Turnbull leads attack on wind as Coalition readies carbon price backflip

Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government appears ready to throw the medium and long-term future of Australia’s large-scale renewable energy market under a bus, as the price to be paid for a back-flip on a carbon price for the electricity sector.

Turnbull joined with The Australian and right-wing climate denying bloggers Andrew Bolt and Jo Nova on Friday in somehow connecting last week’s network fault in Victoria with the growth of renewable energy. Turnbull told a local radio station that the outage was the “fault” of the South Australian government.

Read Giles Parkinson’s story on RenewEconomy - “Turnbull leads attack on wind as Coalition readies carbon price backflip.”

Wind and solar success fails to blunt opposition

The Murdoch media and the conservative political parties show no signs of relaxing their extraordinary and ill-informed campaign against wind and solar, blaming these technologies for the electricity price spikes in South Australia and across the country, despite the principal cause being the surge of gas prices to record highs.

Conservative politicians over the weekend increased their calls for a review of renewable energy policies and further scrutiny over the construction of new wind farms, while the conservative media – the Murdoch Press and the Australian Financial Review – continued to screech their opposition to wind and solar.

But as we and others, including the South Australian government, have pointed out in recent weeks, the fault lies not with wind and solar, but with the soaring cost of gas, supply constraints from networks, and the unfettered power of the energy oligopoly.

Read the RenewEconomy story - “How wind and solar removed major price spikes in South Australia.”