An analyst has warned that the push for net zero with existing renewables technologies by 2050 will break the energy market and lead to a stark increase in Australia’s energy price within a decade.
It comes as Australia, and the world, continues to struggle with an energy crisis amid supply issues plaguing much of the country’s east coast in June, causing the national operator to suspend the electricity market for more than a week.
Institute of Public Affairs research fellow Kevin You on July 17 said the recent incidents of market failures “are not accidents” but are “all designed features of net zero by 2050,” which he said is “casting a dark cloud” over the fossil fuel industry.
He noted that investors are “intimidated” by “the iron fist of the government,” which is likely to place regulatory burdens on coal fired power generators, gas, and oil projects, and on downstream electricity businesses that deal with traditional energy generators.
“You know what happens when the government sticks its nose where it doesn’t belong—whether it be in the transport industry, the aviation industry, in energy generation, in energy distribution—it breaks the market,” he told the audience at Australia’s largest annual liberty conference, the Friedman conference.
“Investors have been scared witless by the spectre of net zero hanging over the energy market, the same way the spectre of communism hung over Europe in 1848.”You described the net zero target as an attempt by “big government, controlled by an elite circle of faceless men, the renewables lobby, and rent seekers” to “take over and take down the energy market.”
