4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy…

4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy 2.0 wet dream is the literal attempt to build out their ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ slogan, for renewables. But the slogan was always a fantasy. /1 https://t.co/RazT4iRCPz

When the sun doesn’t shine most of us are in bed. We don’t need much electricity. There’s still plenty of wind though. And batteries are so much faster and cheaper to install to ‘firm’ the supply, the engineers in the episode point that out as well. /2

But the slogans are still acting. The ALP and AEMO are focused on thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines, which won’t get built anywhere near the time they’ll be needed. (Not least because communities will use social media to obstruct every pylon.) /3

They’re stuck in the idea that big energy will be generated in a few locations, and then distributed to everybody else. That’s 19th century energy thinking. If the ALP want a fast and cheap transition to renewables, they should focus much more on batteries, at all scales. /4

Batteries can even replace the need for most major transmission lines, as ‘virtual transmission’. And they’re cheap and fast to install, and create virtually zero community resistance. It’s a fundamentally different model for the grid. And GO HOUSEHOLDS. /5 https://t.co/yakZE7ElcG

As Saul Griffith always says. This also addresses major cost of living pressures for households, fast. Not years into the future. We pay nothing for electricity in my house, in fact we make money selling our surplus. It took 2 days to make that shift. /6

Households are the centre of ‘the economy’. Not businesses. They rescued us from the GFC, and they can beat Covid and climate change too. /end