The Implausibility of 2030 Energy Targets

The argument has always been that push to renewables will help reduce prices too, and that is just blatantly not true. We need to have a system that can produce low-cost reliable energy around the clock, and we're just not building that system at the market. The idea that we can go to 82 % renewables power generation is a nonsense for the simple reason you've got to keep replacing the stuff and every time you replace it you're going to use vast amounts. It's not small amounts. The mental health strain in those communities is absolutely out of control. We're not talking about little turbines, we're talking about things the size of Banangaroo in Sydney. Once you put in one of those wind turbine sites, you'll never grow a tree in that spot ever again. Everyone seems to think it's a really good idea until you explain to them what's actually gonna happen Derek Bush is a farmer from near Bookham in the southwest of New South Wales. He grows, amongst other things, flowers on a property that his family's been looking after now for many years. He's at the forefront of his community's concerns and attempts to grapple realistically with wind turbines. Aidan Morrison is a leading researcher into energy systems from an Australian perspective. He's director of energy research at the Centre for Independent Studies and of course is returning to the show again. Thank you, Aiden. Derek, could you kick us off? Tell people because the vast majority of Australians are not having wind turbines built effectively, so to speak, in their backyard. They're disengaged with the issue, they might have views on what it looks like, etc. But what's it actually like for someone on the ground confronting this ? And and why are you seeking to reach out and tell the story? I feel, John, that community members are very isolated when you're a small community like Bookham. Like no one really has any empowerment whatsoever to take on a company like Squadron. There's lots of wind turbine solar companies out there. Squadron's just the one that's affecting me the most. The local area, the Yashire has its fair share. Like we we certainly have our fair share of tur bines, solar panels. Hume links about to be constructed throughout whole region at the moment. Uh it's divided, it's incredibly sort of divisive amongst the community. Uh no one wants the power lines. Uh majority of the community doesn't want wind turbines either. Um but living next to them is in my situation, I am not underneath uh turbines yet, and I'm fighting incredibly hard not to be under turbines . Um, listening to the other community members that aren't far from us, uh like Bango Wind Farm, uh White Rye Park Wind Farm, it it's a horrendous activity that goes on every night. If the wind's blowing in your direction, there's no sleep and it's just annoyance all the time. Plus, you've got the visual. The mental health strain in those communities is absolutely out of control. The funny thing is about the Hume Link sort of proposal at the moment, fifteen million dollars is going into the Yas area for community grants and stuff like that. But Hume Link's already decided that seven million of that actually has to go into mental health. So that's the impact that's already happened just from Humelink. You know, they looked at Raya Park, they've looked at Bango, they can see the problems there. The Bookham area, uh, okay, so there's seven projects which are very, very close to me that are all being proposed staged at the moment or actually approved. Uh I just don't want to live under turbines. I love our environment. I want to stick up for our actual community. Um I'm not afraid to say what needs to be said. Um a lot of my neighbours don't like me saying things like that. But you know, we are a very tight knit community, but it's now divided. So that's why I'm here. That's why I'm involved, trying to speak up for the voiceless. Have a say. Get the message out there. Get the message out to our city cousins and people that are in the you know in the environment that actually needs electricity. Uh, you know, yes, yeah, sure they need it, but wow, though it don't impose it on rural communities as much as you had . That's where I'm at. Derek, what would you say to those who would say, well, we have to decarbonize, it's an absolute imperative. Uh so someone's got to have the wind farms. Where do you think they should go? What would you say is that that would be a common view in many parts of urban Australia? Do we really need to have so much wind. Uh look, the amount that that's actually on the cards at the moment is is absolutely astronomical. Uh look, Aiden knows more about that sort of stuff than I do. But um how about how about just some proper based, you know, energy driven you know economy that doesn't rely on an intermittent wind supply or the sun shining. I think we're just pushing that boundary a little bit too far. I do love the comment that comes from friends of ours that yeah, we'll drive down the freeway and I'll I'll see all the turbines at Larida , uh which is at Crookball and uh not Crookwall at Brad Alburn and they'll say, Oh wow, you know, aren't they graceful? And I'll say that yeah, but that that's lovely. But you know, I don't think you'd actually want them in your backyard. Um that's just how, you know, that's just how most generally general sort of communities feel. We don't want to live underneath them. We need the electricity. Decarbonizing, yes, I'm sure that's fine. Um I'm a little bit of a fan of nuclear. I'd like to see something happen there pretty soon. Um it's been bad governments for quite a while pushing these agenda for the uh renew able sector. Like let's let's look at our pumped hydro. Uh well I don't did we actually have a proper quote for the pumped hydro was that the four billion dollars or something and then what are we now at fourteen billion dollars? I On our way to 20, as I understand it. Yeah, yeah, two-thirds of the way through. Yeah . How long, just before, and we come to this very important issue then uh of the energy mix and what's going to work, how long will those turb ines that Derek's talking about in his area last before they've got to be replaced? Um probably around twenty to twenty five years. Um it's not many that are making it any longer than that, so about twenty five years. And does that involve actually pulling down all the cement and steel and s disposing of it, or can you use the towers again and put new blades on? What's the story? Uh there hasn't been many successful repowerings. To have um the base in general is not proposed to be touched at all. So they bury these uh big sort of six, seven hundred ton uh sort of footings in the ground, uh a lot of reinforced uh um yeah reinforced uh concrete uh in the ground, that stays there. That stays there forever. So the typical thing is that once you put in one of those wind turbine sites, you'll never grow a tree in that spot ever again. You just cut it off at the base or maybe a few inches below. And that's um that stays there for good. In terms of rep owering, in theory, um you can put a a new ver a new turbine on top of the same base, but it has to be exactly the same kind of power and everything like that. So in general, over recent years, a lot of wind turbines have got bigger, so they don't match well the bases that are there. And in general, I think it's going to be most common that they just they just start again or leave that in the ground and um and start a new turbine somewhere, somewhere else altogether. So they don't last particularly long. So in other words, the first thing we need to knock on the head is the idea that wind towers, and the same actually applies to solar in different ways, they're not genuinely net zero. They really are far from um uh as clean as people think because uh there's an enormous amount of energy in producing all that steel and cement. And it's done with coal and an unbelievable amount of heat being emitted, and then in 20 years' time you've got to go through it all again, not to mention all the maintenance in the meantime. This is a really important point. The idea that we can go to 82% renewables power generation is a nonsense for the simple reason you've got to keep replacing the stuff, and every time you replace it, you're going to use vast amounts, not small amounts. So the the estimates do vary, but it's really important to understand. Unlike nuclear, unlike hydro, in reality they do require constant burning of fossil fuels to make, maintain, and replace . Well, um there's a lot of people that have done and redone sort of analyses on how much is the life cycle impact of uh of wind. Wind is generally thought to be much lower than solar. Solar is extremely energy intensive to produce the silicon. Um where wind is thought to be um uh quite a lot lower than than than coal um on its own not probably on a par or not quite as good as nuclear um but the thing that a lot of these studies don't take into account is the impact that you have on the land as well and all the extra transmission that's required as well. So when you start clearing land, that also releases a lot of uh carbon and one in Australia, certainly in northern Qu or in Queensland, a lot of central Queensland, we're clearing huge amounts of land up and down the Great Dividing Range in order to make space for these wind turbines. And that is uh generally not factored in to the carbon intensity of this project. So I think that um yeah cutting down trees uh to reduce your carbon emissions is a is a really pretty silly thing to do. So we should be very careful about that indeed. Let's let's just draw out another thing that Derek's just said. He said, look, we've got so many of these coming up. They're everywhere. Not against them necessarily, but can't we just slow down a little bit? In reality, the clamor is that we're actually way, way, way behind what we're told we need to get to the twenty thirty targets, let alone the twenty thirty-five targets, way behind , are we not? And approvals have dropped off the table. They're not happening. Yeah, that's right. There's a couple of different dimensions there. Um, firstly, in terms of where we're going, that's right. the The number of projects reaching financial close has slowed down in the last few years. There's almost no wind projects that are now reaching the final investment decision. Okay. So plenty of people can creep produce a paper plan. Um plans are cheap , but actually putting in money on the line to invest in these things that has slowed down. So we are not really progressing. The last year or so we've gone from like 40 to 41% renewable energy, um, sort of a percent or two in a year. Um but uh to get to uh eighty two percent we have to kind of absolutely leaps and bounds kind of double or triple the progress we've sort of had had of late. So not a chance of of reaching there. But I would say it's not necessarily just the approvals in terms of planning approval that are slowing things up. It is actually whether these things make any economic sense. Whether someone who's putting their money and dollars on the line can invest in uh these projects. That is often the critical decision that these things are stalling on. There's a number of cases where we have projects that are approved, all the approvals, and they still don't commit to going ahead and build them because basically the grid, the market, is screaming out for this to stop because we already have in many cases quite enough or too much wind and solar in the grid. When they're producing, when it's windy and sunny, the prices are really low. So no one wants to commit up front and spend a lot of money on building more power when the value that it delivers to the market is really low. So these projects basically they're getting the natural signal that they should stop building more of these projects and uh and still we're trying to force them into the system with subsidies. And that's even apparently not working very well as well. So it's the economics, not just the planning that is holding things up. Derek, can I come to the issue of um of community division? I mean I think that's that's and you mentioned mental health and an acknowledgement that these issues affect mental health. One of the things that amazes me is the relative impotence and it's probably worse in Victoria that farmers and landowners and managers now face when it comes to seeking a proper process of evaluation and consideration. The mad rush is on. We're going to come back to that in the moment. By way of illustration and contrast , I was talking to a farmer in not in our home state in another one, well, it was Queensland recently. They wanted to go to an old sandstone quarry right out in the bush, a million miles from anywhere. You can't even see the quarry from the highways. It's not a particularly big one. To obtain what I would have thought would have been no more than three or four tons of sandstone to repair some crumbling sandstone in their farmhouse . Uh the approvals process has gone on forever and a day. And now they've been told that it may be possible only if to to kit to extract it. So in other words, absolute obfuscation, absolute sort of red tape everywhere , um almost impossible to do. And yet you're in a situation where you're just expected essentially to say, Well, this is a national emergency and we're going to suspend all of that . Mm . It's uh it's an interesting sort of process. So back in to uh twenty twenty one, Squadron started to put a few feelers out to see he was interested in a wind farm. Um it was very much secret deals. A map landed on the table of for the community four years later. And that was 2024. Basically, this is what you're going to get. It's a pretty extensive sort of you know map of stuff. Uh we're told that the uh setbacks for turbines to our residents is you know by law in New South Wales is one point seven kilometres. Uh squadron has said, right, we'll we'll extend that to two kil ometers, which i is a is a little bit underdone. Uh it's one of the things I'm dealing with at the moment with the you know squadron group. Uh trying to say, okay, well, these these turbines are now two hundred and seventy meters tall, not 150 meters tall. Uh yeah, we we actually at 270 meters, we we see them from 30, 40, 50 kilometers away. Um and that adds more noise, the generators are bigger. Um the hoops that squadron has to jump through. Yes, sure, there's an EIS statement. I'm not too happy about all that going at the moment. Uh we are classified with the EPBC Act because of our endangered species that are in this area . It looks like Murray Watts going to change all that for us. Um So the you know the the the things that squadron are throwing at us are a lot for a small community to try and try and get you know, get in touch with. There's you know the uh scoping report that came out, it ha it is massive. It is there's so many pages of everything that's gone on that but it's all desktop generated. So we we actually have to deal with this scoping report and say, uh no that,'s you know, this is not actually appropriate. You know, the drainage that's gonna come is gonna affect our creek, we have to attack that. You know, there's not a lot of help for us as far as the government goes to try and you know justify what's going on in our environment. It's the system that's broken. A company like Squadron, they can see the opportunity. I can't blame them for what they want to do in our area, not one little bit. You know, the government regul ations are very poor. The New South Wales got the New South Wales guidelines are very poor. The community has no muscle. We have no strength because we're so small. Um it's it's outrageous. It completely is outrageous that the power imbalance that's given against us uh is not fair. I'm dealing with that at the moment. We're talking, you know, with the CEO of squadron, Rob Wheels. He's been very, very generous with his time for a small group of people. Um, and he's done an amazing job so far. Everything we've done so far has been positive with world . Um, but there is a power and balance we need to fix. And and the regulations that control what they can do are very limited. You know, we're not talking about little turbines. We're talking about things that the size of Benangaroo in Sydney. And we're not talking about a few of them on Verizon. There's going to be 41 of them within five Ks of my house. There's going to be 80 of them within this project. Um, and that's just the Bookham project. So the Copper Bella project is seven actually, not even seven, it's about six kilometers from my house. There's another 70 odd turbines. That's just on my western side. And then we go on my eastern side, there's another 20 turbines pro, you know, done there as well. Um, so we've got this accumulation effect, and that's just those two projects. There's another five projects that are very, very close as well. There isn't actually someone out there that's actually controlling this and say that is too much. That is too dense. Yeah, give us a break. The guidelines that are coming out, the Commonwealth guidelines for this, I can't understand it. I've asked Tony Maher, our, you know, Australia's infrastructure energy commissioner to help me with this. I don't think Tony's actually got a control of that either, because it's one company versus the other. It's a very, very big problem for a very small community. And I'm not just one little community. There's little communities everywhere that's having the same problem. Um, slow down, step back.' Lset work this out . And and Derek, as you and I know, there are good farmers who are happy to have them and see it as a source of diversification for their income, let's be honest. Uh uh it's not black and white at all, but that can be really difficult for a small community to manage . Okay, so I I'm not afraid to talk to my neighbors and bring this up because someone has to do it. Um, so within our little valley, which is very much a gener ational farm area, like most of my neighbors are sixth generation. Um, land does not change hands down my road. Like it it's it's been there. The families have been there forever. Um there's a they're all at retirement age. All the locals, all my neighbors are retirement age. Some of them are my closest friends. Um communication between me and them and the other neighbors that are close by is very poor. Um we're trying to organize some sort of facilitation, some sort of mediator to try and bring this back into a a more workable situation because the community rural communities need resilience. We need to be together. We can't be divided on the fact that yes, they want to have some turbines. I just don't like them. I don't want them. My family has said we don't want them. So we're just on one boundary. Other people around the area aren't actually capable of getting them, but they're still gonna be very close to underneath them. Currently, I think the actual payment per turbine for each farmer is about $52,000 a year now, over a $20 to 30 year project , um, plus everything else that's going to be happening, like the substations and and access and and bits and pieces like that. So it's an incredible handshake. It's an incredible amount of money that's going to go to an aging, retiring community. It's, you know, I've had quotes. It's my superannuation. You know, it's for the next generation. It'll help my kids for next 20 years or forever. Um, you know, 52,000 and you're getting 10 turbines, half a million dollars a year. Most people aren't going to say no to that. If you're not worried about living underneath them, you're going to say yes . Aidan, can we cut then to a couple of really important issues. The two broad justifications for the urgency are firstly environmental and secondly economic. That's a strange thing to say, but they are. So Chris Mins is saying and I I do want to state on the table. You know, I I have regard for Chris. Uh I think um he's a sinc a sincere and decent man uh who presumably is wanting to secure New South Wales's energy future. I think a lot of what he said recently, he realizes we've got ourselves in a mess. Uh so he's a bit boxed in, but he's maintaining that and I'm quoting New South Wales cannot New South Wales cannot afford to lose a day in adverted commas in the path to reduce emiss ions . Really? Why can't we afford to lose a day in the path to reduce emissions? We've got a lot of politicians, plenty of people in the media , uh plenty of sensationalists saying, implying, I'll never state it, implying that if we don't do this, that and the other, uh we'll have more floods like this, more, we'll have more droughts, we'll have whatever. But let's drill into this . New South Wales can't afford to lose a day. What does that mean? Is it realistic? No, I just think that it it really makes no sense on examination. New South Wales is a sort of a big part of Australia, but Australia's 1% of global emissions. The rest of the world is not reducing emissions very quickly. It's been acknowledged, you know, everywhere, up and down. Even the government now has acknowledged that we can't unilaterally change the weather. What we do in Australia won't you know of itself actually change uh what happens with climate change. Um uh so there's there's no sort of credible explanation that says that we m can't lose a day because actually we could do nothing at all or do everything and do it overnight and it it still won't change climate change. We'll have to deal with the uh the effects of climate change anyway , whatever they are. And I think that in many cases they've been very grossly and dishonestly over exaggerated. But climate change is is a thing, it is happening. We probably contribute to some of it through carbon emissions. Um but there is just no way in which you can support that claim on an environmental basis that we can't afford to lose a single day because um yeah it just doesn't make any sense. But I think what he's conflating there is some sort of economic imperative too. And this makes me even more annoyed because the economics is really what I've drilled into in in huge detail. And the simple fact is we're going to end up with a much higher cost system. We're actually moving towards a very, very high cost system because of the cost of moving energy around through space and through time, which is what you have to do when you have a weather dependent system. And basically there, has been no honesty at any political level about the fact that we're moving to a higher cost system. No politician has ever come to us and said, you know what, it's going to cost an extra five hundred bucks or an extra thousand dollars for every household every year or, an extra two thousand, extra three thousand, but that price is worth paying. The argument has always been that the push to renewables will help reduce prices too, right? And that's give us some sort of economic dividend. And that is just blatantly not true. That is just not coming to pass. We've seen power prices go up and up and up. So we should not be rushing towards a higher cost destination. We should be thinking very carefully about what we can do to bring costs back down . Um, and also decarbonize if that's possible. But we should be honest about we must be honest about whether it is possible to push prices and carbon simultaneously down, and it's not with the strategy we're currently following. Now you know I I I do want to be fair to Chris Mins because I do think he's recognising there's a real problem here and he's grappling with it in many ways is not of his making. Uh so um I think he frankly I think he's got a problem. I think governments every year have got a massive problem. But you have got the energy market regulator , uh AMIO, it itself has just warned in recent days we have to step up the production of renewables because the renewable capacity we have now will start to drive prices down as you sink the cost of the infrastructure and the transmission lines. We're looking at five years of gently easing uh uh electricity prices. But if we don't get lots more in quickly, reflecting what Chris Minzer said, they'll start to rise again strongly from about twenty thirty . I don't have any conf I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be smart here. I just don't have any confidence in what the regulator's saying . And I'm not wanting to blame Chris Mins , because that's really probably what he is being told. But I think we'd want to say, Chris, this just doesn't stack up. The truth of the matter is your real problem is you're turning the switch off on power stations and blaming them when in reality they're far cheaper, but they've been non economic for so long that of course when you've forced back onto them, they're unreliable. And the dishonesty around the true cost and the true place of coal now being mucked up because the plants have been demonized, they're all to be shut down. You don't maintain if you've got a motor car that you know you're never going to be able to register again, you're not going to put a new engine in it, you're going to make it limp along until it gets you to that deadline. If it doesn't, you're just going to leave it by the side of the road. That's what's happened to our coal fired power fire plants. And yet in reality, when it was running well, that car was an extremely good one. Yeah, that's that's right. Look, I'll just comment first on uh Chris Mins, and I think his government has actually been vastly more pragmatic than the previous Liberal government in New South Wales, particularly around the closure of coal. All right. So Chris Mins uh, when he first uh took over, uh he said he got an expert group to review and audit the renewable energy uh roadmap, it's called, and he said it was a pretty easy decision to make to decide to extend araring, which is our biggest coal-fired power station. So I would congratulate him on that. That is a that is a little bit of honesty. And he's now looking at extending it a second time out to probably something like 2029. And so I think he is being more pragmatic, and he does recognize the importance of keeping the lights on and trying to keep prices within plausible bounds and have a secure system. What that says about his predecessor though is that his predecessor was engaged in what I would call an outright fantasy, that we could switch off our biggest generator and still have the lights stay on. And I think that's been borne out now. And unfortunately, has indulged in this uh again quite fantastic project called the Waratar Super Battery, which was honestly a band-aid on a board wound, which we're going to start paying, we're actually now paying about a hundred million dollars a year for a five year stopgap, which now we don't need. This is a true disaster of public policy because the RARing is still running and will be extended for pretty much all of that five years. We're paying $100 million a year for a project that has no useful purpose for New South Wales consumers. So that really was a disaster. But on that point that you raised about the market commission, and I will correct you there, John. It's actually we have a host of different bodies. This one was the Australian Energy Market Commission that released that report last week. And what they've said is they've said a gradu al fall in prices for five years, then a steeper rise for five years after that. But actually their report is a big backflip from what they had last year, which was said that we would basically go down to a lower destin ation at the end of ten years, about thirteen percent down. Now they're saying it's going up. All right. Their their their plan now says that on the current trajectory costs on average are going up over the next 10 years, which is a massive reversal. But what really annoys me is the degree of dishonesty they have about what is actually causing and what's driving that change. Because what they've said is that, oh no, we need more renewables. You've got exactly the headline. That is what they've said. They said the problem is the renewables aren't going fast enough. We need to have more renewables pushed into the system. Actually, the reality is if you read carefully what they've said. have They said that we have got less renewables in this year's model, not because we're not building them fast, that's true, but it's because of a change in demand, they say, in their model. And what's actually happened is that their previous model only survived building as much renewables and as fast as it did and getting prices down because some because of some enormous fudge factors they've modeled in, including everyone buying an electric vehicle and ch arging it at just the right time of day to support the grid. Everyone buying a home battery and now putting it in the mercy of, you know, at the control of the grid operator, so it would support the grid operator. Hydrogen production, but happening just at the right time of day. So they have now actually having to adjust their projections to fit the more realistic flat demand that we have, as opposed to this spongy demand that would somehow work around the weather . And it turns out renewables can't meet the real world demand that we're now modeling. Okay. So their model actually should say renewables can't solve for the real world demand that we have and trying to force more renewables into the system is pushing up costs. But they're not saying that. They're saying the problem is we don't have enough renewables and we should push them in anyway, even faster, and wish for those fudge factors to come back. And I think that's a real travesty because the reality is their backflip from last year to this year says that we're not headed in the right direction. And yet they're using that same analysis to say, faster, faster, we have to rush onwards. More of the same, more of the same, keep going, please. And I think that is really a betrayal of the integrity and the trust that we should place in public institutions. Derek, this does come to the issue of the way we treat one another as a community, uh you're you've touched on what it's like in the local community, but you know, a lot of people in your area, just because of where you are and because we all move around a lot now would know a lot of people in urban sittings in in in to be frank, teal type seats . One of the things that I despair of is that they tend to sneer at those who have actually got aware the pain and the difficulty uh of these very policies. There's this breakdown in the normal Australian approach of a fair go and we're not going to ask you to be ar all of the price of it. It really does worry me. It was no surprise that it was in some ways that it was the national party, I know , rarely political on this show, but it should have been expected that one of the reasons that they would really arc up about net zero is that ninety percent of the reductions that have uh over two thousand five levels of emissions in Australia have been because of restrictions on what farm ers can do with the land that they manage and produce with. And a few years ago I went onto a farm in Queensland where they had basically stopped maintaining it because within eleven to twelve years, they were quite specific about the time. The restrictions that had been put on them would make it from a fully viable family farm to one that was utterly unviable, they'd have to walk away from it. We're asking parts of the community to where all of the cost without a fair distribution of it. And in particular, it has to be said the opportunity cost of the job losses, of the industry losses and so forth that employ not wealthy people in teal seats, but people in working seats, they're bearing the cost of those job losses that are now descending on us. We're subsidizing. This is the irony of it. Just about every major industry in this country is on life support with government money, which happens to be our children's money, because it's all being borrowed, because they're being made not viable, because our electricity crises are no longer intern ationally competitive, whereas once they're amongst the cheapest in the world because we've bungled the energy transition. There's no getting away from it. It's the inequality of it that I think in many ways is galling a lot of people at the at the coal fi You know they're really the really funny thing about the this transition to renewables that I see that everyone seems to think it's a really good idea until you explain to them what's actually going to happen. Like my my my daughter has a a quite a large party here every year for all of her friends and it's a lesson peace. And I just you know you say to a few of them, oh look, you know, we we 're yeah, this is going to be the last year because we you know we're we're not far off having turbines, it's gonna destroy the outlook. And they go, Oh yeah, but turbines are great, like renewables are great. And I say, Well, but what happens if it's all on these hills, all here? And they say, Oh no, that'd be terrible. It'd ruin your landscape. I said, well, that's a bit of a, you know, a misnomer there. Like, you know, you can't like them and then not like them. You can you can put your cards on the table like I do and say, I I just don't like them, I don't want them, I don't I don't want to live underneath them. Um it's it's quite happy I'm quite happy to hear from people that say you need to have some sort of renewable sort of sector within the community. Yeah, but some communities are actually being over burdened by that. Uh the our area is ac could be absolutely saturated. Um I'm not a nimble . Down my valley, okay, we are I would say actually probably not such a bad spot for some turbines, but not 80 of them. Like there is a s there's at the end of our valley it's it's closed off, it's close to the the Buranjuk State Reserve. Um it's feasible, like it's not going to affect a lot of people. There are other issues of that area, but it's the bushfire risk that's going to come with having clusters of turbines, having six hundred turbines on the western side of major sort of centres like Canberra, Yas, Bounty, Bookham, Binelong, uh the inability to use aircraft to actually put the fires out now. So and and with the combination of Hume Link, um so Hume Link is such a big power line that yeah the five hundred KBA s yeah KBA no that's not Robert. But smoke carbonizers on that side of the power line. So you can't put ground crew crew underneath them. Um, no aircraft, no ground crews. Uh we have single-lane roads uh and we're rough terrain. Uh we're incredibly bush by and pro in the area. Um that that's just one of our little issues . Like, you know, it's it's it's it's okay to say I like turbines if you like them. But how about some sensible sort of placement? Uh and and okay, so what happened yester was it yesterday, the Wellington fire underneath all those salt panels up there? Um is that two billion dollars worth of inf infrastructure that's gone up in smoke? Uh it's a lot of you know it's a it's a big investment to have so risky. Um fires happen everywhere, all the time. There's no way we can can stop it. We just have to be able to control it. Um so yeah, so as far as uh teal voters go, I actually don't think I know any teal voters, John . I really must say that. Uh I I really like where I live. Uh I'm a very much in involved in a sort of you know, a very conservative sort of area. Um but yeah, uh I I'm happy for anyone to have an opinion. But gee we're just think about who's in in actually impacting. You know, it's little communities like Bookham that you know, Bounty, Byrne along, We Jasper, Yats , you know, we do get massively impacted by gener ating your potential electricity when you live in Bondi . I had years, believe it or not, at the in the engine room of economic policy in this country, and I'm very aware that quite small changes in parameters over time have a compounding effect. They have a really major effect over over over the years uh on economic uh performance and therefore living standards. Australian living standards are in decline in relative and absolute terms. Many people are saying they are collapsing at the fastest of all of the wealthy countries. There can be no simply no disputing that rising energy costs and uncertainty and reliability, they all belong to gether, is part of the reason. There is simply no getting away from that. So let's accept that as fact. We're already, as I mentioned a moment ago, supporting with our children's money, a whole heap of energy intensive industries in Australia because they're not viable because of the cost of electricity. There is no genuine relief in sight, just the opposite. We're setting ourselves up for more expensive energy. I think the point that's been made on this on my sh on this programme in the past by other speakers is really concerning. Nobody's paying enough attention to it. The future is not just in maintaining the industries that we ought to have an edge in now, smelting, for example, and critical ones like fuel refining, I could throw that in. Can't we've got no security all without it. But here's the big one. The future whether we have reservations or uncertainties about it or or not, for our young people, the chance for them to escape into the the the clutches of declining living standards, not being able to afford a house is unquestionably digital and AI. We don't know what it's going to look like, but that's where it is. It's obvious that their biggest problem is energy costs. I saw an estimate the other day that if it really works properly in Australia within ten or fifteen years , twelve to thirteen percent of our electricity will be consumed by digital and AI. If it's unaffordable, if it's unprocurable, and the governments are fudging and running around this is sue in a way that tells me they don't know what to do. They know they've got a problem and they don't want to have to address it. That's the reality confronting us. And young people who are worried about the cost of living need to realise that unless we can resolve the reliability and pricing of energy, we will miss that next great opportunity. Is that a fair thing to say, Ed ? Look, I I think in the medium to long term it certainly is. I mean for AI, energy costs are the are the biggest cost by far. That's um you just you know you have to have access to stupendous amounts of electricity and it has to be perfectly reliable too. Absolutely perfectly reliable. I visited a data center recently in Sydney and the extent they go to to mean security and the stability and the redundancy and backup of their systems so that if something happens to the grid they can switch immediately to another backup system. To what? To what? To uh walk the diesel generators. That's what they have in their building, right? So that's what the provides the security at the moment is the large diesel generators that um that back them up. Um and so if they if they uh feel there's not a reliable grid um uh to support them, it's just becomes a less uh less viable prospect. We have again a little bit of a honeymoon for the data centers at the moment because we have some benefits about being in Asia and being a trusted democratic country, I suppose. So there's a little bit of a security dividend for kind of banking functions and stuff like that and some financial flows. But for the raw heavy compute that is coming in AI, which is at the moment still not a big part of Australia's data center demand, but my word, it's what the future will be. Electricity will be an absolute premium. It'll be the most important thing. So at the moment we're still having growth in data centers. But if we can't get costs down, um I just can't imagine we'll be where data centers locate around the world um at all in the near future. Um as you say, like we we currently use in New South Wales about 10% of our electricity making aluminium. And that project, that uh that company can't get uh a good enough uh energy deal to stay open without huge government subsidies. Um so if we want to replace that um with something like uh data centers and AI, we need to have a system that can produce low cost, reliable energy around the clock and um and we're just not building that system at the moment. Let's be really clear, you just said government subsidies. They are actually borrowings against our children. Our children will have to work to pay the tax es because we would not live within our means. We set up an environment where our industries had to be subsidized. We wouldn't do it with our money. We did it with their money. They're going to go to work and they're going to be working for quite a bit of the week at the rate we're going , to pay the taxes for what their parents and their grandparents did before they pay the taxes for their own services and government obligations before they can keep something to live on. That's right . Like uh I suspect like you mood uh Derek uh uh well we're all concerned about what AI might mean. What we do know is we can't afford to lose that race and we can't afford to miss the economic opportunity. We particularly militarily can't afford to let frankly Beijing win that race. But we all worry uh about the water use as well in rural and regional Australia. It's a big question how are we going to solve the heavy water usage, not just power? But that's where we uh ought to be, those sorts of issues are where we really need to be turning our national attention to our future. Because of all people, it's Bill Gates who's belled the cat . Bill he would not have been seen as somebody who was not all for climate change action. Um and he's now saying that it's not going to end civilization as we know it, but we have to be well enough off to cope with the changes that are coming, but especially applies to Australia, because we can't affect it. If we weaken ourselves economically, quite apart from the geopolitical risks that it brings and the lower living standards, it will mean less capacity to do what farmers have always done, Derek, adapt to a highly volatile climate, because that's what we have in Australia. Obviously John,, you're a farmer. I'm I'm I'm a little bit different being a flower farmer, but you know, we still produce stuff. Um I feel I feel also that it, you know, the rush towards AI, that that's just gonna happen. It just it just is, and we don't have electricity to do it, obviously, because you know, if you live in a rural area, you actually don't get a consistent volta ge anyway. So we don't. It it's I think it's we'd lucky to get two twenty volts. Um, and so things just run. But uh talking about replacing industry and re placing the fact that there's going to be jobs, we need to make sure that people actually have a job. Not everyone is going to be suitable for sitting behind a laptop. Some people actually want to do physical work. Someone actually wants to be able to be employed in a situation which is in an industrial setting. You know, you get paid well, you go to work, you come home, dumb. You know, you don't want to actually be, not everyone is wanting to be totally educated through university. There needs to be the position for people to do such. Um I I just feel that the way we're heading there, we're all looked all looking very smart. You know, this green revolution, like fantastic. But gee whiz, you know, make sure we keep bringing everyone else along with us. You know, we need to have jobs. I'm an employer, not an economist. Um, you know, you need to keep employing people to keep everything moving. People need to earn money, to spend money, to buy flowers . Energy costs an issue for you? And your business? I have solar. Pretty much ninety percent of it is done when the sun is shining. So solar to me is fantastic. Uh I I don't have any surplus. I get kilowatt that goes back into the lines doesn't do anything. Um but yeah, solar is a massive difference for us. Like thousands and thousands of dollars a quarter uh we save on having our solar system. Um while they work and until you have to replace them. Exactly. We'll have to replace them. But seriously, I I think that our solar panels paid for themselves in two years. So uh that that was a really good investment. Um I I'm not anti using solar what's whatsoever. I'm not gonna stand here thump my hands on my chest. Um it's really good. Everyone on my road, everyone has solar. Yeah, because it makes sense. Oh well we have solar. But I think mind you, I've been surprised at how quickly the panels fail. I mean real none of them have lasted as long as we were told even quality brands. They've not simply not lasted as long as we were told they will, and we're having to re place them at a quite surprisingly rapid rate out here. But they I don't think any of us are against renewables. They make a lot of sense. We're too dependent on fossil fuels to produce the world's food. I've felt that for ever since I was, in fact, dare I say it, a university student myself. I think it's a problem. But you know, we're often told that the Chinese are getting very good at renewables and installing a lot of renewables. The reality is, and this is a really important point, uh it's just supplanting their ever rising use of fossil fuels, and they've made it very plain that they will not turn the switch off on one form of energy until they have a viable alternative. And I would have thought given that virtually everybody, every other major economy in the world is going down that road and much of Europe is reverting to a different position and be much more realistic now that been mugged by reality . It's high time we did the same in Australia . If if if we impoverish ourselves pret ending that we can make any difference when our own chief scientist has told us we can't, that's going over and beyond what might be called our civic responsibilities to do our bit. And it will count not against us , but against the next generation of Australians who may have a very different view of things. But we're told we've got to do it for our children. I say the opposite. I should just clarify that. Make it plain that I'm not saying don't diversify your energy sources, but I am saying our kids won't thank us if we impoverish them, and it's time we had more honesty here. I've been amazed, I'll come to this in a moment, Aiden , at some of the big players, some of the wealthy people around the place who actually just sneer at anybody who questions the economics of what we're doing. But sorry, Derek, I interrupted and I try not to do that. Back to you. I I hear this all the time is that the people in power, like our Chris Bowens and Chris Minnes, and our poulor S sccullies, that actually do they actually get the information that's required? We had like I have several times heard comments that have come from that sort of area and they said, all I hear is farmers that actually love wind turbines. And so it pretty much it obviously is that the people that are actually wanted to be placed in front of these people are actually placed there, the ones that are in favor. Like plenty of people are. There's no doubt about that. Um, I just feel that the misinformation is coming, and if you're against all of this, um you're obviously going to be slapped down as a climate denier. Um, but no one seems to be able to get the message out there without being slacked in one corner or the other. And I feel that is part of the problem. Um you know, it it's very rare for me to get to talk to anyone in in any sort of position. Um you know, I'm I'm it's a little little flower farmer in Bookham. Um, but when I do, I feel like they actually haven't been told the full story. They haven't been told what's actually happening on the ground. Um, they haven't been told that there are alternatives. Yeah, they haven't been told that it we don't all hate nuclear, we don't all hate solar, we don't all hate wind. But gee, a bit of a bit of a balance wouldn't be a bad thing. Um I don't know that's just my perspective. This is my this is my point. I uh only recently I had uh uh uh a very prominent environmental and other causes activist tell me we had business to do. Why are you uh expressing reservations about the rollout of renewables when it's the pathway to wealth for your farmers? And I just politely said, W forell, some for some you go to Queensland and other parts of the country where land use restrictions and and I'm in favour of restrictions on stupid clearing, but not of regrowth, not of maintenance of a proper environ uh looked after and controlled environment. And you've got farmers who are literally losing their farms because of legislation that's been put in place. It is not uniform. And the burden has been placed very unfairly on small sections of the community who are not well off. That's one of the key messages that I wanted to come out of this. If you're going to go in for these great big revolutions, remember to do it fairly. And one of the things we're not doing fairly at the moment is we're loading this cost on the small parts of the community and on to future Australians. Aidan, um all of this is being done in the name of climate action. But the reality is that many of the people who make the loudest noise are also doing very well out of it financially. There is simply no getting away from that, and it's very rarely pointed out. Uh if you go on and uh want to make the case uh let's say on our ABC uh for for being cautious about closing uh coal-fired power stations or whatever it happens to be until you've got alternatives, oh climate denier or you're making a fortune out of it or you've got a vested interest. But I see people on the television all the time, many of them frankly sneering at those who have a different view, who are big financial winners out of all of this . Yeah, that's um look that's that's sometimes right. I will say though, um unfortunately the economics for renewables does not stack up to keep scaling up. So there's a whole bunch of cases where people are collecting subsidies.' There gyetting a lot of um a lot of uh support. But even then it's not working out quite as well as they think it should. And I'll give one example here is HMC Capital. They have a fund that was meant to move into the energy transition. And it's chaired by a former Prime Minister, Julie Gillard. And uh and she was uh and they bought a large portfolio of existing and also developmental generators. And they actually uh they acquired a wind farm uh just six days before it was underwritten by the current energy minister, Chris Bowen, who had underwriting the capacity investment scheme, which you would think would be the absolute epitome of the best streak of good luck that you could have um in uh in acquiring a portfolio and getting one of its biggest best assets underwritten just a few days later. They still couldn't raise the money to actually close on the deal at the time to finish acquiring that portfolio. And now they've had to basically massively downgrade the fundraising ambitions they had for for that energy transition portfolio and basically seen their share price collapse um and simply backpedaling, they've clearly bitten off more than they can chew, and it hasn't worked out very well for them indeed. So unfortunately, there are well, I think fortunately, because it speaks to the economic realities underlying, there are instances where people have actually, I suppose, uh swallowed some of their own propaganda and made misjudgments economically. But on the other hand, there are also cases, and it's particularly in the regulatory assets. So things like around transmission, or we're creating new markets for for batteries and firming surfaces. All right. So to keep the grid stable, we have to buy new systems like batteries or for frequency control. These were all services that were previously done more or less for free by the big spinning machines that we have in coal and gas, but we're now we're paying extra to procure those services. So a whole bunch of people are doing very well indeed out of basically um buying things that the that consumers are forced to pay for. It gets passed onto some sort of regulatory base or a new market that must be settled that we have to pay for a new product. And so in the battery space and in the transmission space, in the distribution network sort of space, that's where there's a lot of big corporate entities or foreign capital who are doing quite well out of being basically able to expand their asset base by the decree of the regulators that say because it's government policy, we must model a huge expansion of renewable energy and we can spend billions of dollars and send the bill back to consumers in order to uh in order to pretend that is going to be a good thing overall. In fact it it won't be. It is just good for those people that are able to expose themselves to those regulatory assets. So there's a bit of a mixed bag, but I think fortunately there are also cases where people have uh have you know they've bought their own propaganda, thought there was lots of money in actual fact there's not an honest dollar in commercial investments in renewable energy generation anymore because the market is screaming out that we've got too much right the value of sunshine when it's sunny is next to nothing. There's no good business case in doing more of that. And you've got to buy all the batteries, and that's very expensive. And so you tend to tag on to some of those force uh services that you can get um that you can force consumers to pay for to make that stack up. So that's the picture in terms of how it looks like for the uh for the benefit of people that are investing in it. But then many of those people who are bought into this game and then find it's not as they thought it was start to they they get worried. People do worry about what's happening to the hip pocket and earth. It creates an environment where they indeed scream for more subsidies without calling it subsidies. I can't leave this debate. Uh you mentioned Hume Link. Describe Himlink uh from what it means for you on the ground, Derek and Aidan, just how big and what it's going to cost because one of the things that people miss when they say renewables are cheaper. The'yre they're they're not not they're overlooking if you like the the this the sort of uh beginning to end costs involved with electricity at your factory and place of work or your home or whatever. Wiring the country up, somebody's got to pay. And these installations are utterly massive and by the way, involve mind boggling amounts of steel and concrete and I would think probably aluminium and other various alloys. Mind boggling. You've got Hume Link, there's the other massive one from um the heart from Liddell uh up to the New England uh renewable energy zone. Uh these things are huge and someone's got to pay for them and that's not being included in the costs in in the public sort of um discussion of these things. Sure. I I can I can I can uh comment on the cost there. Um certainly HumeLink is a is a major project. It goes from a place called Bannaby, which is south of Sydney. It's sort of kind of close to Golburn or on the way there. And it goes up to Snowy two point zero. It was meant to be part of a project called Snowy Connect. It was kind of meant to kind of link into the big new pumped hydro project we had there. And it goes through uh the area near where where Derek is, all right. So it goes right through that region there and then branches off towards WAGA, where it then connects to another big 500 KV project called Project Energy Connect, which makes a big link all the way to South Australia. And branching off that is in yet another major 500 KV project that called VNI West , which goes all the way down to Melbourne. And together they form a kind of big string of projects to try to make snowy two point zero um connect uh connect to the major load centers and connect to renewable energy. But the problem is the absolute disaster with this is that when they did the business case for Snowy 2.0, and I would I would describe this as the original sin of the energy transition, is they said they're going to plonk, a massive big pumped hydro project, right in the height of the mountains, right between the two biggest population centres in Australia. And they didn't include the cost of the transmission in any analysis about whether that would be a good thing overall economically. Right. So they'd bid off the generation , but it's an utter stranded asset until you build all the transmissions to link that up. And those transmission costs initially Human Link was thought to be sort of two to three, three and a bit billion dollars. It's now up near four and a half or five billion dollars. Um, VI West, which was thought just a year or so ago to be sort of in the order of three and a half billion dollars, has now gone to seven point six billion dollars, plus or minus fifty percent. And I can tell you what happens every time they do the next revision and it was plus or minus fifty percent before they end up pretty much on the plus fifty percent circumstance. Uh Project Energy Connect was a project that was uh initially thought to have finely balanced benefits, all right? Finely balanced benefits with costs. When it was about $2.1 or $2.3 billion , it's blown out to $4.1 billion . We still don't know how or what proportion of that cost we passed back on to users because it's very clear it shouldn't have gone ahead at that degree of cost. So all these projects, basically, I think that our regulatory system has been really convoluted and sort of um abused to try to make it appear that business's usual processes can say these costs are justified. But in reality, they are absolutely not justified because no one has assessed that full system, including Snowy Hydro, including all those links, and said do all those links together as a package make sense. The way they get around it is they basically model the system with all the links in place, except the last one, and we'll say, what's the value of HumeLink? If we assume everything else is built already, the value of the completing the chain is pretty high, so we can sort of say, Okay, well we'll spend a lot of money on that, and they repeat the process with the other links in the chain. Okay, well, what's the value of VNI West? Assuming we've done, and there's even other links, Western Renewables Link, Hume Link, Project Energy Connect, then they uh then they say basically the value of unlocking that last link in the chain is pretty high. So they've been gaming these cost benefit analyses in a way that is utterly atrocious in my opinion to say this whole system uh stacks up and to say that a business as usual cost benefit analysis justifies it, it's just not true. If they'd done the proper analysis of the whole system, it'd be crystal clear. This is an extremely expensive, costly system we're building it. And uh and it's still being rushed through and the impact on farmers' lands is uh is pretty significant, pretty severe. And uh and the impact on on Derek's region in particular is also very severe because they all the uh renewable energy generators have taken encouragement from that giant transmission pathway and said there'll be a huge amount of capacity in this region. So we're going to focus all our plans on that particular pocket and uh and Derek's little region around um around sort of yas in that area there, uh they have an absolutely huge dense uh area of massive amounts of wind proposals, even though they're not a declared renewable energy zone. All right, they're basically piggybacking on the other interconnectors and uh that that community is is hit particularly hard Well when you start to interfere in a market it's uh you need to be very careful. Before you know it, you're hopelessly entangled. I have to say that I think Australia now on energy policy is hopelessly entangled. The only thing that governments seem to be able to propose is to accelerate a process which looks to me more and more expensive and less and less reliable. We've pretty much smashed up our coal plants. The only wonder to me is that there aren't a whole lot of people out there saying they're actually going to be needed. Uh let's let's go and um purchase a few of them and get 'em ready to bring 'em back because I think we're going to be faced with a reality that given that we're so opposed apparently to nuclear that we don't want gas, that batteries can't do it. I was staggered to learn the other day that a surprising number of Australians think batteries actually produce electricity. They do no such thing. And the environmental side of producing vast numbers of batter big ies is horrendous and they don't last very long. And we're just not having an honest debate about any of this. So look, thank you both very much for your time. Derek, Derek, do you have any final observations that you'd like to close out with? Oh, look, the only thing I can say about Hume Link, it's actually probably the biggest environmental disaster that's happening in our region right this moment. Um, we had like they're just building the towers right now so that the the the big hard stands they build to put these towers on. We've had months and months of semi-trailers worth of gravel go past my front gate. And you know, talk ing fifteen, twenty loads a day. Just to build the road so they could put the tower in. The gravel is coming from uh a group of quarries, some of it up to 200 kilometers away, just to come to us. We had a big downpour of rain here a few weeks ago. We had about 30 mils in 20 minutes. Um the amount of silt that came through our creek was astronomical. Never seen anything like it. So when we have a normal heavy shower of rain, a little creek goes up, it might get a little bit dirty for an hour, a couple of days, absolute maximum. For 10 days you couldn't see within two centimetres into the water. That's how polluted it was. And that's purely from the Heemling construction so far. Talking about people's land that's being, you know, enveloped by this. Like all my neighbors up the road, they're just absolutely throwing the towel in. They just say, How can we live with all of this infrastructure right on top of us? It's an absolute travesty to actu al our small community. And it just keeps stretching. Like it goes past Yas. It's going through you know all sorts of regions around us. It's attracted all the renewable energy companies, like Aiden just said, um, and that puts pressure on everyone because you know, there's potentially so uh a local indigenous community has been approached and they're saying that there's a thousand turbines that are being proposed for their traditional lands. So that's I'm I'm I'm in that area as well. So I know of about six hundred, I didn't realise of a thousand turbines. Um it's an extraordinary, extraordinary impulse to happen, you know, in a small community. I'd like to make another point though just about the impact of concentrating all those turbines there because it's come to my attention very recently that in New South Wales, we actually have a huge problem with energy flowing the wrong direction. We've been told we need more transmission to make all this work, but actually at the moment, because all that wind has been developed in that big pocket big pocket around Y as, which is in the south of New South Wales, that's electrically closer to Victoria and it flows over the border to Victoria and can't get to Sydney. And we've had cases very recently, um, actually 26th of November last week, where the price goes sky high. We had a range storm roll through Sydney, all the rooftop solar went off, and the prices hit the cap. $20,000 a megawatt hour. You know, the average is say a hundred, went up to twenty thousand dollars a megawatt hour. But all the energy in that area, the wind that in uh in Derrick's region around that yas collector area was quickly curtailed because it was just flowing the wrong direction and going over the Victorian border, where energy cost negative $30 a kilowatt hour. So we were paying $20,000 in New South Wales to generate electricity and then paying Victoria $30 to take it off our hands. And so that is a huge disaster of planning. And sadly, all the development of more wind in that area makes no sense at all until another link in the chain, one that I think has been forgotten called Sydney Ring South, is built to join Bannerby, which is the end of Hume Link, into the actual southwest suburbs of Sydney. Because our grid was designed to take coal power from the north of Sydney, south . All right. And one of those links goes down to Bannerby. But it was not designed to take huge floods of wind energy from the area where Derek is around that Yas Canberra area, uh, north into Sydney. So we're stuck with an area where we're building a huge, an extremely impactful uh, you know, um zone effectively of wind energy around Derrick's area. At the moment, it can't actually relieve energy prices, right? Because it can't get into Sydney. And we're seeing literally huge bills being racked up and the market operator having to intervene and shut down the wind, stop the wind from operating, because it's flowing the wrong direction into Victoria. So this looks like an absolute sort of planning disaster. And unfortunately, all the relief that we expect to get from Project Energy Connect and Hume Link and Snowy 2.0 at the moment, that won't help very much because it's stuck and can't get into Sydney because it looks like the sequence of the transmission build has also been bungled. So sadly huge pain in uh in in Derek's region for very little gain because the energy just can't reach Sydney because the grid has been designed not for that purpose. It's designed to move coal power south, not wind power north. And so it's really it's really a disaster. Final question, Aidan to you, if I may. What sort of acceleration is going to be needed if the government's insisting we've got to step on the gas at the same time as approvals are falling away . To get to their targets twenty thirty and then twenty thirty five, just explain to the layman what this looks like in terms of the sheer number of turbines and solar farms and offshore wind farms that would be needed. Not net zero by twenty fifty. Today's technology, just five years away and then five years away again. Give us a feel for what it really looks like what would have to be done. And keep in mind that it's all looking as though this doesn't act up add up financially. So who the heck is going to pay? Yeah. Look, we'd have to kind of we'd have to more than double the construction rate that we've sort of had over the last 10, 15 years of wind turbines for the next five years. Almost nothing has been approved for new uh financial investment decisions in the last couple of years. So the pace has dropped off. It is implausible, totally implausible. Um we'd have to build um sort of, yeah, the plan is something like sort of 18, 20 gigawatts of of renewable energy generation, which is again sort of several thousand turbines in the next five years to come close to that target. But in practice, even then, as I said, that wind power could not properly power Sydney at the moment, A, because we don't have the transmission links to build to get it there. We also don't have, and this has been made quite clear, we don't have um all the synchronous condensers required to provide that spinning inertia and service , that doesn't look like it's uh coming on time as well. The solar generation and the degree of batteries that are required for that as well. Every new wind farm that's been basically approved for government underwriting in the latest round of the capacity investment scheme, which is our giant federal underwriting scheme to force this into the system, has got a battery that's big enough to take the peak output of the wind farm and uh and store it for about either two or four hours. So these are enormous batteries that we have from never previously contemplated batteries that size, but that's required for every solar farm um pretty much that we're building here on because uh because the grid just can't take the uh the power. We have too much solar already. And so those costs are unprecedented. We've never swe you know if you think that solar is cheap, wait till you add that much battery to it and you recalculate the levelized cost is certainly not cheap then. You still have to add the synchronous condensers and the transmission on top of that. So I I don't know of anyone serious outside of politics and politicians have that um professional license to lie, apparently, but there is no one serious in I think the uh the grid operation systems or the regulatory systems that is saying with a straight face that we are able to meet those targets by twenty thirty, particularly the eighty two percent renewable energy target model 30. Completely, completely implausible that that can be met. And yet we're building all the transmission, we're shoveling money out the door for all the systems on the assumption that it will be met, which I think is just crazy and it's gonna it's gonna hit bills very soon. We we've not seen anything serious hit bills yet. It's just the beginning, the tip of the iceberg um at the moment. But those costs and investments are really horrendous. So let me just get this right. If I've understood what you're saying, we need to double the rate of building uh in the next five years per annum over the last ten years. So that's telling me we have to double what we already have to get to the twenty thirty target, roughly. Oh, that's double it. Yeah. We have to we have to we have to uh we have to m we have to more than double. We only have about thirty three percent wind and solar in the grid. So to get to eighty-two percent. Oh, sorry, we we have about seven percent sold. We have to we have to double what we built ever uh you know, over twenty years, fifteen, twenty years we've been starting to build this stuff um uh to get to eighty-two percent. Assuming we don't waste any more energy. And again, the wastage is looking enormous in South Australia. Um, for several days uh last week, they wasted more energy than they consumed of wind and solar. They had the w the sun was strong, the wind was strong , and they wasted as much as their whole grid demands for several hours of a couple of days in a row. So that will get worse as you add more uh wind and solar. So the amount that we're going to need is is going to be absolutely stupendous. And I I know no one. I know no one who is technically competent and involved in this industry who with a straight face will say we can hit those targets. It's only the political class now that are that are saying that and uh and I think it's really disappointing they're maintaining that and we're being forced to pay the bills to invest in all the transmission as though it's true. And uh and we know that it's not possible that it can be built that fast, but we're going to keep building the transmission as though it must be built that fast. It's a it's a real heist of public policy. Well, thank you both. I think a lot of people will be very interested in what we're saying here. This is a debate we have to have . You will always get it wrong if you haven't got the facts on the table, and people are not able to assess what's possible, what's not, and what the trade offs will be. And that's been the story of energy policy as it's it's been a real boiling frog, uh slowly heating the water until the frog's in real trouble, rather than giving the frog the opportunity to make the rational decision to say we're going to reset. So thank you for your time on the ground, uh uh Derek and with your vast technical expertise. Aidan, we appreciate it very much. Thank you, John. Really appreciate this opportunity.