Australia produces about one percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity generation accounts for about a third of that. Switch off every coal and gas power station in the country tonight, and global emissions would fall by roughly a third of one percent, an amount China’s power stations emit in about two weeks. As Professor Stephen Wilson observes in the book, no instrument on Earth could measure the difference.
On that alone, the Albanese Labor government and the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, are overhauling the entire national electricity system within eight years. Labor legislated a 43 percent emissions cut by 2030 and Net Zero by 2050, and set a target of 82 percent renewable electricity by 2030. The 82 percent figure came from a consultancy’s spreadsheet commissioned by Labor in opposition, the same modelling that promised every household a $275 cut to its power bill. The cut never arrived. Regulated electricity prices rose by up to 14 percent in one year and by another 21 to 25 percent the next.
To hit the target, 24 coal-fired power stations with 26.7 gigawatts of capacity have announced closure dates. Several have already been blown up: Hazelwood in Victoria, Liddell in New South Wales, and Northern at Port Augusta, whose owners offered to keep it on standby for a small fee and were told no by the South Australian Labor government. The rubble cannot be restarted. In their place, the Australian Energy Market Operator says the country must build five times its present grid-scale wind and solar, 6,000 kilometres of new high-voltage transmission, almost 50 gigawatts of storage, and 17 gigawatts of gas plants to wait behind it all for the days the weather fails. Cartographer Steven Nowakowski’s national map gives that plan a physical shape: 4,552 wind turbine towers already standing and 25,869 more proposed, 44,895 kilometres of new haulage roads, 584 million solar panels across 443,755 hectares, almost twice the area of the Australian Capital Territory, at an estimated $1.38 trillion over 25 years. In 2025, Australia still drew 60.6 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels. Coal alone generated more than all renewable sources combined.
Nobody in government can say what the transition will cost. AEMO’s figure is $122 billion. Frontier Economics puts the build and running cost at $642 billion. Net Zero Australia’s whole-of-economy estimate runs to $7 to $9 trillion. Snowy 2.0 was announced at $2 billion, is now officially $12 billion, was 73 percent complete in March 2026, and has no reliable final price. Queensland’s Pioneer Burdekin pumped hydro went from $12 billion to $36 billion before the incoming LNP government cancelled it, and the Premier drove to Eungella to apologise to the families who had sold their farms for it. In May 2026, Chris Bowen refused, on the floor of the House of Representatives, to say whether his Capacity Investment Scheme would cost taxpayers under $1 billion or more than $10 billion. Commercial in confidence. The scheme commits every Australian taxpayer, for fifteen years, to underwrite 32 gigawatts of private, mostly foreign-owned wind, solar and batteries. If a project’s revenue falls below its agreed floor, taxpayers cover 90 percent of the shortfall. The agreements with the states are secret. South Australia, twenty years into the experiment, has the highest share of renewable electricity in the country and the highest power bills, and has spent close to a billion dollars on diesel-fuelled jet engines, synchronous condensers and gas contracts to buy back the grid stability its coal station provided for nothing.
While all this is built, the one proven low emission technology that delivers steady power from a compact site stays illegal. Two Commonwealth Acts ban nuclear power in Australia. The same government operates a nuclear research reactor at Lucas Heights, 31 kilometres from the centre of Sydney, and is buying nuclear powered submarines. The United Arab Emirates built four reactors in a decade and now draws a quarter of its electricity from them. Nuclear power has been locked out of every official Australian cost comparison before the modelling began.
To Save a Beach – The Story of Reckless Renewables is about bad policy, irrespective of a reader’s views on climate change. The book documents failures in engineering, project management, spending, consent, and democracy. It details projects that have never been costed, that clear rainforest and prime farmland in the name of the environment, and that demolish reliable generators before their replacements are proven. A Labor Minister who hands the risk to taxpayers and the profits to Canadian pension funds, Norwegian state oil companies, French developers, and a Philippine conglomerate fails on their own terms.
The rollout is eroding the social contract between Australians and their governments. Consultation has become performative, or worse. In the Hunter, two-thirds of 1,916 submissions opposed the offshore zone, yet it was declared anyway. In the Illawarra, 14,211 people wrote in, 65 percent against; Chris Bowen’s Department counted them, then added a paragraph explaining that the numbers had “limited validity”, and the local Labor member claimed the amended zone reflected suggestions she had made to the Minister. Grant Piper, a farmer from Coolah, told a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry that projects routinely draw 97 percent opposing submissions, and not one has been refused. At Coolah, the state took the easement across his family’s land in May 2024 and approved the project the following month. In Victoria, farmers took the Energy Minister to the Supreme Court, and the Allan Labor government changed the rules while the case was running, then passed a law letting a magistrate authorise reasonable force to open a locked farm gate. Two AusNet men with body cameras cut a padlock off a farm gate at Myrniong on camera before that law even existed. In Queensland, wind turbines are the only industry exempt from the Vegetation Management Act and the Nature Conservation Act. A Senate inquiry into the failure of offshore wind consultation reported four months late and held no public hearing.
Australians who contest the policy and projects are kept at arm's length by Labor, the Greens and the Teals rather than engaged. Cookers, a word the Prime Minister and the Treasurer both used. Bug eaters. Far right. Climate deniers. Cronies of big oil, a Greenpeace line a Labor member of Parliament reproduced in her own submission as her answer to her own constituents. Neo-Nazis, shouted at Jewish volunteers outside a polling booth in Coorparoo. The labels do the work an argument would otherwise have to do. Once a woman is a cooker, nobody has to answer her question about the whales, the bill or the cost. The scientist who helped save Gould’s Petrel from extinction will never be quoted because he needs his job. A whale-watching skipper with thirty years’ experience is accused by the Greens of exploiting dolphins. Facebook pages built by volunteers over years are throttled and shut down. A Labor staffer from the local Labor member’s office drives an hour up the coast to tell Sandra, in an emptying church hall, “We know who you are and what you are doing. And we are watching you.” Sandra and Bruce eventually leave their home for a gated estate under an Apprehended Violence Order.
This is the managed decline of democracy this book records: a government with billions of dollars and a compliant mainstream media gallery imposing a target no one put on a ballot paper on communities it has decided do not need to be heard. The Reckless Renewables movement comprises thousands of regional farmers, fishers, conservationists, engineers and retirees who did everything the rulebook asks. They wrote letters, lodged submissions, held lawful rallies, gave evidence at inquiries, went to court and stood at polling booths from dawn to dusk. In May 2025, Labor came back with 94 city and urban seats, its biggest win since 1943. Then it asks what a citizen does when every proper channel is exhausted and the machine keeps going.
