Affordable, reliable and efficient energy production is a cornerstone of a prosperous nation, but Speakers at a free community energy forum in Moulamein last Wednesday believe that short-term energy politics is leading to a long-term disaster.

Aidan Morrison from the Centre for Independent Studies has a background in physics, data science and software development, and believes that Australia’s renewable energy transition, underpinned by the Integrated System Plan (ISP) and CSIRO’s Gen Cost Report, is doomed to fail, with misleading claims about renewable energy costs and transmission projects drastically over-budget and based on unrealistic assumptions.

“I sort of fell into the energy debate, and started with a Twitter argument.”

“I was a bit surprised from my physics understanding, people claiming that as we add more renewable energy, the costs would stay fairly flat and not increase more and that sort of jarred with some intuition I had about how energy systems work.”

“I had the CSIRO Gen Cost Report thrown back at me and they said, “No, don’t worry. CSIRO checked and it’s all good. It’s not much more cost.”

Spurred on by the online interaction, Aidan did a deep dive into the subject and found that the report treated most of the costs of storage and transmission as a sunk cost, an assumption that the cost had already been incurred. As the debate continued, Aidan was approached to join the Centre for Independent Studies, a classic liberal, free market, freedom of individual, oriented think tank in Sydney, and the research continued.

“Transmission is the kind of real cornerstone, foundation, that allows a whole bunch of other things to occur and follow on. It is, if you like, the kind of the thing that underwrites, in a sense, the political momentum towards infinite renewables.”

Australia’s Energy Market Operator (AEMO) relies on an Integrated System Plan (ISP) that provides a whole system roadmap for energy-efficient development of the National Energy Market.

Within the ISP, Aidan and his team noticed that not only the route changed but also the sunk costs. The giant transmission lines required to join up South Australia are now considered sunk costs, and the vast costs are no longer considered in any justification of the energy transition.

“I could talk all day about various little tricks and tweaks, but transmission is crucial for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s paid for differently, totally differently, to a wind farm or a solar farm or a battery. Wind farm, solar farms, batteries, there should be a private company that has to go and stump up some money. There should be a sort of a test to see whether it stacks up there, and it should face a bit of market competition and pressure.”

“Transmission is not like that. It’s a regulated monopoly, which means that basically the transmission companies, that are regulated monopolies, like Transgrid, if they can produce a complicated business case with a whole bunch of modelling that says, “this checks out” then the bill gets passed to consumers to pay whatever’s required.”

“It’s forced on the system, through that statutory power of government, to say, this is a monopoly, no competition, we’re doing it.”

“The other thing is, it lasts for ages. Wind and solar only lasts for 20 years, batteries less than that, so we get to rethink this transition every couple of decades. But the transmission lines, they last for ages, and they’ve done the damage to landscape. They’ve carved out their corridors.”

Aidan believes the population has been badly misled from an economic point of view as the promises of lower cost, reliable energy simply don’t stack up.

“Across the political spectrum, people have for a long time been saying, trust the evidence. This is the cheapest way and it’s the greenest way. How could you possibly argue against it? I want to really address that question, can a renewable energy system of uncontrolled inland sources ever push costs down? And what happened, to let us, to get us to believe that.”

Aidan pointed out that forecast project costs are spiralling out of control, not only on the giant interconnectors but also on the smaller lines that connect the solar and wind installations within the renewable energy zones (REZ).

“Project Energy Connect was meant to be the best one (interconnector), the first one. It was going on budget until it was halfway built, and then the cost pretty much just doubled. That’s just happened recently.”

“We’re just starting to see the costs emerge from REZ, and it’s still extremely opaque. REZ’s that were started at less than a billion dollars, now have costs at five and a half billion, even before they started getting construction happening, and we’re now seeing the first bills come in.”

Aidan said that NSW’s recent 9 per cent energy price increase was higher than any of the other states and coincides with the first bills starting to roll in from the REZ projects.

“We’re getting the first big bills through from all the renewable energy zone construction through the New South Wales electricity infrastructure roadmap, and it’s half a billion a year, and they haven’t finished building any renewable energy zones. There’s no connection yet to happen.”

“The extent to which these costs have been hidden and concealed is enormous.”

If the risks of spiralling transmission costs weren’t bad enough, Aidan believes an energy grid built on renewables hasn’t worked anywhere in the world, except for a few examples that have abundant hydroelectric power generation.

“There is just no precedent for a very, very high level of intermittent renewable energy system anywhere in the world where it’s worked. Once you get up above 30-40 per cent wind and solar power prices are high pretty much everywhere.”

“The United Kingdom has recently admitted again, they’re starting to get mugged by reality, as the rest of the world is, everyone is encountering this. They’ve acknowledged that they had a whole bunch of policies in place to force more renewable energy sources in and now the costs of those policies are so high that their electricity exposed industry is becoming uncompetitive, so they’re ramping up new subsidies for their electricity exposed industries to be able to compete internationally again.”

Before embarking on fundamental shifting Australia’s energy direction, one may assume that all the alternatives were considered, but it appears sadly not.

Considering the ISP and CSIRO’s Gen Cost Report, Aidan had a few questions.

“Does it compare different systems, ones with lots of renewable energy and without, with more coal or nuclear stuff like that? Does it include the whole system cost? Is it independent and is it transparent? These are sort of my metrics for whether we can trust these and we certainly can’t.

In fact, despite NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean’s assurances to parliament, that the ISP had considered the counterfactuals, the fact was, they hadn’t considered all the alternatives because the report assumed they are forced to meet all of government policy, such as 82% renewables by 2030. The scope of counterfactuals becomes almost non-existent with this presupposition.

The other commercial reality is that wind and solar development are no longer economically viable without being heavily subsidised by the taxpayer. The power generated by solar grid-scale solar is now tracking around 50 per cent of the wholesale electricity price and trending down.

Is Australia’s biggest power reform simply the Basin Plan on steroids? A political plan, out of touch with reality and set to undermine Australia’s prosperity?

To find out more about the derailment of Australia’s energy transition and why Aidan is calling for the sacking of several key bureaucrats involved with the our current , check out his videos on Youtube channel: Miltechntac, or the Centre for Independent Studies energy videos.

This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 27 March 2025.