Originally published by Robert Gottliebsen of The Australian
13.04.2026
How on earth did Australia come to sign up to a $300bn to $350bn outlay on a renewables project that, partly because of high borrowing charges, will eventually cost $1 trillion spread over 35 years and lock our biggest states, NSW and Victoria, into exorbitant power prices for three decades?
It’s a very sad story that involves both Australia and the international community via the COP conferences. In this commentary I have isolated 11 steps that took us to the disaster.
● Step One: PM Malcolm Turnbull estimated the cost of the Snowy 2.0 project at $2bn. Later Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) estimated the cost of most of the transmission lines at $8.5bn. In both cases the final costs were in the order of 20 times the original estimate. Clearly both were pure guesses, but they lulled people into the belief that “renewables were cheap”, which was never fully challenged until the nation started building and designing what was required.
● Step Two: Believing renewables were “cheap”, we indulged in a massive local and global debate over emissions targets, both in the short and long term. COP conferences were a tragedy. Thousands of highly motivated environmentalists travelled to places like Paris and Brazil to establish targets in the belief that they were saving the planet. In fact, they were damaging outcomes because none of the conferences invited power generation experts, engineers, finance specialists and others to bring the best ideas from around the world as to how you would economically convert power systems to renewables.
In Australia we had our own version of that debate, as politicians were put under great pressure to agree to targets without any serious discussion of how much achieving those targets would cost or how they would be implemented.
● Step Three: With no direction from COP and other conferences, bizarre “renewable “projects began emerging around the world. The most bizarre was in Europe, where they declared that burning wood was equivalent to generating power with renewables. It was a nonsense, but in the name of achieving COP renewable targets, vast amounts of carbon were belched into the air and trees in Canada, the US and the Baltic were cut down to feed furnaces.
Leading the way was Denmark, which on a per capita basis appears to have one of the highest wood-burning schemes in the world. They are classed as “renewable”. Australians were very diplomatic and didn’t ask Queen Mary about this during her visit. She is no fool and would have known that burning wood increases carbon emissions rather than reducing them. The European “fiction” shattered global confidence in targets.
● Step Four: Unlike Europe, Australia’s schemes were a genuine attempt to use real renewables, but the methods were at best questionable. We planned to place wind turbines and solar panels in remote areas and then transport the power vast distances at enormous cost. Any “non-wood” renewable scheme needs to supply power 24 hours a day, and we turned our back on the cost implications of this.
● Step Five: Vitally important in the renewables push was the emergence of large numbers of what sceptics call “woke” voters in the inner suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. In blue-ribbon Liberal seats, so-called Teal candidates emerged. In ALP electorates, hard-line Greens gained strength. To counter these movements, both major parties adopted more extreme positions than they would normally have promoted.
● Step Six: The boards and senior managers of large international and local corporations also shifted in this direction. Globally, BP and Shell burned shareholder value until investors revolted. In Australia, many banks stopped lending to oil, coal and gas. Few in these institutions examined the full cost of the alternatives being proposed; instead, at board tables they repeated the slogan that “renewables are cheap”.
● Step Seven: Government bodies like AEMO and the CSIRO were caught in similar institutional thinking and produced estimates that appeared aligned with government expectations rather than fully tested realities.
● Step Eight: BHP decided to postpone the planned massive expansion of its copper, uranium and gold deposits in South Australia, partly because federal government-directed energy policies were replacing company-led decision making. These energy stipulations, combined with other factors, such as industrial relations, made the expansion uneconomic. Argentina welcomed BHP with open arms.
● Step Nine: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appointed Chris Bowen as Energy Minister. Bowen is a minister who, when he embraces an idea, devotes his energies to it while often ignoring opposing arguments. In the 2019 election, Bowen proposed curtailing franking credits using a policy that created winners and losers. Bill Shorten subsequently lost that election.
● Step Ten: Correctly, regulators established a “worst-case” energy strategy for periods when the sun didn’t shine and the wind didn’t blow. It was sound policy. However, just before the Brazilian COP conference, it was revealed that on three occasions power generation had fallen below this “worst-case” scenario. A different emergency plan was required.
The issue was largely glossed over, but it indicated that energy security had been compromised. Despite this, Bowen went to Brazil and continued to argue that “renewables are cheap”.
● Step Eleven: On April 9, I revealed the cost parameters of the government’s plan, with a likely outlay of $1 trillion over 35 years. The longstanding claim that renewables were cheap effectively ended on that day. Yet a day before that revelation, Bowen was still stating that renewable power was cheap. Either he had not been informed of the implications of the data, or he chose not to accept them.
