Industrial sabotage: SA renewables wonderland wakes up to reality

By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
UP to 27,000 properties in regional South Australia were hit by another major power outage last Friday because ongoing dry weather has caused problems with the state’s massive network of power lines.

The problem with the electrical supply was salt and dirt build-up on insulators on what the South Australians call stobie poles (power poles). Because of the state’s vast network of wind and solar farms there are more than 650,000 such stobie poles – far too many to be manually cleaned.

In a repeat of a major power failure several years ago, food-selling businesses without generators across the Yorke Peninsula and parts of the Mid North were forced to throw out frozen food and petrol stations forced to stop their pumps.

A Moonta service station operator told the ABC the power cut had had a “massive effect on us”, and there had been repeated outages over the last week and he had lost thousands of dollars.

Other businesses hit by the outage included cafes, pharmacies or any other business relying on electronic transactions. But this is the thin edge of the wedge of a decades-long campaign of defacto industrial sabotage run by a succession of South Australian Liberal and Labor governments.

Last Friday’s outage is the reality of a state reliant on a vast network of lines connecting wind, solar and battery banks and hellbent on pursuing a “clean green energy” fantasy. It is no accident that South Australia has the country’s most expensive electricity.

In 2021, the clownish Liberal government of Steven Marshall blew up the coal-fired Augusta Power Station, that once reliably powered South Australia’s industries, businesses and households.

South Australia was once an industrial powerhouse with thousands of car manufacturing jobs that have now been lost to globalisation of the vehicle industry.

But rather than fighting to keep its heavy industry, a long succession of Labor and Liberal governments led by limp-wristed premiers, embraced progressivist deindustrialisation, with visions of making the state some sort of centre of “art, wine, culture and green energy”.

But now reality has bitten, and the state’s last major industrial employer, the Whyalla Steel Works, is in administration owing about $1.3 billion in debts to 648 unsecured and 68 secured creditors. Some 4000 direct and indirect jobs are now uncertain.

In an ominous sign of the troubles at the plant, the blast furnace was shut down this week. The steel works, under the previous operators OneSteel, produced up to 75% of all structural steel in Australia. The iron ore is mined in the Middleback Range.

Two blast furnace shutdowns in 2024 also cost the operators millions of dollars.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas now appears to have woken up to the hard reality that not only South Australia but Australia is staring down the barrel of Australia’s biggest, strategic supplier of steel being shut down.

Malinauskas’ Labor Party was entertaining plans to power the steelworks with allegedly “clean green” hydrogen but have abandoned that virtue-signalling idea, and in league with Canberra, have decided to support the steelworks at a cost of $2.4 billion until a buyer for the plant can be found.

As noted by OneSteel owners GFG Alliance, owned by British businessman Sanjeev Gupta, the operations in Whyalla underpin key regional infrastructure development and form the economic backbone of the region, representing over 43% of the local economy and approximately 42% of local employment.

Also noted by Gupta is that Whyalla has access to local raw materials, a deep-water port and extensive rail linkages to markets on the east and west coasts of Australia.

A very sombre Malinauskas appeared on the 730 Report to explain the state’s action, and unlike previous premiers, appeared to appreciate the strategic importance of Whyalla’s operations in producing Australia’s rail and “long-steel” supply. Port Kembla produces flat steel.

Malinauskas said the arrangement aimed to set up Australian steel production for the future.

Meanwhile little has come of a flurry of starry-eyed ideas for solar-based power generators at Port Augusta. Plans floated in 2017 for a 150MW solar thermal power plant, the largest of its kind in the world, have been abandoned.

Last year, renewables developer Vast Solar signed an engineering contract for construction of a 30 MW concentrated solar thermal power plant with more than eight hours of energy storage capacity near Port Augusta.

As with most so-called “green energy” projects, Vast has a $65 million grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to support its green technology manufacturing and project development activities

But how economic this facility, with a mere 30MW output, will prove to be is another question. The Port August Power Station, before it was demolished, produced 520 MW of power.

The Vast Solar facility’s main advantage is its claimed 8 hours of storage capacity, which with battery assistance, should help fill the gaps in the piecemeal and fragmented renewable supply system.