power bills were never going to come down even if all this worked - and the experience in Europe shows us that the demand for energy is far greater than the "renewables" alone can provide. 

I also know the nuclear option is problematic but it seems there is very little research going into solving those problems. Why aren't we researching nuclear fusion? Yes, it is a very difficult issue but if the problems could be solved then fusion might go a long way towards solving the world's energy needs.

Perhaps I am just too pessimistic but I really don't see all this "climate change activism" working. Certainly our power bills are not going to go down....but, wait a moment...didn't the Prime Minister promise us they would?