Liddell Power Station On Track For State Ownership, by David Archibald. A coal power station in the Hunter Valley of NSW is the latest victim of bad climate modeling and poor political leadership.

Alinta Energy, owned by a Chinese man living in China and thus effectively a Chinese state-owned-enterprise, has bid $1.2 billion for something that AGL had assured us was clapped out and worthless. For those who prefer to be informed by cartoon imagery:

… The public were told one story by AGL regarding Liddell. The $1.2 billion bid proves the whole thing is a scam. AGL was happy to destroy an asset with a minimum value of $1.2 billion because it expected to make far more money flogging power from the 750 MW of natural gas-fuelled diesel gen-sets it intends to install. …

Australia has the luxury to turn its back on unconventional gas resources, because we are still living off natural gas and coal exports. We don’t think manufacturing. This is OK in a benign international trade order based on the principle of comparative advantage in a free market policed by the US Navy.

But we are in a pre-war stage now, so we can’t continue to treat China as the guaranteed supplier of all things manufactured to the West. It’s like giving Germany and Japan the keys to our industrial and commercial plants in the years leading up to 1940.

I am digressing a bit here as I want to contrast our current energy policy based on a world that has gone with the world that is unfolding. We must focus on installing a national energy reserve scheme in which we could access low cost energy on short notice because our survival will depend on it.

Read it all.