His showpiece Boco Rock windfarm, back of Nimmitabel, operates at woeful efficiency of just over 30 per cent.  

Mike works for Labor leader Bill (‘Electricity Bill’) Shorten who recently announced Labor’s renewable energy target (RET) of 50 per cent of electrical energy generated by  renewable energy by 2030.  

Labor’s increase - virtually doubling Australia’s renewable energy target (RET) - will cost ordinary working Eden-Monaro families $600 a year more on their electricity bill – a 37 per cent increase – and that’s on top of today’s average household electricity bill of  $1600 a year.

But wait, there’s more.

Labor’s Bill Shorten would also re-introduce the carbon tax (but refuses to release details of how much more that adds to household electricity bills).

Together – the Bill Shorten+Mike Kelly doubling of the RET, 

plus exhuming the carbon tax will cost taxpayers about $100billion extra – more than the forecast Federal Budget deficits over the next four years. 

That’s an heroic figure – even for a deficit-addicted Australian Labor Party which threw billions around like confetti in the best-forgotten Rudd-Gillard period.  

Windfarm technology has improved, approaching theoretical maximum efficiency, but will never be remotely price competitive with conventional generators, whatever Mike Kelly and Bill Shorten tell you. 

Windfarms need three times the price at which Australian coal generators supply electricity.  

Coal generators need $40 a megawatt hour (MWh) to be profitable. 

Windfarms need $120 MWh. 

Wind-generated electricity is inherently unreliable, needs equivalent and costly fast-start generator backup, requires vast land tracts disfiguring the natural environment, and the jury remains out on the detrimental health effects of low frequency noise and infrasound.  

By artificially forcing 50 per cent renewable energy into Australia’s national electricity market for purely populist motives (while fully exempting energy intensive industries like cement and steel, which use 20 per cent of electricity demand)  Messrs Kelly and Shorten do two bad things: they drive low-cost, low-sulphur, low-polluting black and brown coal generators prematurely out of the market, replaced by highest-cost renewable suppliers, and; they thereby impose crippling unnecessary extra electricity costs sooner on ordinary electricity consumers. 

Amid economic uncertainty, Labor would deliberately trash the low-cost coal generated electricity that underpins our prosperity. 

Finally, Labor’s massive new expansion of windfarms, when most of the best wind sites have already been taken, can threaten the visual tourism value of our pristine headland wilderness along Eden-Monaro’s 250km coastline.   

In 2012, the Eden community defeated the planned windfarm beside Boyd’s Tower which would have destroyed Twofold Bay as a tourism venue.  

Victorian Labor is already winding back coastal windfarm prohibitions. 

Mike Kelly must reassure coastal Eden-Monaro that pristine coastal headlands from the Clyde south to the Victorian border will stay windfarm-free under Labor.

Jon Gaul

Tura Beach